From the letter column for Star Spangled War Stories #126 (April-May 1966):
“RK” being “Robert Kanigher,” natch. (Fake letter run to help dissuade similar letters from pouring in, or real reader comment pulled out and used as a lesson in what editors don’t want to see? No idea.)
From the same issue, an in-house ad that, I can only assume, resulted in the highest sales ever for any issue of Metal Men:
I vote “hotcha.” I mean, who doesn’t like hotcha?
Hotcha as in “hotcha-cha-cha”?
That letter sounds a lot like some people I know it’s scary.
Mid-sixties DC in excelsis. Escalating war in Vietnam, the psychedelic era a-borning and near-revolution in Paris just around the corner, and DC editorial think “hotcha”, a term that would have been mocked as outmoded in an Andy Hardy movie, is the word on the street.
Yeah, I wrote that letter when I was in London. REALLY needed to know about tonnage.
I googled “hotcha” just to see if it was really being used, you know, correctly, and this was the first result:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotCha
I dunno-it’s kinda funnier thinking the centaur likes a Chinese pop group, actually.
I really need to start buying whats been collected of Metal Men, damn my poverty!
Misleading cover! The centaur wasn’t really a robot. (Although he was giant.)
(SPOILER ALERT)
At the end of the story Doc Magnus builds the centaur a robot girlfriend.
That’s right — Doc builds sex toys.
This takes me back to my days as a he-pimp and my stable of rentboys. Hard but rewarding work. Why, there was this time in Norfolk, Virginia, when–
Oh, wait. Man-HORSE?
Never mind.
Imaginary conversation brought to mind by Harvey’s comment:
“You were where?…In jail?… What happened?… You were with an ensign in Ocean View and… I don’t wanna hear any more!”