Metal Men, Slight Return

I want to make a small amendment to the previous entry. I stated that the story in Metal Men #45 was originally slated for First Issue Special. This may be true, and my gut instinct is that FIS was its original destination. However, the Metal Men were mentioned in the letter column of Super-Team Family #1 as making an appearance in #3 of that series. No creative team was listed there, but the Gerber/Simonson pairing gets the nod in #2's letter column when it is revealed that the rambunctious robots won't be in S-T Family after all because of their impending return in their own comic.

And since someone asked me about this, here's a sample of the negative reaction elicited by the 1970s Metal Men series from one Dave Blanchard :

METAL MEN #49 proved to be useful; it was a prime example of the worst type of hack-writing to ever be implemented between the covers of a four-color comic. If ever there was one single issue that could represent the bottom-of-the-barrel sort of comic, this is it. For the first time EVER, I was actually repulsed by a comic.

[...]

Pasko has missed the good boat. Pasko should be removed from the METAL MEN. Pasko is no good. Stop this stream of sewage immediately. Now.

These selected quotes from a letter appearing in Metal Men #51, though his missive in #52 wasn't a whole lot happier.

By the by, I'm pretty sure Dave Blanchard is still a voice on the comics internet, so there's a good chance he might show up here someday. Hi Dave! I hope you don't mind me digging up a critique that's over 30 years old!

(And to Marty Pasko, I liked your issues way more than Dave did.)