Magnus, Robot Fighter Volume 1

Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. #1

by Russ Manning, Robert Schaefer, Eric Friewald

"Magnus, Robot Fighter Volume 1."

Genres: Comics, Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, Comic Book, Classics, Robots, Adventure

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 2004

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Louie the Mustache Matos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the comic book industry can be a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world, I believe it is necessary to acknowledge that Dark Horse was smart enough to purchase and reprint much of the classic work of now defunct comic companies such as EC, Tower, and Gold Key. Case-in-point, Russ Manning was a one-man show during the sixties writing, drawing, and lettering these Magnus, Robot Fighter comics. These are extremely beautiful with painted covers, spacious panel design, and minimal narration. The art is allowed to breathe, to tell the story as sequenced art is supposed to do. Manning's work was not just singularly drawn, but he also had a unique process delineated by Mike Royer in the foreword. Manning would work on all the pages of a book, simultaneously. He believed that by completing his work in just such a way, no singular page would be affected by "a bad day." Also, considering that Manning was a contemporary of Stan Lee, Manning's storytelling style is much more svelte. Although Magnus is essentially a one-note character, (see a robot, smash a robot) the stories are surprisingly engaging. The action is phenomenally drawn with overt movement throughout. The robots are often horrifying and other times clean and distinct. The issues collected here are Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 AD #1-7 originally published in 1963 and 1964 introducing the satellite characters: 1-A, Leeja, Senator Clane as well as continuing villains Mekman, Xyrkol, and H8. I know that they are not Marvel Master Works, but these most certainly ARE Master Works.

[Dan Schwent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 AD collects Magnus #1-7.

This book was really hard to find at a price I could live with. I found one that had been sitting on ebay for months and shot the dealer a lowball offer at $50 below the asking price. She agreed, making me wish I would have went $10-15 lower.

Russ Manning cut his teeth on the Dell/Gold Key Tarzan comics before jumping on board Magnus before jumping back to the Tarzan camp for the Tarzan newspaper strip. He was a fitting choice since Magnus is best described as Tarzan with robots.

Raised by 1A in the far future of 4000 AD, Magnus is trained to be able to destroy robots with his bare hands. This sounds somewhat ridiculous but the tone of these stories is surprisingly dark considering the sunny future setting. Magnus rails against man's overdependence on robots and chops them down to size when they invariably violate the rules of robotics, which they always do.

I rated this a three because some of the stories are kind of weak but I love the Russ Manning artwork. Manning is from the Wally Wood/Alex Raymond school and he wears his influences proudly on his sleeve. He's also a forerunner of later artists who use a more minimalist style like Steve Rude. Manning's future is sleek and his robots manage to be menacing while simultaneously looking somewhat ridiculous.

More stuff from here made it into the Valiant version of Magnus than I thought: Everyone knows Magnus and Leeja made the jump but I had no idea Mekman, Xyrkol, and the Malevs originated here as well.

I'm rating this a high 3. Squeeeee!

[S. Zahler · Rating 5 out of 5]

How many treasures did Gold Key Comics publish in the fifties and sixties?

After enjoying the bizarre and violent Kona Monarch of Monster Isle, the far classier Brothers of the Spear, tons of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories, and some Paul Murry Mickey Mouse, I read and relished this first collection of Magnus, Robot Fighter stories, which were written and drawn by the superb Russ Manning. This comic was better and far more conceptually engaging than the "smash bad robots" premise led me to believe, though delivers plenty of robo-smashing as well.

(Mild spoilers for three issues follow in this paragraph.) Robots discover an ultra dense, unbreakable ore that they intend to use for building a robo-army in one tale, and in another story, a seemingly immortal 'bot creates an encoded sonic burst that contains all of its memories so that it can be "reborn" in another body with newly gained knowledge. In another issue, a repair robot cannibalizes an entire world to grow the size of its brain on a planetary scale.
Magnus Robot Fighter stories are family friendly, but they certainly engaged my sense of wonder more than I'd ever have expected. A couple of times, the tales brought to mind some of my favorite contemporary sci-fi authors---Greg Egan, Ted Chiang, and Stephen Baxter.

Each issue has a strong robot-gone-amok concept that Manning delivers with sharp art, which brings to mind Hal Foster (albeit simpler) and with the dramatic shadows of Wally Wood. And unlike many comics of this era, the momentum of these stories is not hampered by over-explaining things and describing what has been drawn or should have been drawn. Magnus Robot Fighter is very visually told and readable. It feels like and is a singular and coherent artistic vision.

Intriguing premises, menacing robots, a serious viewpoint on the perils of relying too much upon technology, pristine art, dramatic lighting, and plenty of mano-a-roboto fisticuffs add up to make this an incredibly enjoyable sci-fi comic that is different from, but just as successful as my other sci-fi comic favorites---Oesterheld & Lopez's The Eternaut, E.C.'s Weird Science, James Robert's More Than Meets the Eye, Jim Starlin's Dreadstar, Jack Kirby's Kamandi, King & Walta's The Vision and select issues of Moore's Swamp Thing run.

I look forward to reading the rest of Manning's Magnus Robot Righter, as well as more of his work elsewhere and other Gold Key Comics.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Als Kind habe ich die fantastischen Abenteuer geliebt, die Magnus im Jahr 4000 bestehen muss, um die Menschen der Megalopolis North Am, die den gesamten nordamerikanischen Kontinent bedeckt, vor den despotischen Übergriffen der Roboter zu schützen. Diese haben sich von Dienern zu Despoten aufgeschwungen, die sich ans 1. Robotergesetz, keinem Menschen Schaden zuzufügen, nicht mehr halten.
Man kann die willkürlichen Menschenrechtsverletzungen und Verhaftungen heute nicht lesen, ohne Vergleiche mit der gegenwärtige Situation in Amerika zu ziehen, in der Trump die Gleichschaltung staatlicher Organe vollzieht, die freie Presse mundtot macht und die Bürgerrechte abschafft.
Wo bleibt Magnus, wenn man ihn braucht, wer wird die ICE-Roboter in ihre Schranken weisen?
Früher, im Jahr 4000, war alles besser.

[Stephanie Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER 4000 A.D., Volume 1, is a collection of the first seven issues of the fabulous comic which started in 1963. It was created and drawn by the phenomenal Russ Manning. It is now my favorite old-fashioned comic art.
Magnus is the only person on Earth who can fight evil robots; he always wins, and he always has the adoration of his damsel-in-distress girlfriend Leeja. Here he manages to save the world in seven different stories. Also included is a short biography of Manning and some concept art.
Dark Horse, the publisher of this collection, has done a remarkable job in reprinting the comic. It is obvious that they took great care in the printing by using vibrant colors and crisp, clear lines.
If you miss the days when men were men and women liked it that way, be sure to get this volume!

[Jason Pym · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Dark Horse reprint of 1960s pulp scifi. Great fun in its own right, but also nice to discover the roots of Judge Dredd - the council chamber with the giant golden eagle looking like the Justice Department, it all takes place in a giant metropolis that covers the North American continent, scenes of the city looking like Mega City One, cheesy robot designs looking like the ABC Warriors.

[Hal Astell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's something rather interesting to serve as my graphic novel for the month. On one hand, it's ridiculously pulpy sci-fi schlock, far closer to the rayguns and bug eyed monsters of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon than anything published during the golden age of science fiction which predated it. On the other, it's a shockingly topical look at what happens when we abdicate too much control to artificial intelligence. Magnus may fight robots in the distant future but he's not a luddite. To him, machines are fine and dandy, but when we put robots in charge, Bad Things Happen. And that has an obvious analogue to what's happening right now with AI.

What I'm reading is the first of three hardback volumes from Dark Horse that collate the original run of 'Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D.', beginning in 1963. Russ Manning's name appears above the title on the cover and there's an "Art by Russ Manning" credit on the title page, but he isn't the only creative force involved. Sure, he created Magnus and drew everything, but he didn't pen as much of it as I remembered. There are seven stories here and he wrote two of them solo, with a third in collaboration with Robert Schaefer and Eric Freiwald, who wrote the rest. That suggests I should criticise all three for their backward look at the future but praise Manning for his ideas on top of his artwork.

Talking of artwork, he draws simple and effective panels that are so clean that they're reminiscent of newspaper comic strips as much as golden age comic books. Everything's colour, but the colours are always blocked rather than shaded, playing into that simple but effective approach. However, in between individual stories, one per original Gold Key comic book, there are paintings of scenes to come and they're absolutely sumptuous, far more comparable to someone like Don Lawrence of 'Trigan Empire' fame. A couple seem to be blown up from individual panels, but the rest are worth framing and mounting on a wall.

As to content, I love his designs, especially of robots, which are gloriously old school. Those aren't robots from the sixties, they're robots from the thirties with staccato voices that are hyphenated because-I-guess-they-all-sound-like-Daleks. Magnus looks like the all-American male stereotype, distilled down far enough to work as both an object of lust for teenage girls and a man they could bring home to meet the parents, who would admire his masculinity in a thoroughly different way. He's a natural hero for 1963 and he's the only hero 4000 AD has, it seems, given that the senate in nominal charge call on him every time anything bad happens; rather like Batman in Gotham City, even if they never put up a Magnus Signal.

The clothes are fascinating, not least because nobody ever gets changed. These seven stories are all self-contained, with only a general series progression between them, so they don't happen at the same time and there could be serious gaps in time between them, but everyone has precisely one outfit and that's it. Magnus's is a close fitting one piece shirt and shorts combo that gives an impression of being a tunic and kilt because of how generously it's cut around the shoulders. His girlfriend Leeja Clane's dress is an elegant affair, thick opaque black all the way down to where it teasingly turns transparent. Her father, a senator, and his colleagues wear robes that remind of authority figures in 'Judge Dredd'.

One more note before I talk about story and that's that I've read this before and remembered it as being a lot of fun, but very much in that outrageous Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon style. What I completely failed to notice last time through, a decade or two ago, was the thematic connection to Doc Savage.

For one, while Manning apparently pitched Magnus as Tarzan in the future, he became something a little different. Just like Doc, Magnus was trained from birth to be able to dedicate his life to the task at hand, here taking on robots who break Asimov's Laws of Robotics, quoted on the very first page, and go rogue; typically on a grand scale like trying to take over the world or destroy all the humans. Ironically, he's trained by a robot, 1A. Like Doc, he's physically stronger, so able to break metal robots apart with his bare hands, and he clearly loves the thrill of adventure. Also, Doc was a superhero who didn't have any superpowers and Magnus follows suit, his only superpower (if it counts) the ability to hear and understand robot communications. Maybe that's training too.

If that wasn't enough, Magnus can cure villains of the criminal tendencies that drive them, just as Doc does through similar means at his secret upstate New York clinic, as per this speech bubble:

"He mustn't die! The human race needs his genius! With psycho-care we could change his social behavior pattern so he will work for the good of mankind!"

Of course, Doc Savage was confined to the thirties and forties and Magnus is a couple of millennia forward. In 4000 A.D., all of North America is populated, so densely that it's a single city, NorthAm by name. With nowhere left to grow food or raise animals, that happens on the ocean floor in the food processing labs that feed the continent. And mankind, having invented robots, doesn't do a heck of a lot of anything anymore. There is a human senate but it seems pretty ineffective, given how often crises happen with only Magnus able to solve them. Instead we depend on robots to be the police (pol-robs), the armed forces (defense-robs), healthcare (medic-robs) and so on.

For the most part that works, but Manning and his colleagues conjure up reason after reason for it to go horribly wrong, for robots to go bad, either on their own or at the direction of a succession of humans with deadly grudges or megalomaniacal tendencies, even one who wants to become a robot himself. Crucially, rogue robots are always more able than every other robot, so it wouldn't make any sense to have robots fix robot problems. Instead, there's Magnus, which makes his very existence rather fortuitous. If A-1 hadn't trained him for this particular mission, then humanity in 4000 A.D. would fail, if not in this issue then in the next. While Doc Savage always saved the day, as pulp heroes tended to, I rarely got the impression that the world would end if he wasn't in it.

I'd love to read the rest of Magnus's original run, but I don't have the other two collected volumes. While I can roll my eyes at how retro this future is, with gloriously goofy-looking robots (the rogue robots rarely change design to eliminate the flaws he so often exploits) and a complete absence of anything digital, I love how topical this feels right now, because what used to be an idea in science fiction has become our reality. The first story, with pol-rob chief H8 (I kid you not) as the villain of the week, reminds of RoboCop, which wouldn't arrive for a quarter of a century.

Lumped together, a common thread of mistrust runs through everything. Magnus fights the rogue robots but, from the very outset, he doesn't like the fact that "People do nothing for themselves! Robots wait on them... build for them... even think for them! Man doesn't even have to entertain himself! Man is becoming a race of weaklings... able only to play and watch TV!" That's in the very first issue, which dips far deeper into this idea than anything later. Here, other characters resist a robot-dominated world too: kids read a book that a robot tells them is forbidden (albeit for their own good) and Leeja Clane's first action is to speed on a futuristic motorway. Unfortunately, once that story's done, we shift to rogue villain of the week territory and the philosophy bleeds away.

Complaining about couch potatoes was science fiction in 1963, but it's a reality sixty-years on and everything that's happened since the internet revolution only adds to that. Of course, back then, Manning wasn't writing about ChatGPT, unboxing videos and generative AI, but his approach still speaks to them all. I have a feeling that 'Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D.' is somehow going to be visually less accurate with every year that passes but thematically more so. That's wild.

Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in October 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Illus...

Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of the original Magnus comic stories.
A man, raised by robots, returns to 'man's world', the futuristic city of North-Am to help mankind fight back against the robots that are slowly taking over the world.Some through evil schemes ( they can be stopped by punching them so hard their heads fall off) and some by just being way too protective and helpful to their human masters.

The stories have a kind of 'Tarzan in the future' feel and the art reminds me a lot of the old Hanna-barbara super hero cartoons.
Lots of action, funky science, pretty pictures and the occasional lecture about how man cannot let himself become too dependent on his machines.

The part of my brain that loves irony wonders if this is one of the comics can be downloaded to your cellphone?

One of the great things about this mad rush of comic companies buying the rights to older characters, is while the newer stories can be really uneven, there have been lots of these kinds of collections of the old stories.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the mid-century modern world of the year 4000, humans are really lazy, and expect robots to do all their work. The robots frequently freak out and try to destroy the gleaming future city-continent of NorthAm. Magnus is the only person that can stand up to them. Repeat as necessary.
The stories are simplistic, but the art is charming.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

They don't write them like this anymore. A little cheesy but I like Russ Manning's story lines

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorites when I was young. Very dated. But very fun.

[Erica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh so deliciously 1950's. It's like someone threw a fedora, repressed emotions and patting the secretary's ass into a still and this is the prison hooch that came out. Glorious and painful.

[D. Meador · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read all these (issues 1-7 of volume one) when they were originally released; loved them then and love them more now. Amazing how relevant they are to today's world.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not have the opportunity to get any trade of this series in hand, as they are all out of print and extremely expensive on the second-hand market. Instead I settled for scans of the originally seven floppy issues, which fortunately included the "Key of Knowledge" educational insert on the inside of the front and back cocvers, as well as the back up comic stream "The Aliens." Both of these I enjoyed very much.



Magnus Robot Fighter is an atomic-era wish-fulfillment vehicle set in the retrofuturistic 4000 A.D.. The setting incorporates contemporary ideas of what the future might bring. Isaac Asimov is an obvious inspiration. Our titular hero, Magnus, reminds me of Tarzan. He is a supreme athlete who deftly navigates this strange, futuristic environment in order to rescue his damsel. He is a conservative who wants to strengthen man, and lectures at every opportunity that the individual of this era has become weak and subservient to the machines. It's a very manly attitude.

The art is unbeatable, except that Magnus very rarely has more than a single facial expression (one that is overall serious, discerning, and unapproving). I especially love the archetypal design of the robots. Their design will remind all curent-era readers of Bender from Futurama.

The story is silly and contrived, but far from boring. I did roll my eyes with how much Magnus gets away with on charisma alone (and his imposing stature next to the deteriorated WALL-E-esque bodies of the common future denizen). It only takes a brief introduction to Senator Clane (Leeja's father) before Magnus starts being regularly summoned for his opinion on current events before the senate. Perhaps people are more trusting in the year 4000! Or perhaps, they see themselves completely at his mercy? In that way, it feels very similar to early Superman comics.



I absolutely recommend these issues to anyone finding themselves in a phase of retrofuturism appreciation, or any fans of other sci-fi from the 1950-60s.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great art. Plotting is weak and repetitive, Robot/Evil-Genius/Robot Evil-Genius wants to take over the world, Magnus smashes them into oblivion. If they are human, and we don’t see a corpse, one or two issues later they will return, to try and take over the world. That said, the writing is decent, the action flows well and it never becomes to talky, and there are some nice touches, now and again, and it has a darker tone than you would expect. Enjoyable
For what it is, and worth it for Russ Manning’s art alone, the painted covers are fabulous.

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was told by a former comic book writer that I should give this a try. I gave it a try. I should not have given it a try. Russ Manning is a masterful artist and visual storyteller, but the stories told are not worth telling. I have the next volume, so I suppose I'll give that a try as well and hope for improvement.

[Alex Fyffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Russ Manning takes a familiar concept—man becoming too dependent on his machines—and adapts it for comic-book action. In far-future Nor-Am, robots do everything, leaving humans complacent; some robots and some scheming roboticists seek to exploit that. Enter Magnus, a man trained in martial arts to the point he can smash steel—and trained for the purpose of stopping the evil robots. Not deep, but solidly done.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought that this would be some campy fun, as most Silver-Age, sci-fi comics are, but I did not expect how good this would be. Manning has such a command of the form that every panel is a masterpiece. The stories are fun and well written and the designs of the future tech and robots are stunning.

[Mark Dickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved them then, love them now.

[Keith Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories are simplistic mid century sci-fi pulp, but the designs are pure Retrofuturistic fun. Robots, rockets, mile high city-scapes and flying cars as far as the eye can see.

[Forrest · Rating 2 out of 5]

To say these haven't aged well is an understatement. The only thing I enjoyed was some of the art.

[Eric Onkenhout · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well written and drawn comics that predict mans reliance on robots and mechanics.

[Michael Laflamme · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful classic 'Dark Horse (TM)' Comic from my past. Amazing that the memories of so many make these old characters available today. Long Live Comics!!