Jolted by Jack O'Lantern!

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Happy July 1985, everybody!!!
Jolted by Jack O'Lantern!
Publisher	Marvel Comics
Published in	The Transformers issue 22 issue 23 issue 24 issue 25
First published	13th July, 1985 (part 1) 27th July, 1985 (part 2) 10th August, 1985 (part 3) 24th August, 1985 (part 4)
Writer	Tom DeFalco
Artist	Steve Ditko
Colours	Nel Yomtov
Letters	Diana Albers
Editor	Dennis O'Neil
Editor-in-chief	Jim Shooter

Machine Man tries to fight the fate of all X-series robots, but the kid gloves have to come off when he faces a sinister supervillain.

Synopsis

Part 1

Machine Man returns to the workshop of Gears Garvin, his humanised face still disfigured following his encounter with Madam Menace and Alpha Flight. Though Gears' speciality is the inside of machines, he reckons he can fix up the face with some fibreglass and putty, but it'll take a few hours. Aaron dons his hat and coat to get some fresh air, and Peter Spaulding offers to join him, but he is rebuffed. The worried Peter tells Gears that he hasn't seen Aaron so anxious and withdrawn. As Aaron walks, he considers how his upbringing by Dr. Abel Stack prevented him from facing the fate of the fifty other robots in the X series; without the watchful eye of his programmer, will Aaron too succumb to vengeful violence as a result of his constant rejection by humanity?

Across town, in a run-down athletic centre, Geoff Peckman complains to his fellow gangsters that their boss hasn't sent them on a caper in months, and they can't keep spinning their wheels with readiness drills. They are interrupted by the sudden arrival of the blood-curdling Jack O'Lantern. The fright-faced fiend hazes his new recruits by baiting them into all fighting him at once, but his pogo-platform, gas grenades, and lack of a sense of fair play see the men overcome. Having shown them who's boss, Jack O'Lantern begins to tell of a new scheme that will make them millions...

Early the next morning, and with some trepidation, Aaron dons his repaired face. Gears advises him that the putty hasn't yet hardened, but Aaron intends only to do his office duties at his day job – though Peter is sceptical that he should return in his current mental state.

At Delmar Insurance, a frantic Eddie Harris calls Aaron into an emergency meeting held by their boss, Byron J. Benjamin. Benjamin explains that their people have developed a new prototypical super-embassy – a heavily fortified building with automated defence systems capable of protecting its high-profile occupants from terrorist attacks. The embassy will go on the international market the following week, on October 31, and Delmar will sponsor a Halloween costume party inside it for visiting foreign diplomats. Pamela Quinn's mind is elsewhere, as she wonders why Aaron has not been responding to her advances... while Aaron himself thinks about how she deserves a man of flesh and blood rather than metal. As the meeting closes, Benjamin asks Aaron to personally ensure nothing goes wrong with the super-embassy's opening, Aaron picking up on the subtext that he wants Machine Man at the ready.

On the day of the ball, Aaron is given a tour of the super-embassy by one of its head staff members. Aaron is amazed that a singular computer system controls everything on site, but is concerned by the large bulkhead doors that automatically slide down at the first sign of danger. When he tells his guide that such a safeguard would also trap the diplomats and staff inside, he is told that tranquilising gas would be pumped into every room to subdue any invaders. After his tour is concluded, Aaron leaves the super-embassy, impressed by its level of technology and protection but nonetheless dismayed that such a building is necessary. His ruminations are interrupted after he passes a man with a camera whom he recognises as the notorious gangster Geoff Peckman, who is happily snapping pictures of the super-embassy...

Part 2

Suspecting foul play, Aaron discreetly negates gravity and dives into the upper reaches of a nearby tree to change into Machine Man. Peckman begins to leave the scene, so Machine Man magnetises his hand to the roof of the gangster's car and tails him by being dragged along like a kite. Peckman drives to the athletic centre and presents his photos to Jack O'Lantern, who congratulates his reconnaissance.

Observing the scene through a skylight, Machine Man is keen avoid action, lest he be agitated into once again losing control. Before he can contact the authorities, the roof gives way under his vast weight, and he drops into the gym below. Jack O'Lantern gives his men the order to kill him. Though under attack by athletics equipment, Machine Man tries to keep his temper by ending the battle efficiently, wrapping up his foes in a gym mat.

Jack O'Lantern is impressed by the interloper's win over his brutal henchmen. Though he craves the excitement of taking on such a formidable foe, he has a standing appointment at the super-embassy that evening. Jack bounces around on his pogo-platform and gets the drop on Machine Man with his wrist-blaster, throwing the living robot through the wall into a changing room.

Caught off guard by the strength of his attacker, Machine Man takes a moment to monitor himself and keep calm... but, catching his reflection in a mirror, he realises that his face has once again been damaged in battle. He feels the tension build within him, and the desire to go berserk. It is only through sheer force of willpower that he remains in control of his temper.

Machine Man returns to find that Jack O'Lantern and his men have fled. Despite catching sight of an escaping truck, he is unable to trace it. The robot's woes are many: a terrorist with unknown plans for the super-embassy, a face that can't be fixed in time for its grand opening, and the threat of bloodthirsty blackouts still with an undetermined cause...

Part 3

Peter paces his apartment, concerned that the party at the embassy is less than an hour away and they've yet to hear from Aaron. Gears is certain that Aaron is made of stern stuff, but Peter again blows up that Aaron is a person, not just a machine.

Elsewhere, Machine Man concludes that his blackouts are the result of a malfunction in his cerebral cortex. If it cannot be fixed, he reasons that sooner or later he must lay down his life rather than become a rampaging monster. But before he faces his fate, he has unfinished business...

Aaron arrives at the super-embassy after the party has already started. In his civvies, with a disfigured face, and with no time to pick up a costume, Aaron approaches a pair of young trick-or-treaters for a quick fix. One bribe later, Aaron enters the costume party wearing a rubber superhero mask. He meets with his colleagues from Delmar, who quickly overwhelm him with talk of concern and betting and his lacking outfit. Maggie Jones in particular is unimpressed with his mask, and pulls it off despite Aaron's protestations. The gang stares... and then laughs; as Maggie puts it, beneath one "man of steel" mask lies another. Aaron is agog that they think his true, irreducible appearance is a costume.

Elsewhere, Jack O'Lantern and his men enter the super-embassy using tickets purchased from a country too poor to send their own ambassadors. As Jack planned, the embassy's personnel are eager to show off the finer points of the security system to prospective buyers, so he and his disguised freebooters are taken on a tour. Aaron clocks them through the crowd, and snubs Pamela's offer of a dance to try and pursue them.

In the security centre, Jack and his men knock out its operators with gas, seizing control of the embassy. On Jack's command, thick bulkhead doors seal and partition the building, giving him 724 valuable hostages. Aaron is trapped alone in a corridor, immune to the mercenaries' knockout gas, and makes to directly interface with the embassy's computer systems by an access port inside a wall. In the control centre, Peckman informs Jack O'Lantern of a disturbance in the corridor, and the villain heads out to investigate... just as Machine Man strains to overload the computer in an attempt to unsecure the embassy!

Part 4

Machine Man removes his finger attachment from the wall just in time for Jack O'Lantern's attack. He proves immune to the mercenary's smoke grenade, and goes on the offensive by loosening the couplings of his body to windmill both his limbs and himself. Jack's freebooters prove easy to subdue, but Machine Man must still take on the villain himself while still maintaining his composure. Jack O'Lantern tries to escape down the corridors on his pogo platform, using his wrist-blaster and concussion grenades to try and fend off the living robot.

Jack O'Lantern burns through a wall into a ballroom full of startled partygoers whom he intends to exchange for his freedom. With no sign of his opponent slowing down, Jack threatens to toss a grenade into the crowd to get Machine Man to back off. Machine Man can tell he isn't bluffing. He takes his only option, generating a highly-charged magnetic field. Jack is contained, but his suit is insulated against this kind of attack – but his concussion bomb is not, and he is engulfed in its controlled explosion. The macabre mercenary is down and out, unharmed thanks to his suit, as Machine Man had calculated. Reasoning that Jack's men will surrender without their ringleader, he makes to leave before he has to explain to his Delmar colleagues why his face looks like Aaron's "party mask". The esteemed party guests watch him leave in stony silence, making no attempts to show gratitude to their mechanical saviour.

Machine Man meets up with Peter and Gears at Garvin's Garage, where the latter takes a look inside his head. What he finds is a mess of blown circuits and tangled wires; using his intuition with machinery, Gears spends nine hours operating on Aaron like a trained computer specialist. Aaron is overjoyed to be fixed up as good as new. When Aaron asks about Delmar, Peter informs him that Jack O'Lantern was captured and made international headlines, and that Byron Benjamin has had the super-embassy back to the drawing board.

His "final" duty complete, Aaron decides to take a leave of absence from his office job, telling Gears to take as much time as he needs to repair his face. With a new outlook on life and the world as his oyster, Aaron plans to discover everything he can about the wonders around him. Looking out to the city skyline, he tells his friends that he has the rest of his life to figure out his future... and he intends to be around for a long, long time.

The End?

Featured characters

Regular cast	Antagonists	Incidentals
Aaron Stack/Machine Man Gears Garvin Peter Spaulding Abel Stack (flashback) Delmar Insurance Eddie Harris Byron J. Benjamin Maggie Jones Brock Jones Pamela Quinn	Jack O'Lantern Jack O'Lantern's freebooters Geoff Peckman A military personnel (flashback)	An X series robot (flashback) Super-embassy personnel Trick-or-treaters Foreign dignitaries

Quotes

"Amazing! You look wonderful!"

—Peter's perfectly heterosexual response to Aaron's repaired face.

(Computerization has made astounding advances since the days when I was but a gleam in my programmer's eye!)

—Aaron takes a tour of the super-embassy.

"He'll never realize he's dragging a non-paying passenger! Of course, it'll be instant embarrassment if he drives into an underpass with a low clearance!"

—Machine Man, while negating gravity high above Peckman's car.

Pamela: "Aaron, we've been waiting for you!"
Maggie: "Speak for yourself, Cinderella! Now that he's here, this party'll become about as exciting as a trip to the orthodontist."

"Only fools and idealists fight on... when the cause is lost! A true mercenary knows when to find the back door!"

—Wisdom from Jack O'Lantern.

"Though dazed and numbed by fear, these people realize... that Machine Man risked his all... in their defense! Yet no one offers a word of thanks, a gesture of gratitude... No one even tries... And that is the sharpest slap of all!!!"

—The (melo)dramatic narration.

"I have so much yet to learn, to experience... in a world that's so gigantic... so filled with infinite wonders! I'll just take my chances as I've always done! I'm in no hurry to commit myself... I intend to be around for a long... long time!"

—Machine Man has a new lease on life.

Notes

Jolted by Jack O'Lantern! on Marvel Database, an external wiki

Machine Man returns after being absent from issue 21. The fourth and final part was accompanied by the text feature "The New Machine Man".

Original printing

• Machine Man (vol 1) issue 19, February 1981

The cover of the U.S. printing advertises this as a "Complete-your-collection special!", clarifying underneath "(Or, guess what mag won't have a 20th issue.)"

Crazy credits

Signing off in inimitable Marvel style, the story lists the credits as follows:

• Tom DeFalco: wondrous writing
• Steve Ditko: astounding artwork
• Diana Albers: colossal calligraphy
• Nel Yomtov: captivating colour
• Dennis O'Neil: electrifying editing
• Jim Shooter: penny pinching paychecks
• Irving Forbush: soul & inspiration

Edits

• The fifth, sixth, and seventh pages of part 1 are printed in black and white.
• In its original U.S. printing, the opening splash page featured the book's legal indicia. Typically, TFUK has obscured this by covering it with patterned textures, but this issue takes a different tack, adding extra-thick gutters between the opening spiel ("This is the story of X-51..."), the credits, and the main image. Unintentionally or otherwise, this removes the opening narration: "This is it, true believer! The cataclysmic climax to our mechanical misfit's charismatic career! Beware of all-out action, prodigious pathos, and the mightiest of Marvel merriment as Machine Man is..." leading into the title, "Jolted by Jack O'Lantern!".
• Nel Yomtov's "Captivating colors" credit is changed to "Captivating colour".
• The establishing scene of the "run-down athletic center" changes the latter word to "centre"; this happens again on the second page of part 2.
• On page four, "maneuvers" is changed to "manoeuvres", "armor" to "armour", and "mold" to "mould".
• The first page of part 2 is in black and white.
• On the third page of part 2, "favor" becomes "favour". On the next page, "manuever" (a misspelling!) becomes "manoeuvre".
• The fourth page of part 3 is in black and white.
• On the first page of part 3, a "Sometime later..." caption is completely removed. The top of Peter's speech bubble, which overlapped with the caption, is squared off, and the remaining space is painted orange to match the background.
• On the same page, a caption citing Abel Stack's death by bomb to have taken place in 2001, A Space Odyssey issue 8  is removed. The resulting space is painted yellow, and somebody has even gone to the extra length of inking in more of the explosion to fill it in!
• On the third page of part 3, Jack O'Lantern asks for a tour of the "security centre", rather than the "security center".
• The first, fourth, and fifth pages of part 4 are in black and white.
• On the second page of part 4, we get yet another "maneuver" into "manoeuvre".
• In the U.S. version, a caption has Dennis (O'Neil) note that the accident that scarred Machine Man's face and really jobbed him took place in the previous issue. TFUK removes this caption, and fills the space by continuing the artwork and drawing in more of Machine Man's head.
• We've not mentioned before, but every Marvel U.S. reprint published thus far has made the effort to remove the page numbers, which typically appeared in little circles in the bottom corner of each page. It's notable here because the final page not only removes the number, but also the original cursive "The End" text next to it, replacing both with a slightly larger "The End?" in reference to the imminent printing of the second volume.

Artwork and technical errors

• U.S. spellings to creep through include "paychecks" (in the credits), "fiberglass", "computerized" (thrice), "civilized", "marvelous", "computerization", "immobilizing", "tranquilizing", "magnetizing", "realize" (twice), "transistorized", "stabilize", "molded", "analyzing", and "realized".
• As Aaron leaves Gears' workshop, Peter's thought bubble misspells his name as "Arron".
• On the second page of part 2, "Meanwhile, on the athletic center's roof..." is altered to "Meanwhile, on the athletic centres roof...", fixing the spelling but ruining the punctuation.
• In part 3, the re-lettering of Jack's request to tour the security centre omits any closing punctuation – but in the unedited U.S. printing, it was an erroneous exclamation mark rather than a question mark anyway.
• At the end of part 3, the back of Aaron's head is coloured maroon like his Machine Man suit, although at this point it should be silver for his exposed head.
• As Jack and Machine Man's fight takes them through a wall into the ballroom, one of the foreign dignitaries shouts out in Arabic. Well, sort of, as the letters aren't quite fully formed. Google's various OCR systems render it as "تا الله علم حسن", meaning something like "God knows best", so it was likely intended as a similar invocation to the other guy's "Madre de dios!"... but the second word is an alif short of actually saying "Allah". They were close, but no sitar.

Continuity errors

• Aaron refers to Dr. Abel Stack formally and in a detached way, when "Introducing Machine Man" made it clear he referred to him in familial, paternal terms.
• If the computer system of the super-embassy monitors "every square inch of the grounds", exactly how far away did Aaron have to go before he could safely change into Machine Man?
• And not to be CinemaSins, but neither Peckman nor any onlookers ever noticed Machine Man floating above his car?
• When Machine Man collapses through the roof of the athletics centre, he gives his weight as 850 pounds. That's only ten percent of the weight he claimed to have in "Alone Against Alpha Flight!" which was 8501 pounds!
• Aaron concludes that his cerebral cortex is failing; Gears takes a look and discovers that the damage sustained to his head in "Alone Against Alpha Flight!" has been causing his raging blackouts. After Gears fixes him up, Aaron has a new lease on life... despite a) the attribution of his berserker periods to the damage to his head completely ignores the underlying possibility that his X series programming may one day cause him to go mad and b) the fact that he had a whole number of hot-tempered freakouts in "Where Walk the Gods!" and "Arms and the Robot!", both of which predate the dings to his bonce!

Continuity notes

• Is it ambiguous how much time has passed between the previous story and this one, though we pick up with Aaron's face still disfigured as it was in the closing moments of "Alone Against Alpha Flight!". He returns to work (late) the following day, and a time skip takes us to Halloween, later in the week. Most of the action takes place on the same day, with Aaron undergoing a nine-hour open brain surgical operation towards the story's conclusion.
• Machine Man recounts his origin story, including some illustrations of the events of "Introducing Machine Man". We explicitly find out that he became aware of Abel's death, something that has been only implied since "Where Walk the Gods!".
  • The artwork in these illustrations borrows heavily from 2001 issue 8;  the first illustration references artwork of a soldier with a flamethrower and of X-35's death, and the second references the panel of Abel removing the explosive, rather than Ditko's rendition of the same scene from "Introducing Machine Man".
• Aaron was nearly introduced to Brock Jones back in "Byte of the Binary Bug!" before being interrupted.
• Machine Man hides his civilian clothes in the hollow sections of his legs, as established in "Baron Brimstone and his Sinister Satan Squad!".
• When Aaron is late contacting Peter, Gears suggests that he might have been grabbed by some hobgoblins, which is pretty funny given Jack O'Lantern's later criminal career. 

Real-life references

• After Machine Man takes down the freebooters at the old athletic centre, he tells them they're lucky he's a softer touch than Spider-Man.
• The two trick-or-treaters are dressed as Batman and Superman. Neither is named in dialogue, though on unmasking Aaron, Maggie quips that "Beneath one man of steel was another!"
• A party guest is dressed as Archie Andrews.
• Maggie calls Pam "Cinderella".
• The "NEXT:" caption at the end of part 3 is "BALLROOM BLITZ!".
• Gears says he'll bet his Harley against a Tonka truck.