Tony Stark tried to build something as pleasant to use as Windows, with the market domination strategy of Apple, and now Ultron is trying to kill everyone. But why would Tony do that? Building a robot in the Marvel universe counts as attempted genocide. Our species only survives because most Marvel robots suck harder than Roomba with an arc-reactor. And these are the worst:
The Bi-Beast
The Bi-Beast’s only distinguishing factor was its stupidest distinguishing factor.
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Impossibly, there’s no rule 34 of the Bi-Beast. (Source: Marvel)
It’s not clear how someone stupid enough to build both skulls facing forward was capable of doing so. It’s the only creature in existence where eyes in the back of its head is a feasible improvement, and instead it goes half-blind if it yawns. Which will happen, because otherwise it’s as boring as anything that giant and naked can be. Everything about the character design says “Leave me alone, I don’t feel like designing characters today.” We’d swear the artist copied an anatomical model, then copied the last bit twice so he wouldn’t get found out.
The design is even dumber than it looks, a feat you actually need two brains to achieve, because the top skull contains combat knowledge while the lower is loaded with culture. So when someone smashes it over the head it immediately loses the ability to defend itself, but can wax poetic about aesthetic splatters of oil as it’s beaten to pieces.
The Living Brain
The Living Brain is so tragic Kafka would console it with hot chocolate and an oil change. It thinks, therefore it sucks. A supercomputer capable of solving any problem and its battle strategy is “whirling fists like a middle school student.” Which may be why its first rampage was through middle school students. Anything other than “unarmed children” wouldn’t be credibly threatened.
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ENGAGE COMBAT PROTOCAL: MNEH-I’M-TELLING-MOM! (Source: Marvel)
Criminals keep stealing and reprogramming it for evil, but that’s like gluing a calculator onto a baseball bat – you haven’t improved the violence, you’re just breaking the smart stuff. And instead of fixing it, Spider-Man’s standard strategy was to smash it to pieces.
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“It’s alive, but not legally. Kill it!” (Source: Marvel)
It’s the most tragic victim of the Marvel universe’s mindless violence because it’s entirely made of mind. The Superior Spider-Man finally reprogrammed it for heroic purposes, but that doesn’t change how Spider-Man could have scored a sweet spider-computer back in the ’60s. Or the fact that it spent most of its super-smart existence knowing exactly how badly it’s going to lose the next stupid fight.
Thorbot
Tony Stark and Hank Pym built a clone cyborg god. They saved money on pentagrams and snakes by calculating it was already 100% guaranteed to turn evil. This was during Marvel’s Civil War over superhero registration, when Iron Man’s character motivation was replaced with graffiti saying “THE 1% ARE EVIL.” Cloning an obedient cyborg of one of his closest comrades? It couldn’t have been creepier if he’d time-travelled into Thor’s childhood bedroom to whisper about trusting men with goatees who talk about being on government registries.
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FORSOOTH, I SWEAR I’M A NEW CHARACTER! (Source: Marvel)
Cloning a god is a great way to trap intelligent designers in an infinite loop, but even in Marvel physics it doesn’t copy their powers. The Thorbot needed cyborg parts to generate his lightning strikes. Which means they already knew how to build a lightning gun, and the only point of the “Thor” clone was to annoy Asgard with patent infringements. The only thing the Thorbot ever achieved was murdering a zeta-list hero and giving everyone else an excuse to cry instead of fight for a few panels. So even when it succeeded, it made things suck.
Albert
Industrialist Donald Pierce is the worst combat robot builder in the world. His plan to kill Wolverine was to build a robotic Wolverine, thereby adding a Wolverine to existence. That’s the exact opposite of killing him. He also called the robot Wolverine “Albert,” because when a writer’s big plan is “I’ll just copy an existing character” they’ve already made it clear they can’t be bothered. But when that character is Wolverine, they get hired by Marvel.
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Hey Albert — X-23, Sabretooth, Jimmy Hudson, Wild Thing, Daken and the Skrullverine want a word. (Source: Marvel)
Albert was meant to lure Wolverine to his doom at the hands of Elsie Dee, an android bomb disguised as a little girl. But Elsie made friends with Wolverine instead. Worst combat robot designer in the world. Even regular little girls won’t make friends with something that looks like Wolverine, never mind little electrobombs engineered only to destroy him.
Getting back to Albert: sucked. When you’re a robot internal metal claws don’t make you a badass, they make you a can-opener. Of course Albert also failed to kill Wolverine, opting instead to adventure around the world with the inappropriately young Elsie girlbot. So Pierce might have sucked at killing Wolverine, but he did an absolutely perfect job of copying him.
Sentient Iron Man Armor
Tony Stark built the sexiest technology ever so that he could get inside it and fire his genius all over the world. But he made it for war, not love, and was caught by surprise when it whisked him away to a desert island where it wanted to keep him safe and be one forever. Honestly, if it hadn’t been made entirely of murder and warheads, it would have been his most romantic love interest. Instead it was one of the worst Iron Man stories ever written.
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(Source: Marvel)
The sentient suit was called the “SAFE” armor. Making Stark even worse at naming things than he is at installing safeties. The sentient armor built a robotic replacement for Tony by coating tough mechanical insides with soft synthetic skin. It got the idea of Iron Man armor exactly the wrong way round, and it is Iron Man armor. Tony and the armor spent the rest of the issue sobbing and self-sacrificing each other to death. If one of them hadn’t been made of guns, readers would swear they’d bought Cosmopolitan by mistake.
Tony buried the literally broken-hearted armor on the island. Because leaving psychotic WMDs lying around is his entire business model. Since then it’s been taken over by Dimitrios, an intelligent computer virus created by Hank Pym which wants to destroy humanity. He created it to destroy Ultron, an intelligent computer system created by Hank Pym which wants to destroy humanity. The Avengers could probably retire if they just got Tony and Hank into World of Warcraft.
Peter Parker’s Parent-bots
Marvel decided to restore Peter Parker’s parents, because it’s not like Spider-Man is defined by the loss of a father figure. It couldn’t have been worse if Bruce Wayne’s parents had popped out of his thirtieth birthday cake to shout “PSYCH!” Richard and Mary Parker are resurrected as ex-secret agents. Because if you’re going to replace your superhero story with orphan fantasy you might as well go all the way. We’re lucky Parker didn’t find a golden ticket to Hogwarts.
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This month in Untold Tales of Spider-Man: Not Spider-Man! (Source: Marvel)
Their stories were so bad Marvel started “The Clone Saga” to undo their effects, and “The Clone Saga” almost undid Spider-Man as a profitable concept. They were written out so quickly even the characters involved in doing it were struck with temporary amnesia. Behold the Chameleon’s plan to discover Spider-man’s secret identity:
1. Aleady know Spider-man’s secret identity
2. Build perfect android duplicates of his parents
3. Forget the secret identity
He could have succeeded by asking his own robots “Who are you, and do you know any sarcastic teenagers?” He had copies of literally everything that ever gave rise to Peter Parker, and he still couldn’t work it out. He didn’t just know Peter’s name, he had files on his father’s inside leg measurements. He didn’t even need to find Spider-Man any more. He could have mass-produced the parents as free sexbots and psychologically destroyed him.
Instead the parentbots turned into half-porcupines before getting trashed. And that was still less stupid than the rest of their existence.
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“I will die as I lived: in a stupid way!” (Source: Marvel)
H.E.R.B.I.E.
H.E.R.B.I.E. is the Human Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics, and the only thing more painfully overextended than that robot’s acronym was its existence. It was an awful robot, but fantastic at being more annoying than Orko. It looked like something a child would draw after seeing a butt plug and sounded like that child trying to get drunk through a duck call to repress the memories.
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H.E.R.B.I.E. and the Thing both losing a “Who’s stupider looking” competition. (Source: Marvel)
He replaced Johnny Storm in the ’70s cartoon, and I’d swear he was built to make being on fire feel preferable. Dave Cockrum was commissioned to design H.E.R.B.I.E. but hated it so much he had to be replaced. This is the artist who drew Bouncing Boy’s wedding, but it was H.E.R.B.I.E. which made him hate the comic he was working on. H.E.R.B.I.E. was screwing up the Fantastic Four before he even existed.
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Luke McKinney writes about games, drink, science, and everything else that makes life amazing. He’s a columnist on Cracked and writes for several beer magazines. He’s also available for hire. Follow him on Tumblr and Twitter @lukemckinney.
Luke nailed it with the 5 DC Superteams We Want to See on Film.
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Okay, we wish for even more Deadshot. And Michael Jai White to play Bronze Tiger everywhere.
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