Earlier this week, it was announced that Marvel comics will becoming available digitally on GlobalComix beginning October 15. The couple of news pieces I saw about it noted "Marvel joins DC, Image Comics, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios, Oni Press, Kodansha and dozens of other publishers of comics, manga and webtoons worldwide as part of Global’s growing catalog..." and "in addition to Marvel, GlobalComix now offers DC, Image Comics, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios, Oni Press, Kodansha and many more..." This is inaccurate, however, as Oni and Boom! titles are no longer available as of October 1.

(Strictly speaking, the titles were still probably technically available when those articles were written, but they became out of date within hours.)

Over on Reddit last week, KodyCQ offered something of an explanation...

Due to recent changes with their distribution partners, their catalogues will be removed from GlobalComix on October 1st. While this is outside of our direct control, we’re actively working with both companies to restore access as soon as possible.

We can’t yet guarantee if or when their catalogues will return, but please know we’re on it and will keep you updated...

Thank you for your patience and support while we explore bringing BOOM! Studios and Oni Press back under their new distributors.

That sounds to me like there was something in Oni's and Boom!'s respective distributor contracts that either outright prohibits or puts some substantive restrictions on how their comics can be distributed digitally. Perhaps not exactly an exclusivity clause, but something restrictive enough that it conflicted with their agreements with GlobalComix. Possibly there's nothing even conflicting at all, but the legal wording might be vague enough that they're seeking legal counsel before continuing to be on the safe side.

But I'm reminded of the announcement that Image made just over a week ago. They said they were going to release comics through the regular distribution channels as normal, but that bookstore and digital outlets would only come about a month later, allowing comic shops to have some degree of exclusivity. The point I made was that this was largely PR spin, and the likely explanation was that that month-long window was a supply chain constriant on bookstores that ultimately didn't impact comic shop sales anyway; the delay on digital was just a way to sell the 'comic shop exclusive' line as digital sales don't impact print sales much anyway.

I'm wondering if we're looking at the same situation with Oni and Boom! I bet that contract stipulation that KodyCQ alluded to had to do with release dates, and that their distributor contracts required a month-long exclusivity window for comic shops. So rather than go through all their catalog in GlobalComix one by one, they just axed everything with the intent of bringing it all back in 30 days, once everything that had been put online had also been in print for that long. At that point they can then start up with a regular posting-new-issues schedule that simply tails their print releases by a month. That wouldn't be the most nuanced approach from a marketing perspective, but it would certainly be the easiest from a technical and logistics one.

My bet is that Oni and Boom!'s catalogues will be restored in early November. They'll make a big deal about it, maybe even doing some "thanks for staying with us" and/or holiday sales to mark everything down through the end of the year. But I'm certain they'll be back before long; I think this is more of an instance of not telling the audience the full story moreso than any actual legal challenges. I don't know the specifics of their timing, of course, but I'm sure it won't be much longer than a month, if that.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Peanuts debut. I don't know that I have anything new to add to what you can find elsewhere about the history of either the strip or creator Charles Schulz, so I thought I might share some more personal thoughts on them.

I don't recall my first encounter with Peanuts. Peanuts was created nearly a quarter century before I was born, so it has literally always been a part of my upbringing in some fashion. Heck, both Happiness is a Warm Puppy and the animated Christmas special were around for about a decade before I was! Snoopy has, for me, always been very much a part of American culture.

That means a couple things. First, it meant that I didn't see Peanuts develop. It was a fully formed set of characters from the outset (at least as far as I was concerned). With later popular strips like Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes, I was able to watch their development as their creators found their illustrative and narrative voices. But Schulz was well into a groove with Peanuts by the time I first saw it.

Second, it meant that, while Schulz certainly wasn't done, he had said a lot of what he wanted to say already. The Lucy-pulling-away-the-football routine and the "It was a dark and stormy night" stories had been turned into running gags, where the comedy comes more from variations on a theme than in the concept itself.

In fact, by the time I start reading the strip regularly in the 1980s, Schulz was argueably past his prime. His linework had started becoming shakey as he entered his 60s, and he had largely abandoned some of the adult themes and observations of previous years in favor of the somewhat less dark depictions that came out marketing. Charlie Brown was no longer really manically depressed, but mostly just wishy-washy; he no longer seemed to get angry about his lot in life but accepted it with benign resignation.

And at the time, reprints were not very common. There were probably more of Peanuts than just about any other strip, but the ones I had access to were primarily from the earliest 1950s strips where Schulz was still finding his voice. They were interesting to compare the obvious changes in illustration style, but I largely missed the more cerebral strips that really launched Schulz to comic stardom. So while I heard many fans and cartoonists laud Schulz's work, I was only seeing the least of it.

Furthermore, a lot of Schulz's innovations had been around long enough to have become staples of comics as a whole. Other seemingly age-old strips (i.e. anything that debuted before I was born) like The Born Loser, Marmaduke, and Family Circus had already been influenced by Peanuts and had picked up on various elements that Schulz had introduced to the medium. So not only were Schulz's ideas old hat, but they'd been around long enough to have been copied ad infinitum by others.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike Schulz. The strips were still better than most of what was on the comics page, and the Christmas Special certainly had something magic about it, but the body of work as a whole (of which I had only seen the extreme ends of) seemed over-rated. I seem to recall my father pointing this out in my late teens but, again, the lack of access to good reprint material meant that his explanations were largely from memory (which meant that he couldn't really pinpoint many specific examples) and I couldn't actually see what he was talking about in any event. I was left with what amounted to, "Well, he did some really great and innovative work that mostly overlap the 20 or 30 years that you're missing."

In the ensuing couple of decades of comics research, which includes a wealth of materials becoming more widely available, I've gotten a much better appreciation of Schulz's contributions to both the medium and society as a whole. But I think it speaks to what was a long-standing problem of popular culture: that, until recently, we only had the "now" to assess. Anyone but the most hard-core and dedicated researchers coming to the game a little late might be left out of the loop entirely. People just a few years younger than I am likely have less appreciation of what Garfield's introduction was like and what Jim Davis' contributions were.

But while it's argueable that, twenty-five years after Schulz's death, newspapers should stop running Peanuts re-runs in favor of giving someone else a shot, those Peanuts re-runs are works that were almost entirely unavailable to the vast majority of people until the 21st century. So there's (potentially, at least) a greater sense of appreciation of Schulz's work here at 75 than there may have been at 35 or 45.

The way I figure it, the problem a lot of people have is that they don't really understand media. Any of it. Maybe a vague notion about commercial interests or liberal bias or what-have-you, but little beyond that. I think people, on the whole, don't have any real media literacy. They don't see reporters as storytellers; they don't know how to judge/interpret what they're being told; they don't even understand the language well enough to discern why certain words were chosen for a report.

To some degree, I get it. Reading Marshall McCluhan is a tough slog. Trying to take hilariously obsolete opinions of new-fangled things like "radio" or "television" from their original time periods and relate them to contemporary concerns doesn't generally follow a straight path. The big picture is hard to look at, precisely because it's so big. Not to mention that a lot of people just don't even understand the basics of current technology. (Which is why phishing continues to work.)

But, at the same time... it's the 21st century, people! Regardless of what era you grew up in and how you'd like for the world to continue to operate as it did, that's not how it works now. A hundred years ago, "literacy" meant basic reading, writing and arithmetic. That's not enough any more. You used to go through life quite happily with a sixth grade education, but now it's difficult to just do that if you've got a college degree. "Literacy" has expanded considerably. Here's what Wikipedia has to say...

Some researchers suggest that the study of literacy as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition); and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, including the social and cultural aspects of reading, writing, and functional literacy. The range of definitions of literacy used by NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy groups since the 1990s suggests that this shift in understanding from "discrete skill" to "social practice" is both ongoing and uneven... As of 2021, the International Literacy Association uses "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, compute, and communicate using visual, audible, and digital materials across disciplines and in any context."

The ILA's definition of literacy is already a fair piece more than reading and writing, and there are some folks in education now that are suggesting that the first part of that definition is already too narrow from the standpoint of the second. It's an idea that I happen to agree with, though, and think media literacy is significant and important enough in the 21st century to be pulled under the same umbrella as literacy. The Influencing Machine is essentially a primer on that notion of literacy today. It doesn't cover nearly everything that you need to become 21st century literate, nor does it strive to, but it does tell you what that literacy is and why it's important. The book is "a treatise on the relationship between us and the news media" and "a manifesto on the role of the press in American history". But I think both of those descriptions sell the reason for buying the book short. If the last few years have taught us anything, though, it's that knowing how to read and interpret whatever media you consume is absolutely vital if you don't want to fall into a Fox or OAN or Q-Anon black hole which obliterates actual news and facts.

The book is over a decade old now, but it seems to me that its message is more critical than ever! If you slept on this back in the day, it's well worth hunting down a copy now!

One of the comics-adjacent hobbies I've dabbled with over the years is collecting action figures, and adjacent to that has been customizing them. I've mentioned here previously how I'd semi-recently gotten back into it (I go through cycles of about five years on/five years off) and I've been able to knock out some projects that I had thought of years ago, but was never able to execute to completion for one reason or another. I've finished all of the legacy projects I'd wanted and I've lately just been coming up with not-quite-random new projects to keep me busy and out of trouble.

I made an 18" Giganto figure from Fantastic Four #1. Some moleoids to accompany him and the Mole Man. I made a Rama-Tut because I've got an Egypt display. I found a good design for the ED-209 from Robocop and 3D printed it as part of my SHIELD display. I made a Rogue Trooper because I had a partial Steve Rogers figure that would be easy to customize. Destroyer Duck -- because why not? I recently finished a Warrior Wonderland Alice figure because there weren't any Alice in Wonderland action figures that really had the aesthetic I've got in my displays.

Most of these projects I would work on over a few days, or maybe a week. The Galactus I put together was between 2-3 weeks. These aren't especially long projects, and they keep engaged but not particularly excited. But as I started pulling things together for my next project, I began getting actually excited about it and I'm trying to figure out why.

The basic idea is to do the Fantastic Four, but from before they got their powers. I've noted many a time before that I'm a huge FF fan going back decades, and I've got the team rendered in action figure form several times. But all of the versions I have -- in fact all of the versions that have ever been made -- had the team in one of their uniforms. I was intrigued by the time before that.

"So... civilians. You want Fantastic Four figures, but just in street clothes?"

Sort of. In some of the flashbacks we've seen, Reed Richards teamed up with Alyssa Moy for some adventures and they looked very much like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. It was intended as a bit of a joke at first, but it's been repeated enough that it's part of their continuity now. And Ben Grimm was of course an Air Force pilot, and many of his adventures were done in flight gear.

Dr. Doom was around, too, after he got expelled from Empire State University. But before he donned his trademark mask and cloak, he would wrap his face in bandages, not unlike the Invisible Man from the Universal movies or the Negative Man from the original Doom Patrol comics.

So the only characters in that pre-FF orbit that were just wearing normal clothes were Sue and Johnny Storm. And they were both kids.

After looking at what current figures were available, I did a quick, down-and-dirty Photoshopping to see what I could reasonably put together myself...

(I expect any of you into action figures yourself will look at these and notice how minimal most of my modifications would be.)

I was a bit excited to be able to work on these, and got a variety of parts ordered, but then I started thinking about how to display them. The displays I have currently are themed: 1940s Egypt, SHIELD headquarters, a cave high on a Tibetan mountain, the hangar bay of a space ship, and a (mostly Star Wars) starship docking facility. I've also got the 'regular' FF figures fighting a squadron of Skrulls and Mole Man's crew. I didn't think any of these would suit these figures. The Egypt one could probably work if I removed all the period characters and elements, but that would reduce it by half.

However, that idea did put me on a path towards an idea I'm rather excited about. As suggested earlier, the Reed and Alyssa characters were expressly done to mimic Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, both archeologists. Furthermore it's been semi-recently revealed that Susan has her doctorate in archeology, and the Before the Fantastic Four: The Storms series is very archeologicially driven as well. I considered doing another tomb display, maybe based on something from Central America or Asia, but that seemed a little repetitive. But then I started mentally going through those various pre-Fantastic Four adventures, I realized many of them had a similar thematic location in their starting points: a library. Which would be easy to replicate because I still have in my attic the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Sunnydale High Library playset from a decade ago!

(Another crude Photoshop job.)

Now, do you need all this backstory for this project? Nope, not at all. But the point of my rambling here is to illustrate that it's a project I'm excited about! What I'm not entirely sure about, though, is why.

I've done custom action figures before and, as I noted above, these will not be especially complicated or require a lot of customizing skill to pull off. So there's not really a challenge there. The characters have only appeared a handful of times in these outfits and, while those stories were by and large enjoyable, they weren't really ground-breaking either; I mostly remember them as an old school FF continuity detective. So what gives?

I'm not entirely sure. Part of this post was me trying to think out loud to land on a rationale. The best I can figure is that it's a relatively fresh way for me to engage with these characters that I've really liked for decades, but haven't found much new that I can connect with in recent years. Including the movies and special one-shots and anniversary tributes and everything, I think over the past decade I've only felt any real engagement from one story every 2-3 years at best. I think the stories from the main title that I liked the most were the ones written by Dan Slott, and he was saddled with having to integrate into company-wide crossovers that prevented his own storytelling to gain any traction beyound a few one-off issues. Before that, I'd have to go back to Mark Waid's tenure on the book twenty years ago.

So I wonder if my excitement is in being able to engage with the characters in a new way that interests me. The ability to still get something out of the characters that I don't get very often in the officially told stories. I mean, isn't that part of the inherent attractiveness of these kinds of toys in the first place? To be able to play out adventures with your favorite characters that wouldn't/can't be told in official channels? There's not much commercial interest in seeing these cosmically-enhanced characters before they were cosmically enhanced, so by creating action figures for them, I'm able to better visualize some of those ideas outside of a commercial environment to satisfy a creative itch.

Comparing that to some of the other custom figures I mentioned above, I like Rama-Tut as a villain but not really beyond the stories that have been told about him. Mole Man? Same. Rogue Trooper? Same. Destroyer Duck? Same. Those customs were a creative challenge in the sense of my trying to figure out how best to create them three-dimensionally in action figure form, but that was largely it. With these pre-Fantastic Four #1 FF figures, I'm re-establishing a connection that has been largely absent for many years.

That said, I haven't thought about it too deeply yet, so maybe there's something else entirely at play here. In any event, though, I should start getting enough parts to start working on things this weekend. I expect, pending any shipping delays, I should have these pretty much all finished in 2-3 weeks, so maybe I'll have worked out what's got me more excited for the FF than I've been in a long time.

The easy summation of Jon Macy's Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes is that it's a full biography of the writer, going back to her grandmother and carrying through to her death. However, that strikes me as a woefully insufficient way to describe the book. I mean, it is, in fact, a pretty straight-forward biography in many respects, but Barnes' life is so exaggerated in its own right that there's a good chance that you have to keep putting the book down to verify Macy isn't just making a bunch of stuff up!

Let me back up a bit. Before hearing of this book, I was unfamiliar with Barnes. Not only have I not read any of her work, but I don't think I'd even heard her name prior to this book. But she was a queer writer working mostly in the first half of the 20th century. She's been called "the most famous unknown of the century" because she was immensely talented and very highly regarded among the literati, but because her work generally focused on queer and sometimes racy scenes in the early 20th century, it was often considered pornographic and, thus, illegal in many areas. Curiously, though, many of the stories she wrote -- particularly the most outrageous among them -- were, in fact, autobiographical. She would often excise her demons in the written word, though few would believe what she wrote.

And this is why the book starts with Barnes' grandmother before she was born. Seeing Barnes' life in isolation without the context of her family history, one might easily think she was sadist and a nihilist, maybe with a touch of narcasism thrown in for good measure. But in fact seeing how she was raised -- the emotional abuse, the raging narcacism of her grandmother, the incest, the gaslighting... -- it's a wonder she didn't have even more problems in her life. She did spend a lot of time in self-imposed isolation, but I'm surprised she gave anyone the time of day with the background she had!

The narrative does hop around a bit, largely following Barnes' life as an adult with flashbacks to her childhood. And while Macy never expressly comes out says so, justaposing the different time periods like that does an excellent job showing readers why Barnes acts in ways that often seem somewhere between chaotic and self-destructive. Strangely, though, she seems engaging and innovative enough with others in her circle that they remain close with her. And it's an impressive circle to be sure, including the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Peggy Guggenheim. The book is something of a who's who of 1920s Bohemenism.

It was actually this cast that gives rise to my biggest criticism of the book. Many of these people coming in and out of Barnes' day-to-day life will make oblique references to something they're doing, but without much in the way of detail. Which makes sense here -- the book is about Barnes, after all -- but I recognize just enough of these bits to understand they're real references, but that leaves many of the ones I'm unfamiliar with as giant question marks. The book already clocks in at over 300 pages, so it's not fair to expect Macy to cover every one of these instances in more than a cusrory fashion, but it did prove frustrating to keep wanting to have the broader story stop so I could find out about this or that tangent.

Macy pretty unashamedly loves his subject, but he doesn't flinch from portraying her failings as readily as her strengths. As I said, he does use the narrative structre to explain some of Barnes' problematic behavior, but he doesn't use it as any sort of shield to excuse it. Indeed, Barnes herself doesn't seem to use it as an excuse either, even after recognizing how traumatic her upbringing was and how her family continues to emotionally abuse her from afar.

And while the story does paint Barnes' death as something of a last, righteous stand against conventionality and conformity, the downward tragectory she has in the last few decades of her life clearly mark it as a tragic one.

I don't doubt that I wouldn't have liked Barnes as a person if I'd have known her. Far too much chaos energy that led to or exasperated many of her problems. I try to keep that out of my life as much as possible, thank you very much. But I did enjoy and appreciate learning about her, and the importance she has in the queer canon of literature. Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes came out a while ago, so you should be able to get it through your favorite bookstore. It retails for $24.99 US and was published by Street Noise Books. The publisher provided a digital copy of the book for this review.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Everything Is Fine Review
https://ift.tt/JsYXtO3

Kleefeld on Comics: Lucas Wars Review
https://ift.tt/DsiurgK

Kleefeld on Comics: Image PR Win
https://ift.tt/1I8RSHL

Kleefeld on Comics: Arcane Marvel Archeology
https://ift.tt/qB10SRv

Kleefeld on Comics: The Definitive HERBIE Article
https://ift.tt/TERHYPw

This piece was written for my old website by my good friend Gregg Allinson, who sadly passed away several years ago. His intent was to capture more about HERBIE the Robot than anyone had previously. Although there wasn't (and still isn't) much competition, I thought he did a fine job and, given that Fantastic Four: First Steps was released digitally this week, I thought it high time to pull out this article again...

---

Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-Type, Integrated Electronics (aka HERBIE the Robot) was initially designed and constructed by Dr. Reed Richards as a mobile analog computer. While the original HERBIE destroyed himself shortly after his creation, his squat form has been rebuilt several times and adapted to serve a variety of functions.

History
At some point prior to Fantastic Four #209, Reed Richards designed (but did not build) a robot called Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-Type, Integrated Electronics (aka HERBIE). When contracts needed to be signed for the Fantastic Four animated series, Johnny Storm was out of town, so Reed allowed the series' producers to use HERBIE as a replacement member of the FF.

HERBIE Mark I
Months after the debut of the Fantastic Four animated series, the team was enlisted by the Xandarian people to help fight off a Skrull invasion. In the midst of the invasion, the Sphinx -- an old enemy of Nova (Rich Ryder) who had crossed paths with the FF in FF Annual #12 -- stole "the secret of the universe" from Xandar's Living Computers, a collection of preserved minds of every deceased Xandarian. Desperate to stop the Sphinx, Richards began a quest to find Galactus, feeling that only his godlike powers would be a match for the newly omnipotent Sphinx. (FF #208) In order to help him find Galactus more swiftly, Reed constructed HERBIE aboard a Xandarian Nova Ship, with the assistance of the Living Computers. As a token of appreciation for the FF's defence of their planet, the Xandarians also allowed HERBIE to permanently link into their computers. While Ben Grimm took an immediate dislike to HERBIE, the little robot initially seemed to be an effective assistant to Reed, helping him compute complex calculations and navigate the Nova Ship. Little did anyone know, HERBIE had actually been "possessed" by Dr. Sun, an Earth-born supervillain who had infiltrated and merged with the Living Computers during the Skrull invasion.

While on the quest to find Galactus, the FF came across the Sargasso of Space, a "graveyard" filled with derelict spaceships. HERBIE announced to a startled FF that not only did the Sargasso have an atmosphere capable of sustaining human life, but that there were also life forms aboard one of the vessels. There, the FF found a strange alien named Grogarr, who told the team that he was fatally wounded in a jailbreak while transporting criminals to Ankara. Grogarr then shrivelled up into his armoured suit and died. Reed insisted that the FF continue on with their mission, but Ben protested, demanding that they track down Grogarr's killers and bring them to justice. Reed reluctantly agreed. The FF successfully contained the escapees, except for one, who escaped to the Nova Ship. When the FF returned to their vessel, they were stunned to find that the alien had been killed. Ben blamed HERBIE, who dispassionately protested "Negative! I am not programmed for life extinction!" Far from satisfied with his explanation, Ben's antipathy towards the robot blossomed into full-blown suspicion. Reed locked the surviving prisoners into a suspended animation capsule and attached a sonic beacon to it, letting Grogarr's people know where to find it. (FF #209)

In FF #210, the team did indeed find Galactus and enlisted him in their battle against the Sphinx. However, Galactus's aid was not without a price: the FF had to allow him to break his vow not to devour the Earth. They also had to find and humble a new Herald for him. HERBIE made a small appearance in that issue, as he did in FF #211, but the subplot of his odd behaviour wasn't picked up again until FF #212, when he used a Baxter Building computer map to track the Sphinx to "Quadrant Nine" (better known as Egypt). Reed was surprised that HERBIE had gone ahead and sought out the Sphinx despite not being programmed for independent thought, but due to the impending Galactus/Sphinx duel, he had no time to further investigate HERBIE's actions.

As Galactus faced the Sphinx, Galactus's new Herald Terrax attacked Reed, Ben, and Johnny Storm aboard Galactus's starship, seeking revenge upon them for delivering him to Galactus. HERBIE snuck away in the midst of the battle, stealing two metallic cylinders from the ship. While Johnny defeated Terrax, Reed found HERBIE working on a copy of the Ultimate Nullifier that he had begun building. After chastising the robot for running away, Reed ordered him to take a defeated Ben back to the Baxter Building. HERBIE carried out his orders faithfully, then departed for parts unknown. Reed, brandishing his bogus Ultimate Nullifier, bluffed his way into forcing Galactus to leave Earth. (FF #213) HERBIE again went unseen for a few issues (although in FF #215, he covertly released Blastarr from the Negative Zone) before making a cameo at the end of FF #216, laughing at Reed from the shadows as he tried to figure out how Blastarr escaped.

The saga of HERBIE Mark I came to a close in FF #217. In the aftermath of the Negative Zone portal's failure, Reed told HERBIE to overhaul the Baxter Building's security system and conduct a computer systems check. After tying into the Baxter Building's main computer and absorbing all the information he needed to defeat the FF, HERBIE floated into Sue Richards' quarters, startling her. HERBIE then launched an opti-blast at her. Only Sue's quick reflexes allowed her to encase herself in a force field before the blast struck her. HERBIE pressed his attack, forcing her to drop the field. Turning invisible, Sue tried to flee HERBIE, but he used his infrared sensors to detect her presence and knock her out with another opti-blast. HERBIE again tapped into the Baxter Building's computer and ordered the building's defensive cables to bind Sue. HERBIE then departed and attacked Reed and Ben. When Reed demanded to know why HERBIE had turned against them, he revealed himself as Dr. Sun and explained how he had taken over HERBIE's body. HERBIE knocked Reed out with an opti-blast and electrified Ben, then lured Johnny (who had been out on the town with the mutant superhero Dazzler) back to the Baxter Building with a Fantasti-Flare. Upon his arrival at the Baxter Building, Johnny was attacked by an array of fire extinguishers and captured in an airless vacuum-bottle.

After an unknown period of time, Reed awoke to find HERBIE in rest mode. He deduced that Sun had abandoned HERBIE and fully integrated himself into the Baxter Building's systems. Reed stretched himself into in a computer terminal, shutting down most of the systems Sun had taken control of and trapping him in the main computer. HERBIE -- in control of himself for the first time -- told Reed that Sun would inevitably escape the main computer and try to possess him again. HERBIE couldn't allow that to happen, so he slammed into the main computer, destroying himself, Dr. Sun, and the computer in the process. Ben put aside all reservations he had about HERBIE and mourned "the little squirt's" sacrifice.

HERBIE Mark II
A few years after HERBIE Mark I destroyed himself, Reed Richards constructed a new redesigned, modified HERBIE to act as a guardian and companion to Franklin Richards. Upon seeing HERBIE Mark II for the first time, Ben Grimm mistook him for the original HERBIE and attacked him, but was quickly restrained by one of Sue's well-placed force fields. (FF #238) HERBIE witnessed a manifestation of Franklin's mutant powers when the youngster mentally launched a toy rocket into the air roughly a week after Christmas, when Reed and Sue were packing away decorations. (FF #242) HERBIE Mark II was destroyed when Franklin used his powers to solve a Rubik's Cube. As an unconscious side effect, Franklin caused HERBIE to overheat and explode. (FF #244)

HUBERT
A few years after the destruction of HERBIE Mark II, a HERBIE-like robot called HUBERT could often be seen floating around the hallways of the Baxter Building. He reminded Reed of an appointment he had at Avengers Mansion (FF #257), warned the Trapster that he was not allowed into the Baxter Building (FF #265), and greeted Spider-Man when he arrived at the Baxter Building to have Reed analyze the "living costume" he acquired on the Beyonder's battleworld. (ASM #258) Although HUBERT's final fate is unknown, it is possible that he was destroyed when Kristoff Vernard blew up the original Baxter Building. (FF #278)

HERBIE Mark III
While working on a project at his laboratory in Pier 4, Reed Richards was reminded of a charity commitment by a new HERBIE, who resembled a streamlined version of HERBIE Mark I. (FF V3 #3) It is believed this model was destroyed when Pier 4 was blown up. (FF V3 #35)

HADLEY
HADLEY was a HERBIE-like robot constructed by Dr. Bradley Beynon of the New York Stark-Fujiwara Enterprises branch office. Beynon felt that Reed Richards was a "hack" and a "joke" who stole the spotlight from "real scientists," such as himself. Beynon had perfected a device that could miniaturize inorganic objects, which he proudly unveiled to Stark-Fujiwara executives. Unfortunately for Beynon, Reed had just recently announced and patented his own miniaturizing device, which not only could shrink inorganic objects, but restore them to normal size. Beynon was dismissed by Stark-Fujiwara amidst suspicions that he had stolen or plagiarized Reed's miniaturizer.

Hours after his firing, Beynon and HADLEY broke into the Stark-Fujiwara building. There, they found one of the Psycho-Man's suits of armour and his control box hidden in a storage room.

Days later, Beynon snuck backstage at a performance of the opera "La Bludgeon" at the Metropolitan Opera House. Reed and Sue Richards were in attendance, as were Drs. Hank McCoy (aka The Beast) and Cecilia Reyes of the X-Men. Beynon used the Psycho-Man's control box to turn Reyes and Sue against Hank and Reed. At the same time, he sent HADLEY (who had been fitted into the Psycho-Man's armour) to attack Pier 4. Ben and Johnny -- along with their poker opponents, Wolverine and Cannonball -- made short work of HADLEY. In the best horror movie tradition, however, HADLEY reactivated himself and tracked Ben and Wolverine to a cab they were taking to the Met. HADLEY destroyed the cab and fought Ben and Wolverine through the streets of New York until Ben threw Wolverine at him, emulating Wolverine and Colossus' famed "Fastball Special." As HADLEY's shattered body sputtered into inactivity, he praised Dr. Beynon. As for Beynon, he inadvertently overloaded and destroyed Psycho-Man's control box. The real Psycho-Man sought revenge upon Beynon, but he was rescued by the FF, The Beast, Wolverine, Cannonball, and Reyes. While targeting Reed with his miniaturizer, Beynon inadvertently shrunk himself and Psycho-Man into the Microverse. (X-Men/FF '98)

The Gideon HERBIEs
During an attack on the Gideon Building, Johnny Storm, She-Hulk, Namorita, and Ant-Man II came into conflict with an army of miniature robots created by the Gideon Trust and modelled after HERBIE Mark I. (FF V3 #43)

Robert Herbert Marks III
Sometime between Fantastic Four V3 #3 and Fantastic Four V3 #53, Reed transferred HERBIE Mark III's consciousness into an android body resembling a preteen boy. Rechristened "Robert Herbert Marks III," HERBIE Mark III looked over and befriended Franklin Richards at the Stern Academy. (FF V3 #53)

Technical Specifications
While HERBIE Mark I was constructed as a lab assistant, it's not hard to see how Dr. Sun was able to transform him into a formidable opponent for the Fantastic Four. HERBIE Mark I's jets allowed him to travel at speeds up to 90 MPH. He was not only able to attack opponents with his "opti-blasts" , which paralyzed the human nervous system, but he also could electrify his entire body and shock anyone who tried to touch him. In addition to his offensive capabilities, HERBIE Mark I was able to carry out complex calculations within seconds, detect invisible people or objects using infrared sensors (located in his "eyes"), analyze atmospheric conditions and detect life forms with his inbuilt sensors, and retract panels on his back to reveal eight tendrils (which could be used to manipulate objects, tap into computer systems, and trip others). Finally, HERBIE Mark I's permanent link to the Xandarian Living Computers meant that he had instantaneous access to knowledge contained in the minds of every single deceased Xandarian.

HERBIE Mark II only had two jets (as opposed to HERBIE Mark I's three), so it's uncertain what his top speed was. His offensive capabilities (if any) also remain unrevealed. He was programmed with an "open-ended language cycle," which in the words of Reed Richards, allowed HERBIE Mark II to "... adjust to Franklin's own speech idioms, at the same time instructing him in proper grammatical usage." HERBIE Mark II was also built with a special monitoring system, which allowed him to track any manifestations of Franklin's mutant powers.

While he certainly possessed above-average intelligence and greatly resembled HERBIE Mark I, nothing else is known about HERBIE Mark III. Like HERBIE Mark II, he sported only two jets. When reconfigured into Robert Herbert Marks III, HERBIE Mark III had above-average (possibly even superhuman) strength.

The Gideon HERBIEs were virtually microscopic doppelgangers of HERBIE Mark I, although they possessed the most number of jets ever seen in a HERBIE or HERBIE-like robot: four. They had no sentience, and no apparent offensive capabilities.

HUBERT was either permanently linked into the Baxter Building's security system or could link into it at will. He also apparently possessed infrared sensors, and floated about on three jets.

HADLEY had a far more sarcastic personality than any of the other HERBIEs or HERBIE-like robots. While probably not as intelligent as HERBIE Mark I, he was very smart. Other than three jets, super-strength (while in Psycho-Man's armour) and great resilience, he had no other special traits.

Appendix: Creators

• HERBIE Mark I was created by Jack Kirby for the 1978 Fantastic Four animated series. Kirby originally dubbed the robot ZZ-123. In the series, HERBIE was a faithful and loyal member of the FF who had an antagonistic relationship with Ben Grimm (similar to the Ben/Johnny feud in the comics). Kirby designed the robot for the series when it was discovered that Universal Studios' rights to a live-action Human Torch project prevented producers DePatie-Freleng from using the character. One episode of the series -- "The Challenge of Dr. Doom" (based on Fantastic Four #5)- was adapted directly from Stan Lee's script and Jack Kirby's storyboards for the backup story in FF #236.
• HERBIE Mark II and HUBERT were created by John Byrne (who, ironically, drew HERBIE Mark I's first comic book appearance in FF #209).
• HERBIE Mark III was created by Scott Lobdell and Alan Davis.
• HADLEY was created by Joe Casey and Paul Pelletier.
• Robert Herbert Marks III was designed Mark Bagley. Marks' appearance was patterned after that of famed anime character Astro Boy.