The Last Mechanical Monster
The Mechanical Monsters was a 1941 animated Superman flick released by the Fleischer Studios. Award winning graphic novelist Brian Fies transposed and reinvented it as The Last Mechanical Monster, a black-and-white web comic with crowd sourced contributions before arriving at its newest iteration as a full-color hardcover book. In Fies’ reinvention the mad inventor of the original story, who unleashed a crime wave conducted by robots, is finally released from prison in the 21st century—he must be, what, 100 years old? Ignoring the chronological impossibility, this imaginative new take on the old story finds the inventor reconstructing one of his robots (he’s hard pressed to find spare parts) and seeking revenge against the world. The Last Mechanical Monster has many amusing pop culture and philosophical references in a tale of how consequences can escape the intentions even of a mad genius—sometimes to good ends.
