Shortlist: Magnus, Robot Fighter

Created by Russ Manning for Gold Key, Magnus: Robot Fighter has done tours of publishing duty with Valiant, Acclaim, and currently Dark Horse Comics. (Their first issue wasn't too bad, and included a nice reprint of the first Gold Key issue.) In the year 4000 AD, the robot 1-A raises and trains Magnus to defend humanity from rogue robots, aliens, and laziness. (If you've seen WALL-E, you've seen how the average person would get with robot servants, although you never see that many fat people in Magnus...)

How Magnus hasn't to date got a video game, to say nothing of an action figure, is beyond me. The guy's whole deal is karate-chopping robots. A sandbox game where robot crime escalates as Magnus's robot-fu technique improves wouldn't have to be especially deep plotwise to be fun. Some of those robots got mighty big, and he's also fought aliens, including a crossover with Predator.


Magnus not only deserves an action figure, but by god he needs an action feature, too: if any figure needed karate-chopping action, he does. (I wonder how that would work: your basic DCUC or Legends style articulation, but with one shoulder given over to the spring-loaded chop? Traditionally, the karate-chopping arm is a unarticulated piece, and I wonder how well it would go with elbow and wrist joints.) Hell, I'd go for a Gold Key wave: Magnus, Turok, Dr. Solar, and...um, I don't know. Mighty Samson? Andar, Turok's sidekick? Dagar the Invincible? It'll never happen, although if movie versions ever pan out, Turok or Magnus might get lucky.


I don't know the character very well, but I think Dr. Solar might be interesting for a live-action adaptation. That said, it would probably become Dr. Manhattan: the Movie. Still, a figure of him with a light-up chest emblem; or to go old-school, a face that turns green in cold water, would be neat.

Scans from Dark Horse's Magnus, Robot Fighter #1, "Metal Mob, part one: Taken" Script by Jim Shooter, art by Bill Reinhold; and reprinting Gold Key's Magnus, Robot Fighter #1, script and art by Russ Manning.