In “The Beauty and the Brain,” from Phantom Lady #13 (actual #1, 1947, published by Fox), Phantom Lady, who is Sandra Knight, daughter of a U.S. senator, is replaced by a robot who is her double. The robot is recognized as Sandra, but then Sandra also masquerades as the robot. This kind of story doesn’t have to make sense.
I have mentioned before (more than is necessary, really) that no one recognizes Sandra when she is Phantom Lady, despite not changing her appearance, just her clothes. However, I haven’t forgotten this is a comic book, where costumed heroes and heroines manage to keep secret identities that would be instantly seen through in real life.
The artwork is by Matt Baker. The stories were produced by the Jerry Iger shop, which piled on pulchritude to make the female characters stand out. The author is credited as Gregory Page, a pseudonym for usual Iger scripter, Ruth Roche.
Two Phantom Ladies! Just click on the thumbnail.
The lives of adventure heroes are complicated by a surprising frequency of evil twins, robot doubles, and look-alikes more generally. People have told me that I look like Jeff Goldblum (after he got cosmetic surgery); perhaps I should deal with him before he becomes a problem. (And who in G_d's name would get cosmetic surgery to look like me?!? That's a very low bar!)
ReplyDeleteThere's no making sense of this story unless one infers a relationship between Guddel and Thorn, with Thorn double-crossing Guddel, but none of that is explicitly stated. I'm not sure how to regard the story-telling as such.
Considering that an allergy is an immunologic problem, it's quite something to have a robot with an allergy.
Matt Baker's art is as appealing as usual, and — mirabile dictu! — we were spared the nasty little Iger thing that said “The End”.
Daniel, nothing wrong with Jeff Goldblum. Do you have his height? I'd love to be that tall, looking down on other peoples' bald spots, instead of vice versa.
ReplyDeleteOn robots: by coincidence the latest (September 2020) issue of National Geographic has an article about robots, including a picture of the head of a sex 'bot. She is a beauty, but as the caption to the picture says in a quote from Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at Georgia Tech: "If a robot seems too much like a human, people's acceptance can plummet into 'the uncanny valley,' Masahiro Mori's term for our feelings when a robot seems less an enhanced machine and more like a disturbingly diminished human — or a corpse." They didn't cover whether a robot can have allergies...I am sure they are more in danger from computer viruses.
Golblum has half-a-foot (15 cm) on me. I don't quite have a bald spot, but he could see the thinning of the hair on the crown of my head.
ReplyDeleteI get the point about how a robot that seemed to be an animated corpse could be appalling. But robots that seem fully human would disturb me greatly unless emancipated. I find it terrible that some people want a means of having slaves, and even of having sex slaves.
Daniel, I think sex with non-humans is pretty sick, anyway. Growing up reading science fiction I don't remember any sex robots (not in mainstream science fiction, anyway), although human-like robots were sometimes part of the plot(s). The '50s were probably too squeamish about sex to have characters who were into 'bot-humping.
ReplyDeleteI vaguely remember a story where robots were made to be killed by psychos who felt the need to murder someone. I'd think that would be expensive, unless the robot was "resurrected" after its death. Robot murder is sicker than having sex.