Number 1568: Mekano — a wonder, not a marvel

Mekano (not the X-Men villain of the seventies) was a one-shot character appearing in Wonder Comics #1. Mekano, a large robot, falls in love with a human woman, Sandra,* after doing a bash job on some Nazis. The story is drawn by Bob Oksner, who in 1964 would draw this lovestruck robot:

Robots in love would have some real problems, so maybe it’s a good thing for Sandra that Mekano didn’t appear again. Do robots have fantasies? We are assured in a caption on page three that although this story is fantasy, so once were airplanes and telephones, and that currently “great scientists are working with mechanical men.” **

From Wonder Comics #1 (1944):

*A spoiler, since it is discovered in the next-to-last panel. Sorry.

**And a fine job those great scientists did, too, as evidenced by this picture of my personal robot, Isaac. He is shown here attending to me in the fifties when I was a boy. I wish I still had Isaac, but in the early sixties I traded him for the down payment on a used car.