Will Magus' and Herbert Crawford's Metal Men were either malevolent machines or menacing mechanisms. On Earth-One, Magus developed his Responsometers which stored personalities within the malleable metallic frames of his Metal Men, originally developed to assist the United States government and later the world in combating various threats, both those originating from their own planet as well as those arriving from outerspace.
On Earth-Two, Crawford developed a means to communicate with an extraterrestrial metallic horde from Jupiter-Two, luring them to his world where solar rays enlarged these Metal Men. Magus designed his artificially produced Metal Men based on the metals of gold, lead, iron, mercury, platinum and tin. Crawford's alien Metal Men replicated the metals of gold, silver, iron, magnesium and copper (another form of Metal Men remained on an alternate Jupiter that Starman once visited).
While the Mangus Metal Men had dozens of adventures as protectors, the Crawford Metal Men only had one notable appearance opposing the Justice Society of America. However, while the original five robot men of Gold, Iron, Lead, Copper, Mercury and their lady robot Platinum were all destroyed after their debut, Mangus rebuilt them and would continue to each time they were destroyed. The later models proved structurally superior to the originals he built.
Besides the original Metal Men, either a maddened Mangus or a robotic duplicate of his spawned other malevolent mechanized men, These included the Robots of Terror aka the "New Metal Men", consisting of Barium, Aluminum, Calcium, Zirconium, Sodium, and Plutonium. Shortly after, the Gas Gang is unleashed on the world, consisting of Oxygen, Helium, Chloroform, Carbon Monoxide, and Carbon Dioxide. Then there was the most notable Metal Men clones, the Metal Women!
While these various versions of the Metal Men co-existed, so too were multiple copies of the Jovian Metal Men on Earth-Two, consisting of at least four of each metal: Gold, Cooper, Silver, Iron, Magnesium, and Metal-X. All these quartets save the Metal-X men were destroyed during their battle with the Justice Society.
The Metal Women consisted of five female counterparts and a male counterpart of the Metal Men created to be love interests for their opposite numbers. The five Metal Women tragically had their synthetic lives cut short during their first adventure, with only the sole male member Platinum Man remaining functional. He would reappear years later, seeking revenge against the Metal Men while entrapping the honorary Metal Men femme-bot known as "Nameless". Batman and the Metal Men defeated Platinum Man and his robotic minions, while the object of his... and Metal Man Tin's... affection perished protecting them.
On occasion, the Metal Men even transformed into various vehicles, which mirrored those automated entities who took the place of Crawford's Metal Men. These were the vehicles Goitrude, Black Widow, Sand-Car, Atomobile, Esmerelda and the Doll-Plane... driven by Green Lantern's pal Doiby Dickles, the Spider, Sandman, Atom, Wonder Woman's friend Etta Candy and the Doll Man. Sometimes these mechanisms, such as Goitrude and its former host vehicle Esmerelda displayed sentience, while others such as the Doll-Plane and Black Widow were at times self-piloting vessels. Some had metamorphic properties, such as the Sand-Car and Atomobile.
The Metal Men of Earth-One had scores of adventures handling a wide-range of threats, both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial. The Jovian Metal Horde only had a single case with the majority of their members versus the Justice Society on Earth-Two, while the aforementioned vehicles had rendered valuable assistance to their human masters in dozens of cases throughout the years.
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