Gold Key Comics...Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D.

With his first appearance in Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A. D., #1 in 1963, writer and artist Russ Manning created a new "Tarzan" inspired character for the distant future. After working on the Edgar Rice Burroughs character for Gold Key and the newspaper syndicate, Manning got a chance to do his own series at Western Publishing, and decided to update the Ape Man mythos .But instead of being raised by primates this time, Magnus was reared by a benevolent robot called 1A who foresaw a very grim future in mankind's growing dependence on robots. Borrowing from Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics for the first issue, Magnus is trained by 1A as a warrior to protect humans from rogue machines and the humans who used them for their own evil purposes. Trained in an advanced martial arts, our hero can break steel with his bare hands and equipped with a telepathic device to "hear" all robot-to-robot communications. Magnus is the guardian of a sprawling North Am battling space pirates, aliens, wicked robots and other various threats. With the help of his girlfriend, the lovely Leeja Clane, her senator father, Victor Clane, and a boy's club known as "The Outsiders", Magnus has many exciting adventures done in in Manning's sleek streamline style for the first twenty one issues, before Russ left the feature. Paul Norris was chosen to take over the artwork for most of the remaining tales, along with lots of reprints to round out the series ended with issue #46 in January of 1977. But the popularity of the original series spawned new issues from Valiant Comics and Acclaim Comics in the nineties and currently under Dark Horse Comics even more stories of the robot fighter are being told.