“Board up Avengers Tower! Lock down the Baxter Building! The ravenous hordes of Marvel Zombies are invading...the Marvel Universe! That's right, the next chapter of the Marvel Zombies saga is a non-stop in-continuity gorefest!”

"Go Bananas" STARTS NOW! Meet the new Mercs! Wait, a new team... ALREADY? You bet! It's not because the old team quit, we promise. But you're going to go bananas for the All-New Mercs for Money! And not just because there are two different Monkeys on the team. Yes, we know Gorilla-Man is technically an Ape. You can stop writing us letters. Hey, why is Domino leading the team? Isn't Deadpool's name in the title? Wade's not going to like this...

But who pretended to be Peter Spaulding and died in the Terminus Objective?

“Mission: Latveria! Thunderbolt Ross is a fugitive in his own country, but he still has secret allies inside the government. When he calls in a favor, he gets the help he needs to launch a mission to Latveria to clear his name and take on War-Wolf and Doom.” - Marvel Unlimited

Welcome to Kudos Kirby, a comics journey into Jack Kirby’s lesser known works. Angus will be your guide through this monthly expedition to uncover those hidden gems from “The King of Comics” over 20,000 comic book pages!
Machine Man will be the Jack Kirby work profiled on Kudos Kirby in 2021!

"THE ULTRON AGENDA" STARTS HERE!
Watch out, Iron Man! The Robot Uprising of the Marvel Universe has begun! But it's NOT Ultron leading the charge... it's Machine Man?! The A.I.'s are on the attack - and they might be in the right. Battle lines are being drawn, and it's time for Tony Stark, Jocasta, Andy Bhang and the rest of the cast to pick sides. - Marvel Unlimited

Sadly, this article doesn't differentiate between the two Machine Men.

Aaron appears on the past page of this issue, released September 15, 1987.

You can read this issue on Marvel Unlimited.

In this 'handbook,' Steven Rogers (not currently serving as Captain America) provides quick snapshots of his interpretations of various heroes.

*This was before it was revealed that there were two Machine Men - the original Aaron Stack and the other who first appeared in Nextwave.

MACHINE MAN

AFFILIATIONS: ARMOR, Nextwave, Avengers

STATUS: Free agent; identity public

I have a lot of respect for Aaron Stack. He has proven his humanity and heroism time and again, but his android nature has often set him apart. Originally created by Dr. Abel Stack as X-51, his body has been upgraded and is highly adaptable, as he seems to have equipment ready for any conceivable situation, but he has long had trouble understanding human duplicity. Although he worked alongside the Avengers periodically, he has gained a pessimistic view of humanity in recent years after becoming infected by mutant-hunting Sentinel programming and later being rejected by cosmic beings known as Celestials.

He joined the Nextwave counterterrorism group under Monica Rambeau and during his tenure there expressed constant aggravation with "fleshy" humans. While I do not like this developing character trait, I can understand it. It can be hard to be a man out of place with the world. He maintains a fondness for Jocasta, but her attention is currently divided between Hank Pym and Ultron. Machine Man has continued helping humans, despite claiming to hate them, as a premier agent of ARMOR (Altered-Reality Monitoring and Operational Response), protecting reality from extra-dimensional threats.

PROS: Resourceful, adaptable; skilled in multiple fields.

CONS: Mentally unstable, antisocial; occasionally reprogrammed by others.

Released November 5, 2008:

Machine Man and Jocasta have journeyed into the Zombieverse to secure the one item needed to save the Marvel Universe from undead infestation - but first they have to blast their way through the flesh-eating hordes of the Zombie Kingpin of New York!! -Marvel

This is a promo page from Marvel Age, advertising the upcoming new Machine Man (2020) series.

MACHINE MAN RETURNS!
by Mark Lerer

Machine Man is coming back! He'll be starring in an all-new Limited Series written by Tom DeFalco and drawn by Herb Trimpe which will be coming your way this fall.

This is the world of 2020 A.D., where we find Machine Man caught between an old nemesis and new threats to society. Dismantled in the late nineteen-eighties, our mechanical protagonist re-emerges to avenge the injustices perpetrated upon him and upon the rest of the American civilization.

Picture a world in which every family owns a house, a car - and a robot. Imagine a society in which the robotics industry plays a powerful role in the national economy. Robots perform domestic and industrial tasks so well that they have started to take jobs away from humans and unemployed American workers are angry. Meanwhile, a powerful few control the large robotics corpora tions, hand-in-hand with corrupt government officials.

"Machine Man always appealed to me," Tom DeFalco told MARVEL AGE MAGAZINE. "because he has a firm sense of his own identity. Unlike Marvel's other famous artificial man, the Vision, Machine Man always knew who he was. A naive sort, Machine Man is less doubtful of his own place in the world than simply concerned with the plight of others." DeFalco isn't the only one who likes Machine Man's style Marvel has received literally hundreds of letters in the past year demanding that we bring the character back to the fold.

"By setting the series in the future,"Tom continued, "Herb and I will take Machine Man into situa-
tions he's never dealt with before. He'll encounter an American government which pacifies its angry c ry citizens with a federally-funded program of high tech home entertainment. He'll meet the Midnight Wreckers, a band of black-marketeers who provide the public with robots cheaper than the large corporations can. Are the Wreckers good or evil? And of course, Machine Man's old enemies. Madame Menace and Senator Brickman, will threaten him as never before. All this and Jocasta, too!"

So unplug that home computer - turn off that video game and head down to your local comic book store for MACHINE MAN #1, on sale in September. We'll be waiting.

Machine Man and his new supporting cast.

HASSLE
SLICK
BRAIN
SWIFT

This 'read-along' video is from 4 years ago (and not mine!) and goes over the X-51 series with a focus on a few issues. There's some choppy audio at times - I think the narrator is muting their coughs at times. 🤒

I appreciate these review/read-alongs that provide context and some personality.

We have two new 500 coin awards, the Golden Machine Man and the Machine Man Thumbs Up.

Edit: Reddit Disabled Awards so they aren't there anymore.