Bozo the Iron Man
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Hugh Hazzard and his Robot, Bozo the Iron Man was a fictional character featured in issues 1-42 of the Smash Comics comic book from Quality Comics. Hugh Hazard's adventures were written and crudely drawn by Quality Comics editor George Brenner. Bozo was featured on the cover of issue #1, the first robot cover of a comic book.
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[edit] Bozo's Origin and History
In the first installment, the origin story, Hugh Hazard is a suit and fedora clad man with connections to a large city police department. He is involved in the investigation of crimes committed by a mysterious robot. Hugh manages to temporarily deactivate the robot, and climbs inside its hollow chest to hitch a ride to the robot's home base, which turns out to be the laboratory of an evil scientist, who dies in the ensuing battle. The robot is again deactivated, and placed on a garbage scow for disposal at sea, but Hugh Hazard has ideas of using the robot as a crime-fighting tool. He saves the robot from its watery fate, then names the robot Bozo.
In the next installment, Hazard is shown examining the robot's blueprints, and stating that the robot can be modified to fly. The modified robot, shown flying with a spinning propeller on its head, is again used to foil a crime. Flying would be a part of all subsequent appearances.
After the pattern of the first adventure, Hugh Hazard tended to encounter criminals committing crimes with scientific gadgetry, and these criminals tended to become the victims of their own weapons.
In 1956, Quality Comics characters were sold to DC Comics. Quality's Blackhawks continued to be published without interruption, but most of their other characters languished. While most of the classic Quality superheroes saw print again many years later, Hugh Hazard has not returned. A robot resembling Bozo did make a single-panel appearance in an issue of James Robinson's Starman, where the inactive robot was in a store-room with a Japanese collector's horde of Golden Age superhero artifacts.
[edit] The Forerunner of Mecha
Hugh Hazard has a walkie-talkie-like radio that he uses to vocally summon Bozo the Robot, who is sometimes shown standing in a grove of trees when he receives his radio summons. In later stories, Hugh Hazard would have adventures riding inside the robot, with his voice emanating from the mute robot's grinning mouth. The robot is shown as human-size in these stories, as if it were a suit of armor. This depiction of the character resembles the Marvel Comics Iron Man character that would debut 24 years later, and anticipates the emergence of the Mecha genre in Japanese manga and anime.
[edit] Bozo's inspirations
1939 was the year of the New York World's Fair, which featured Westinghouse's Elektro robot. This was the major event of the year in New York, and it is likely that George Brenner and most other people involved in New York based comic book industry attended the event. Elektro was well remembered by fair attendees, and could have inspired Brenner to make a robot the star of a comic book feature. Bozo even shares a design element with electro, a round glass porthole on the chest, which exposes internal circuitry.
That year also saw the release of the movie serial The Phantom Creeps, in which Bela Lugosi portrays an evil scientist that uses a robot and other fantastic scientific devices to take revenge on the world for his wife's death. An earlier serial, 1935's science fiction western The Phantom Empire, contained a sequence in which two comedic gangsters wear the shells of deactivated robots to infiltrate a futuristic city. These two serial films contain the story elements of the first Hugh Hazard adventure.
[edit] Character update
In an 2007 interview on Newsarama, Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti discussed the character concepts from DC's recent Freedom Fighters series. It was revealed by Mr. Gray that the character concept for the villain Gonzo the Mechanical Bastard was derived from a character proposal by Grant Morrison, which was to have been an update of Bozo. The final Gonzo character eventually became something very different; an android that could impersonate and replace a world leader.
