"Grrrr! Bad men! I kill!"
Eerie #11, published in 1953 by Avon Periodicals, featured four stories, but the last one, the only one not mentioned on the cover, is of special note. Titled “Robot Model L2 — Failure!” it details how, “during the years of the Martian war,” the Supreme Commander of Earth required a robot for guard duty:
Darrow, the bearded roboticist, builds L2, a fierce robot whose only desire was to kill Martians:
A brief aside…even if the robot was designed to just kill Martians, would you really want something like this roaming around outside your home at night?
Anyway, as it turns out, there’s a human turncoat named Garond just itching to sell out…um, the panel says “his country,” but surely they mean “his planet?” Why would selling out his country make him Earth president?
It doesn’t matter, he’s clearly a bad egg, and he goes into the action the next day, rooting around in the private rooms of a scientist and his granddaughter looking for secret formulas or some such thing. The scientist catches him in the act, discovering that Garond’s a spy. Garond kills him, then kills the granddaughter who happens upon the scene.
At this point, L2, hearing the cries for help, enters the scene as Garond is wringing the last bit of life out of the granddaughter. L2 pursues Garond outside, and, clutched together in their struggles, they both tumble off a cliff to their destruction:
The authorities happen upon the bodies of Garond and L2, and, since no one knew that Garond was a traitor, the Supreme Commander assumes that L2 went berserk and killed all three of these people. And that leads to this final panel:
Yes, the ethereal presence of L2’s spirit looms over the proceedings, despairing in the humans’ misinterpretation of events! That’s right…it’s a robot’s ghost. The caption in the above panel pays some lip service to the absurdity of “the phantom of a smashed piece of machinery”…but by God, that’s the ghost of a robot drawn there, and I’m not going to have some wishy-washy caption tell me any different. I mean, just look at that.
As a special bonus, I provide you with this telling panel from one of the other stories in this issue:
I’ve certainly never seen a chart with such detail. Have you?
