The Metal Men are a team of six (or more!) android heroes that have been part of the DC firmament since 1962. But the shape-shifting characters created on the page by Doctor Will Magnus have always stood off to the side as an off-color kind of franchise.
Now DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio and artist Shane Davis are working to recast the Metal Men as a vital part of the company's core universe in a way that doesn't just stretch the characters into a new shape but builds on literally everything that's come before.
CBR caught up with the creators to discuss their just-launched miniseries, and DiDio and Davis share how their approach pays homage to every strange corner of Metal Men history while also adding in new elements from the world of Dark Nights: Metal and a plethora of robot guest stars.
CBR: Metal Men seems, among other things, the moment where each of you are stepping back into monthly comics-making for the first time in a minute. Has that been a welcome shift in how you make comics or more of a challenge to get back into the grind?
Shane Davis: I'm doing about five pages a week now. You know, it's weird. I keep telling Dan that I feel like I'm in my prime. I do a page a day, and I feel like I'm falling behind, but I'm actually ahead. I just can't keep track of time. I know this sounds strange, but I put model kits together going to sleep. It's relaxing for me. But then I wake up with a piece of plastic glued to my head. I don't know. My brain just keeps going until I can't go anymore, and I'm just sleeping on the floor. [Laughter]
Dan DiDio: But I think we're actually in great shape right now. The book debuts this month, and we're already into issue #6 already. It's great to be able to look at the whole context of the series in advance and see how the pacing is working and things of that nature.
Davis: It also helps me not to repeat some of the action over again.
Well, Dan scripts all the dialogue after the art has been done. So I'm betting that Shane has an even stronger role in the storytelling of this series.
DiDio: Yeah, I always love to see what the images are first. What's fun about working with Shane is that he put so much emotion into the character's faces. So I might anticipate them saying something, but it would end up being much stronger of a statement because of the expression. For example, there's a scene where Gold is really angry at Magnus, and I had it down one way in my head, but when I saw Shane's art, it completely changed the tone of that scene.
The Metal Men are a group who have been part of the DCU for a long time, but they've never been a giant franchise. We last saw them under Geoff Johns' care in the New 52, but they were left out of Rebirth until this moment. Did you approach this as a fresh reboot or more along those lines of "let's tie everything from the past together"?
DiDio: We pretty much read everything that came before. I've always been a big fan of the Metal Men, and I'm always watching things and following along. I've watched the multiple interpretations that we've done. Aside from Geoff, there were the stories Keith Giffen did as a backup in the Doom Patrol book, and we add some of that in. And we went back and looked at the Duncan Rouleau material, also when Francis Manapul did some redesigns and when Len Wein did some writing. The goal was to find the core conceit at the heart of the characters so we could contextualize all those different takes around one idea. Then we'd take that single idea and push it forward.
The heart of the book to me has always been the relationship between the Metal Men and Magnus as their father figure...
DiDio: And the first issue is very much about what the heart of their relationship is. I was watching the new West World TV series, and I love the idea of artificial creatures feeling that their sentient when they're truly not. A lot of that idea came in and charged some of my approach to the Metal Men. If they're not truly sentient, then where are these emotions coming from? Where are their ideas coming from? I turn back to their creator then, and if you start to look at the characters and their complicated relationship to their creator, it's an interesting thing to do. I tend look at Magnus as more of an emotionless character – someone who seems totally in control. And in some ways, the Metal Men are acting out his emotions and serving as his id in a weird way. It's an interesting place to build a story from.
Davis: And it's a good visual juxtaposition to have these expressive guys bouncing around with a dead-faced guy in the corner interacting with them. On the page, it helps to have that contrast between the team and him.
DiDio: And then we introduce this new character, which is the Nth Metal Man. We picked up the idea from the Metal event that Nth metal is a psychic metal. It reacts to the moods of how people are feeling around it. You put a psychic metal like that into the middle of something that doesn't really have true emotions, what comes from that?
Shane, I know in past projects like the Superman Earth One graphic novels you've done a lot of work out the characters from look to body language before doing the pages. With such a big cast, are you able to put your stamp on them that way?
Davis: I'll eventually have "my version" of the Metal Men show up. But to start, I'm not one of those guys who looks at a character and says, "That design doesn't work." That said, there are challenges with characters who are mono-chromatic. That's all I can say. I've approached it as a challenge, and I think about how they'll look on the page as a result of that. But I'll never be a guy who comes on to a property and says, "Screw what came before." I think their design does work, and I've gotten to draw multiple versions of these characters so far. So it gives me an idea of what works better than something else.
I'd say the challenge is more about how I'm animating them on the page the way I'd do it. But I'm still being respectful to what came before and even do throwbacks to the old ways of drawing them. Sometimes their faces will be floating on an object, and sometimes their face is the object. Ultimately, I take what works and what doesn't. I view it like a buffet. Artistically, it's definitely unique. If you're doing Metal Men justice, I think you have to let the reader's imagination do a lot of their transformations in between the gutters. I don't want to do see them breaking down in slow action like a Transformers comic. Some of those comics are good and some are bad, but you'll see people drawing them over and over changing their shape. Nobody wants to see that. Just let it happen. Otherwise, it slows down the pacing of the comic – especially if it's an action sequence. I'm always trying to put the story first.
Sometimes you launch a book and it's super tied to the DCU and what's happening in a cosmic sense, and other times it stands totally alone. Where does Metal Men sit on that range?
DiDio: I'm working with this with the hope that we'll see another series. It feels attached to the DC Universe. We're tying into some things from Dark Nights: Metal, and we have some guest stars from other places in the DCU showing up. This moves the story forward and reflects certain moments in time that are happening across the DCU. Contextually it fits within a very specific period of time, but I don't feel that disrupts or distracts from the story itself. It adds some contours that makes it interesting. I don't want this to be another version of the Metal Men that's left off to the side with a bunch of other versions that were left off to the side. It feels like these characters are a part of the DCU but just starring in their own story.
Davis: And Dan's done a great job of tying all the versions of the Metal Men together here. I'm not trying to give anything away, but I give him major props for pulling all of this together in a new way. If anything, he made them more coherent. There's a reason for that in the first issue, and now we know how it all works.
DiDio: And to return the compliment to Shane, there's a great sequence in issue #4 when we go to RobotCon...
Davis: Yeah, Dan calls me up and says, "How would you like to draw a convention?" I'm like, "I don't even want to go conventions anymore!" [DiDio Laughs] And I think it's just one issue, but it really stretches over two issues.
DiDio: We go to RobotCon, and we pull out every bizarre robot from DC fiction, from movie fiction, from other publishers' fiction...
Davis: Some are from other parts of the world where I'm going, "Yeah. Even though it's a cat, it's also a robot."
DiDio: It makes it feel like this is all a part of one big world that we're celebrating.
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