Barry Windsor-Smith plotted, drew and I believe largely colored a mini-series revival of a late Jack Kirby creation with which Marvel had failed to get a publishing hit. The sensibilities of a new generation, and probably some influence from the release of the movie Blade Runner, inspired the fabled Conan the Barbarian artist to bring his delicate, detailed line. I love how the story's colored cinematically. It's a story of one anachronistic marvel, awake in a world that left him for deactivated scrap, who identifies with marginalized, communal rebels. They risk their lives to survive in the capitalist wasteland of surgical video gamers and patrols of droids who terminate with prejudice. And the head of the company whose scrapyards they pick over? The woman who had Machine Man deactivated, decades before: Sunset Bain. Here's a link to my Tik Toks on Machine Man: @cecildisharoon AI gets out of the box: the retrofuturistic Machine Man (Barry Windsor-Smith art)

Forgetting is the curse of the Man-Thing...and sometimes, his only blessing. But I haven’t forgotten the Man-Thing. He may be a character you say haunts you. It’s those stories! Man-Thing is the rarest sort of protagonist, in that he is chiefly an unobserved observer, until he tries to intervene and scares the carp out of the water. In 1971, he debuted in a Marvel Comics experiment with adult material, in the form of black and white magazines. SAVAGE TALES #1 features the ill fate of chemist Ted Sallis, betrayed by his lover into the hands of terrorists who want his secret: the new Super Soldier Formula, in the manner of that which once transformed Private Steve Rogers into the apex of human fitness, Captain America. But something there in the swamp works with this imperfect formula, to render Sallis senseless, recreated as a shambling, muck-based mockery of humanity. The experiment didn’t continue, but the Man-Thing, created by Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow, came back a couple