MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER is a well-remembered adventure series published by Gold Key comics during the Silver Age. Set in the far-off year of 4000 AD, it concerned the exploits of Magnus, a quasi-super hero who used his steel-shattering strength to battle threats to humanity caused by the plethora of robots that had been created to serve a society which had become too overly-reliant on them. The real hallmark of the series was the artwork of Russ Manning, who worked on the first 22 issues of the series. However, as the super hero fad of the 1960s waned, MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER’s fortunes also took a downturn. Gold Key discontinued the title after issue #28, though they eventually resumed publication a couple of years later with #29, this time reprinting earlier stories.
However, before the axe fell, there was an additional story written and penciled for what would have been issue #29 that was never completed. It was written by Mike Royer, who was also intended to ink the story. The penciling was done by Paul Norris, best remembered as the artist who co-created Aquaman. The entire story was penciled in 1969 but remained unfinished.
Eventually, the pages were put up for auction at Heritage Auctions in 2018, which is where I found and pulled these scans. The artwork sold at that time for $1912.00, an absolute steal for a 14 page story.
There have been a number of revivals of MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER over the years, most prominently the one that was used in the early 1990s to launch Valiant. But all of them ran out of steam past a certain point.
In addition to auctioning all 14 pages of original art, the seller also included Mike Royer’s complete script for the story. Alas, the listing only reproduced the first page, which we see above. Royer was blocking out the overall panel compositions in the writing, it seems.
And just to cover teh last base, the cover to MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER that ran on the published issue #29 was a line-drawn recreation of this painted cover from issue #7.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Wow, that art is not only gorgeous for the era but any era. In seven years no one’s inked it or scripted it? I’d read old copies of Magnus as a kid and some Valiant stuff and have always had an affection for the character. The original much more so than the revivals of course. And why didn’t the Aquaman art ever shine like that? I guess it could have had at times as I only saw reprints and of those only Fradon’s work shined to me.
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Magnus might be ripe for a revival, given all the concerns about A.I. and such.
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I enjoyed “Magnut, Robot Biter” in Not Brand Ecch. His big story was a battle with Ironed Man.
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That’s nice art, though it has a problem I find common to not-quite-right art of the era — the characters are acting and emoting but often don’t really seem to interconnect with one another. Like, the guy who pounds his fist on the table isn’t looking at the guy he’s shouting at, and that guy’s not looking at him, either.
The draftsmanship’s quite good, though.
I see this a lot in the DC mystery titles, too — the artists are drawing what they’re asked to draw, but the characters aren’t really bringing the story to life, they’re just story puppets. So the nice drawing doesn’t engage you in the story. Could be Royer would have fixed that in the inks, though, since it was his story and he would have been more engaged with it.
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I decided to look up Magnus’ stories at comics.org discovered this story: Mekman creates robots identical to Magnus and the North Am governmental leaders, planning to rule through them. Magnus discovers that just as the Idents are robots posing as human, so Mekman is a human disguised as a robot. He captures Mekman, then beats the Magnus ident in single combat [ Magnus, Robot Fighter#2 ( May 1963 ) “Operation Disguise” ]. In the Atom part of All-Star Comics#37 ( October-November 1947 ) the Atom arrives at the HQ of General “Stubby” Klemper, notifying him that Wonder Woman has informed him that lifelike automatons are being used by the Injustice Society to impersonate important government officials ( The General is one ). I never picked up any of Gold Key or Valiant’s Magnus, Robot Fighters but I did see them ( Back issues for one ).
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…as Ross oversees construction of the new Project Greenskin, Jim comes to him with information about the Leader’s sinister plans to replace key people, including the president, with androids [ The Incredible Hulk#146 ( December 1971 ) comics.org ]
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Russ Manning was clearly hard to replace on this . . . .
This art is far more polished than Norris’s Aquaman work, but also came about 30 years later . . .
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