One of the fun things about reading Silver Age comics, for me, is the complete lack of understanding in basic science. Take, for example, the Metal Men. These are a group of robots, each based around a different metal, that were apparently sentient and had different abilities based off whatever metal they were made of, like how Gold could stretch out to thin wires, Mercury was liquird-based, Iron was strong, and Lead was good for making shields.
Well, it turns out that if you have a group of good robots, someone is bound to send some evil robots after them, and that included the Gas Gang.
Now, the Gas Gang were hardly the only robots that went up against the Metal Men. There were giant robots and robot-like things like Chemo and at least one group made of radioactive metals. But the Gas Gang were robots made of gas…somehow.
See above for the complete lack of understanding in basic science.
See, the Metal Men’s typical story in those days were as follows: some threat, often of a rather meta-quality (no, really) would rear its head and the different Metal Men would all rush to stop whatever it was, often being demolished one at a time (Tin was usually first while reminding everyone how weak he was), and then at the end we’d see Doc Magnus, their creator, building replacement bodies with whatever surviving Metal Men there were (usually Platinum).
However, Doc was often responsible for those other evil robots as well. Following one weird adventure, Doc had been turned into a robot. And he wasn’t a good robot. He was an evil one, so he invented the Gas Gang. Each one was based on a different gas and had different abilities. They were:
- Oxygen, who could promote rust very quickly.
- Chloroform, who could shoot off knock-out or laughing gas
- Carbon Monoxide, who could poison people
- Carbon Dioxide, who could freeze people
- Helium, who, uh…made people speak like Mickey Mouse, I guess.
During their first encounter, Chloroform made Mercury break apart laughing while Oxygen started to make all the Metal Men rust. Carbon Monoxide tried to poison them while Carbon Dioxide tried to freeze them until Gold wrapped the lot of them in a cage and shot himself through with high voltage, causing the Gas Gang to turn to steam and somehow turning Doc back to human.
Yes, I know it seems weird that somehow they were robots made of gas and that they were defeated by somehow turning gas into steam, but here we are.
Oddly enough, Doc would rebuild the Gas Gang to try to stop the Metal Men later on when they went a little bad, but the Gas Gang turned on Doc and Gold had to do the high voltage thing again.
That’s about it for the comic book appearances. They were sometimes referred to as causing problems off-panel somewhere, but that was it.
Oh, sure, they did appear on Batman the Brave and the Bold only without Carbon Monoxide and with Nitrogen and Hydrogen added to the group. And in that incarnation, they were scientists whose bodies were changed into gas until Doc built them robot bodies. That…makes a bit more sense.
But really. Robots that were supposedly made of gas. You can’t make this stuff up because somebody already did.
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