With the entire world counting down to an imminent and inevitable event of frightening magnitude – no, not a Trump impeachment, but the premiere of Avengers: Infinity War – an Avengers robot column may be the only thing to sooth and distract the hordes long enough for the rest of us to get to the store and stock up on survival gear.

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For that I need to go back one movie to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Every good comic historian knows the origin of Ultron. He’s introduced in the pulsating pages of Avengers #55 (August 1968) as Ultron-5 (with one panel in Avengers #54) and his back story is laid out in delectable detail in Avengers #58 (November 1968). Some indefinite time in the past Hank Pym – Ant Man, Giant Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket , pick one – was noodling around in his workshop tinkering with “a crude but workable robot .. A faltering step on the path to synthetic life!” For reasons never explained, the robot turns itself on and its brain evolves from infant to adult in a matter of magnificent moments, giving it more daddy issues  than all the Miss Golden Globes titlests combined. He, now a he, blanks Hank’s memory while he spends time offpage continually upgrading his body so that when we first meet him, he introduced himself as Ultron-5.

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Roy Thomas had taken over the writing reins of Avengers and he had a thing for robots. He would bring back Ultron iterated to Ultron-6 in 1969, just one month after he tormented the X-Men with Mark II Sentinels.  The source of Ultron’s name is easy to guess. In Philip Nowlan’s “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” Anthony Rogers (not yet Buck) encounters two magic metals produced by ultronic waves: inertron, used for anti-gravity, and ultron, an "absolutely invisible and non-reflective solid of great molecular density and moderate elasticity, which has the property of being 100 percent conductive to those pulsations known as light, electricity and heat." Marvel would introduce its own two magic metals, pulsation-damping vibranium and impregnable adamantium in this same period, with the first mention of vibranium in Avengers #66, used for Ultron’s upgrade. How do you defeat a robot whose body can’t be scratched? By letting him explode under a vibranium dome. All the pieces fit together so neatly.

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In usual practice, Stan Lee let his artists design the villains, mostly because who could ever tell Jack Kirby what to do? Thomas worked with the presumably more tractable and, IMO, equally great John Buscema, so he gave Buscema his mental conception of Ultron. Thomas, you might remember from your class on comics history (taught in every school today, I fervently hope), was among the great fans of the first generation of comics professionals who grew up reading the stuff. His head was a graveyard of thousands of dead heroes and villains from an earlier generation when fifty cents bought home five issues. He put one and one together and made Ultron-5.

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In an interview with Karen Walker that ran in the appropriately-titled fanzine Back Issue: The Retro Comic Experience Thomas said,

 

“I’d based my idea of [Ultron] on a villain-robot called Mechano (I think that’s the spelling) in an issue of Captain Video  … and he looks a lot like Ultron so I must’ve sent a picture of him to John. Later, when Sal Buscema drew the climax of his second appearance, I sent Sal a 1950s issue of the ME comic The Avenger with its robot, for the body.”

 

I knew I had to track Mechano down. I also knew these were 40-year-old memories talking, since the interview ran in 2010, so I couldn’t count on any of it being accurate. To the Researchmobile! (Based on the short-lived Spider-Mobile, not the one from the dreaded competitor.)

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First, to spare our brutalized brain cells more wear and tear in digging out now 50-year-old memories, I present forthwith the original Ultrons. First, the ur-robot from Avengers #58, then Ultron-5 from Avengers #55, Ultron-6 from Avengers #66, and lastly Ultimate Ultron from Avengers #68.