As we talked about last week, Jerry Siegel’s creation Robotman, while not being a trend-setter, grew into a reliable back-page feature over the course of his career. And in fact, the strip was popular enough to survive its home, STAR-SPANGLED COMICS, being rebranded as a western title. When that happened, the strip migrated to the pages of DETECTIVE COMICS for some reason–there wasn’t anything particularly detectivish about Robotman–he might have fit in better with ACTION COMICS, say, or one of editor Julie Schwartz’s science fiction titles such as MYSTERY IN SPACE. But presumably, DETECTIVE COMICS was where there was a space, and it was in those pages that Robotman finished out his golden age run.
He was done in by the same circumstance that brought an end to the career of others such as Johnny Quick and Zatara, and which forced Superman and Batman to start sharing a locker in the pages of WORLD’S FINEST COMICS: shrinking page counts. While comic books had started out at 64 pages in an issue, plenty of space to build a compelling anthology of features, as he economics of publishing changed and costs rose, rather than increasing their dime cover price, DC instead decided to shrink the size of their books. They first went down to a 48 page package (often blurbed as 52 pages, as DC liked to cheat and count the covers), and then at the end of 1953, to 32 pages (or 36 pages with covers.)
What this reduction meant in practical terms was that every anthology series needed to shed at least one feature. In the case of DETECTIVE COMICS, this meant that Robotman’s time was finally up. His final golden age story appeared in this issue, DETECTIVE COMICS #202, towards the end of 1953.
The writer of this final Robotman story is unknown, but the artwork was by Joe Certa, who is best remembered today as the artist who co-created John Jones, the Manhunter from Mars.
A decade later, writers Arnold Drake and Bob Haney would resurrect the premise of the Robotman strip for one of the characters in their new feature for MY GREATEST ADVENTURE; the Doom Patrol. This later Robotman (who was initially referred to as Automaton) didn’t bear any connection to his golden age forebearer apart from his heroic codename.
The climax of this story, in which the army fires Robotman at the criminal tank, shows a profound lack of understanding as to how such firearms work. But for the young audience of the period, it worked as well as anything else.
As this final blurb indicates, Robotman’s place in DETECTIVE COMICS was taken up by Captain Compass, who was a maritime detective and so fit in better with the theme of the magazine.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 