Will Magnus

43 years ago - Will Magnus is born

26 years ago - 17-year-old Will attends college.

23 years ago - 20-year-old Will graduates & begins grad school, where he has T.O. Morrow as a teacher, he's introduced to the ideas of H.I.V.E. but elects not to participate, instead beginning several different doctoral studies at once.

20 years ago - 23-year-old Will earns his doctorate in theoretical mathematics.

19 years ago - 24-year-old Will earns his doctorate in mechanical engineering.

18 years ago - 25-year-old Will is sought out by the Doom Patrol, to help build a device they need. He begins regularly consulting with Niles Caulder.

17 years ago - 26-year-old Will earns his doctorate in particle physics.

14 years ago - 29-year-old Will develops the earliest version of his responsometers.

13 years ago - 30-year-old Will builds a new body for Cliff Steele, developing technology he will use for his planned Metal Men.

11 years ago - 32-year-old Will discovers that T.O. Morrow built his Red Tornado android using elements of his own research.

10 years ago - 33-year-old Will builds the Metal Men, androids with autonomous personalities thanks to their responsometers. They are able to do all sorts of work from construction to search and rescue.

9 years ago - 33-year-old Will's Metal Men are able to stop Professor Ramsey Norton's Chemo android when it goes haywire and rampages through Midway City.

7 years ago - 36-year-old Will attempts to build Plutonium Man. T.O Morrow manages to influence the procols of his design. The Metal Men are destroyed stopping him. He has a breakdown at the loss, and has to start taking prozac, which limits his creativity while he finds work in a government lab.

6 years ago - 37-year-old Will is assisted by Vic Stone in revitalizing his Metal Men programming and rebuilding them, giving them even greater autonomy. He focuses on helping them achieve their own identities.

5 years ago - 38-year-old Will is contacted by T.O Morrow who invites him to work in his Oolong Island labratory

4 years ago - 39-year-old Will and T.O Morrow have a falling out when Will refuses to allow his research to be sold on the open market. Morrow loses ownership of Oolong Island to Magnus, who begins setting up his own island laboratories.

3 years ago - 40-year-old Will is contacted by LeToya Charles. She comes to his island, where she steals data from T.O. Morrow's servers, using it to reactiviate her tech, She fights the Metal Men to a standstill and escapes.

2 years ago - 41-year-old Will helps the Doom Patrol understand how to access Danny the Street so they can save Rebis from the Key after the death of Niles Caulder. He opens up Oolong Island to Gar Logan & Raven as they look to begin their own Doom Patrol, shaing his labs with Karen Beecher, and inviting Kitty Faulkner & Pat Dugan to join the staff.

1 year ago - 42-year-old Will is able to rebuild a severely damaged Cliff Steele after the battle against Mageddon, uploading a digital copy of his brain into a new responsometer, making him anatomically the same as the Metal Men, who go with Cliff when he builds a new home outside Vegas, starting their own detective agency, so that they can learn more about what it means to be human.

The Metal Men are a decidedly Silver Age idea, and while they persist right up to today, they've never really had a big shake-up to their premise in an attempt to modernize them. There have been new artists that have tackled them, or the suggestion of possible more complicated origins, but in almost every case you're never really improving them. My belief here is that some ideas are just clearly operating from within that fun child's imagination world of Silver Age comics, and attempting to make them something else is just missing the point.

So they shouldn't be something more serious or complex. Yes, the idea that someone invented something this wacky could potentially be a little tonally dissonant, but that's the fun of comics for you. You just have to allow that this is possible because of the particular eccentricities of the guy who did the inventing.

Will Magnus & The Metal Men's Comic History

The Metal Men were originally a 1962 filler story from Showcase #37, a creation of editor and writer Robert Kanigher. There really isn't a lot to explain about them that isn't immedately apparent when you look at them; they were a group of robots each with a different color, built from a diffent metal, all working together to fight the monster-of-the-issue. It's the same worldbuilding style we've seen in countless saturday morning cartoons. After a few issues in Showcase they earned their own series that ran all the way until 1977. These classic silver age stories were largely self contained, operating without a lot of interaction with the rest of the DC landscape, although you started to see a little more crossover later in the run of the book as sales started to diminish.

The main source of fun was in the ways each member of the Metal Men could use the qualities of their origin metal as superpowers, whether that meant Lead being able to shield them from radiation, Gold being able to stretch into an almost infinitely thin wire, or Mercury turning into liquid at room temperature. The one exception was Platinum, whose main role was to fawn over Doc while he chastised her for behaving 'like a real woman' rather than a robot, and threatening to send her away if she kept it up. Comics in the 60s, everybody.

After the cancellation of their series, the Metal Men would be reference occasionally, and appeared in crossovers like the Crisis. Doc Magnus himself was responsible for the construction of Robotman's new body in the Doom Patrol's return, and would later show up fairly regularly in the pages of Grant Morrison's run on the series, helping to repair or maintain Cliff's robot body. Magnus was also a featured character in 2006 series 52, where he struggled to function without his creations and became part of the mad scientist think-tank on Oolong Island, which would later lead to the Doom Patrol taking over the same island in their standalone series.

As for the Metal man themselves, several new attempts were made to give the Metal Men their own series; a four-issue miniseries from 1993 by Mike Carlin & Dan Jurgens attempted to update their origins, suggesting that each of the Metal Men was actually a person whose personality had been transfered into an android, an idea that still turns up occasionally.  Duncan Rouleau did another series in 2007, leaning into a cartoonish, 4th-wall breaking style, and even Dan Didio did a 12-issue maxi-series in 2019.

lots of idea have been introduced into the general story of the Metal Men, including new members like Copper, Plutonium, Nth Metal Man, Tin's wife Nameless, and the time Doc himself became an android named Veridium, but through it all the core six Metal Men have remained the same.

Our Will Magnus & the Metal Men Story

You sometimes see the individual Metal Men treated as unique characters, and because of that we were temped to create special pages for each of them, but the reality is that that's not really the point; The Metal Men aren't meant to be individuals. They are all part of Will Magnus's story, so that's how we're presenting them.

Doc Magnus is an odd little artifact of the Silver Age, but he's been depicted well both in the Doom Patrol and in 52 as a brilliant scientist who struggles with socializing with other people, making his invention of these artificial people who are all trying to learn how to interact with the world such an interesting little parable about parenthood. We've wound up using him quite a bit in interactions with other scientists, but through it all, the idea is that he's working to help his inventions develop their own identities and sense of self.

The introduction of Oolong Island, the mad scientist think tank, in the pages of 52 led to some very cool innovations for the Doom Patrol series, and we think that's a great way for our new take on the team moving forward, which means that Magnus will start working with that group even more. The Metal Men, however, have a unique opportunity with Robotman basically evolving into one of them... They can learn so much from him, and it actually seems fitting to imagine Magnus missing them, but still wanting them to be able to go out on their own, just like any loving parent.

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