Machine Man #3 - Ten-For, the Mean Machine

Machine Man is still in the sanitarium, receiving the visual of the distress call, projecting an image of a ship plunging into a distant star while one of the patients channels the verbal distress call. While MM begins to work on a space-time bridge for a rescue, the army, led by Colonel Kragg home in on MM's location.

MM starts the device built to the alien's specifications, but finds out that it was designed to exchange them for the alien, and almost gets sucked into deep space.



MM manages to escape and redesigns the device for a straight rescue, even though the alien makes it clear that he doesn't care who is sacrificed for his sake. The alien arrives, proving to be a robot named Ten-For, a Holocaust Specialist First Class. Just then the army attacks, mistakenly locking in on Ten-For instead of MM. Ten-For partially disables MM and goes off to attack the army, while Doc Spalding attempts to help MM, who has just realized that "Holocaust Specialist" probably means bad news.

A decent story, with some nice visuals. Ten-For is a bit over the top this issue, but would prove to be an interesting villain in the issues ahead.

Mike Royer inks the 17-page story, and the Kirby Checklist credits John Verpoorten with the inks on the cover.

Kirby also writes a text page, "The Unexpected Robot", speculating about how man will react to competition from robots like MM in the future.

Published 1978