Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #416: Ultivac

So, if you look over a group called the “Forgotten Villains” for possible entries to this series, you are gonna probably see something truly forgotten.  As I see it, that would be Ultivac, a giant robot that fought another lesser-known DC team that’s probably best remembered for who created them than for any individual thing they ever did.

Yeah, Ultivac fought the Challengers of the Unknown, a group of guys I can’t believe I haven’t covered yet.  Well, I guess I know who’s up for next week!

The best way to understand why the Challengers matter is basically to point out one thing:  Jack Kirby created them before the Fantastic Four, and they are eerily similar.  The Challengers first appeared in DC’s Showcase title, a book designed to offer new characters a chance to catch on, and the Challengers’ first appearance in those pages was in 1957.  The Fantastic Four would come out in 1961.  And while Kirby wasn’t working alone on either book, notably with Stan Lee on Fantastic Four and with either his Captain America co-creator Joe Simon or Dave Wood (it’s not really clear) for the Challengers of the Unknown stories, the two groups did have a lot in common.  Both teams featured a group of people, mostly men, who survived a harrowing accident and decided to do good in the world while exploring the weird and the wild in a sci-fi setting.  The big difference is the FF came out of their accident with superpowers, and the Challengers just had whatever their regular (if rather impressive) skills were.  Beyond that, both teams wore matching jumpsuits and had one really smart guy on the team, a hotheaded kid with a thing for fast cars, a tough guy brawler, and a pilot.  Of course for the FF that brawler and that pilot were the same guy, and the woman member of the Challengers was more of a support system in Challenger Mountain as near as I can make out.

Wait, this entry is about Ultivac.  Next week I’ll do the Challengers.  Unless I forget.  That has been known to happen.

Regardless, Ultivac was a giant robot built by a former war criminal named Felex Hesse and his one time cellmate Floyd Barker.  Small problem:  Ultivac had a mind of his own.  Possessing great strength, flight, artificial intelligence, and even the ability to cast holograms of some sort, Ultivac soon turned on his creators who in turn asked the Challengers for help.  Because four guys with no powers and matching jumpsuits are clearly who you call when there’s a giant robot on the loose.  Naturally, the Challengers can’t, so they go to a secret lab for help.  The director there is a woman named June Robbins, later the fifth and only female members of the Challengers.  The team does manage to incapacitate Ultivac, and Hesse and Barker decide to try and use him as a sideshow attraction because apparently Hesse is a reformed war criminal.

Ultivac later kidnaps June because he decided she was hot, but the Challengers managed to defeat him…mostly by talking to him.  Yeah, apparently, he’s a reasonable giant robot.

Then Hesse destroyed him with a ray gun.

That might have been the end of him, but there was that Forgotten Villains thing, a team created by the Enchantress (the crazy DC one not the blonde bombshell Marvel one) and made up entirely of villains from the past.  Ultivac was now under the control of one Mr. Poseidon.  Who’s that?  Some guy who lost to the Sea Devils, a DC bunch whose only skill was they could scuba dive.  The Forgotten Heroes, meanwhile, had Superman helping them out.  Sure, another baddie (the Atom-Master) would take over Poseidon’s role as the guy controlling Ultivac later on, but that seems to be what happened to the big guy.  He went from a robot you could reason with to some poor sap controlled by losers.

So, that’s Ultivac, a robot that maybe didn’t want to be evil but apparently always ended up that way anyway.