Machine Man continues his battle with Ten-For, who runs out to be craftier than expected, fooling the army into thinking he’s peaceful and Machine Man is violent while waiting for his invasion fleet to arrive. MM gives up on humanity thanks to this ploy, and then ends up as a costume party. Very strange stuff.

Meanwhile, the Autocron fleet gets the message from Ten-For and prepares for their invasion.

Bit of an odd-layout on pages 2-3. They’re meant to be read as a two page spread, but without any of the usual visual cues except a really small unclear arrow, so you almost invariably read the panels in the wrong order. I wonder if part of this was originally meant to be a two-page spread, but then shrunk down and reformatted. Doesn’t seem likely, as the 17-page story length had been standard for quite a while at this point (shrinking page counts had led to such reformatting in some other 1970s work, like an issue of OMAC).

Mike Royer inks the 17-page story, Klaus Janson inks the cover and Kirby writes a text page, “Would You Like a Machine to Fight Your Battles?”.

Published 1978