STORY: "Beware Computo, Commander of the Robot Hive" (15 pages)  Cyclops and Marvel Girl defeat Computo when it tries to steal a radio transmitter.

What you need to know:
Hank and Bobby have been sent to California, Scott and Jean are in New York, and Warren is "a roving agent."  Scott's working as a radio journalist and Jean is a model.  Scott's reports are every bit as exciting as you might imagine.  ("How good is the good government administration of Mayor Van Clete?  We'll spend this week unravelling that political puzzle!")

For the first time, Scott and Jean are acting like a couple.

Computo is just a big robot which builds smaller robots and wants to steal a transmitter so that it can.... uh...  well, it wants to steal a transmitter.  Computo turns out to be a creation of minor Fantastic Four villain Quasimodo, who's also a robot.  Quasimodo escapes; Arnold Drake picked up his story next month in Captain Marvel.

Again, this issue has never been reprinted, and you're not missing anything.

We're promised that next issue will feature the Beast and Iceman battling Metoxo the Lava Man.  The story was pulled and never appeared, although it's alluded to in an X-Men story in Marvel Holiday Special 1994.  Meanwhile, the letters page is becoming really quite negative.

A more innocent time:
Ah, innocence is fading.  Jean enlivens a recap page for us by posing in an assortment of bikinis.

Scott and Jean are both in awe of the radio station's technology.  Such as... tape recorders.  And a new transmitter, which "uses vacuum tubes as big as a man!"  Meanwhile, one of the Cybertron robots generates wind using its "mighty internal bellows."

Jean happily picks up the radio station's promo copy of the new single by the Chocolate Covered Ashcan.

There's some terrible dialogue in this issue.  Take Scott's closing line: "Evil is as recurrent as the cataclysmic upheavals of nature that convulse our planet from time-to-time!" 

Comments:
Completely forgettable generic rubbish.  Again, there's a good reason why nobody's ever seen fit to bring this period back into print - it's really quite poor.

The issue is mainly notable (if at all) for featuring the first full script by Arnold Drake.  The Drake run has mostly been out of print for decades, and not much happens - the most significant bit is the debut of Polaris next issue.  Drake was an interesting choice of writer; he was mainly a DC guy, and this was part of a very short sting working for Marvel.  Notably, his main claim to fame was creating the Doom Patrol for at DC. 

They appeared at around the same time as the X-Men, and it's often been pointed out that there's a surprising amount of similarity between the two teams.  Both were the outcast heroes of their respective universes, both fought Brotherhoods of Evil, and both were led by a guy in a wheelchair (which, admittedly, was highly unusual in the early sixties).  Of course there's also a ton of differences, but the similarities are eerie enough to be worth noting.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Cyclops and Marvel Girl I (both last in issue #46)

VILLAINS
Quasimodo (last in the second story in Fantastic Four Annual #5; next in Captain Marvel vol 1 #6)
Computo (first appearance; next in Captain Marvel vol 1 #7)

FEATURE: "Yours Truly, the Beast" (5 pages)  The Beast demonstrates his powers.

What you need to know:
The feature was reprinted as a back-up strip in Amazing Adventures vol 3 #11 in 1980, but otherwise it's been out of print since then.

Comments:
Well, how would you fill five pages with "he's big and agile"?  Drake resorts to telling us about his personality, and more or less gets away with it.  It's the first time in a while that we're reminded about Hank as a scientist.  Drake's take on the character is that he has so many interests that he's not sure which ones to pursue.  In the event, he just ended up as a renaissance man.

Written: 3 January 2005

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