Brian Fies

Public Domain Superman!

Well, actually, Superman only appears once and only as a name in a microfilm image of a Daily Planet newspaper headline halfway through the story. That's the moment when I stopped reading and started researching. And indeed, I found that this book is a sequel to "The Mechanical Monsters" cartoon produced by Max Fleischer back in the 1940s as part of a series of Superman animated shorts that were later allowed to fall into the public domain when their copyrights were not renewed. I must have watched this decades ago, but it had slipped from my mind, so I refreshed my memory by finding a version on YouTube. This connection is not mentioned anywhere on the cover, but it was mentioned on the blurb page that I had skipped, and it also turned up in the acknowledgments at the end.

Doing my homework gave the book an extra layer, but it didn't add as much depth as I expected since the cartoon is just a jumping off point for Brian Fies examination of aging and legacy. The villainous inventor who made the Mechanical Monsters in 1941 has spent six decades in prison, and upon his release he returns to his secret lair and resumes his evil plans with the single robot he is able to cobble together from the parts Superman left scattered about when he took down the whole robotic army.

Gathering the resources needed for his evil plans and day-to-day needs forces the aged inventor to interact with various members of the community near his lair as they help him play catch-up with the changes that have happened in the world during his absence. And like the Grinch coming down from the mountain, he finds the the size of his heart changing size.

I liked the fable aspects of the story, but I did get distracted by some bits that just didn't make much sense, like the length of his jail sentence, the fact that prison is treated like it exists in a vacuum with no access to outside news, and that the U.S. government while militarizing for World War II ignored the weaponry potential of the Mechanical Monsters. The officials who scooped up Nazi scientists with Operation Paperclip at the end of the war would have certainly implemented a work-release program for prisoners who could contribute automated fighting machines to the war effort.

And then the big finale just fell flat for me as the inventor's support network inevitably comes together to help in the moment of crisis as fire fighters and policemen just stand around twiddling their thumbs. Events unfold in increasingly unlikely ways to the point of being ridiculous.

It's a pretty decent book, but I just couldn't let myself go with the flow of it.… (más)