Advancing age helps you appreciate the appeal of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent NoMan.
In the first issue of Tower Comics’ T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (Nov. 1965), aged Dr. Anthony Dunn is confined to a wheelchair, dying, when he perfects a way out of the universal human dilemma.
“He spent the last few years of his normal life working on replaceable androids into which he could transfer his mind, and succeeded just in time — the very moment he died, he entered the body of the first of them,” noted comics historian Don Markstein.
“He may have been the most unlikely alter ego ever considered for a superhero,” observed comics historian Lou Mougin.
Fawcett’s Captain Marvel had provided children with the wish fulfillment of being instantly transformed into a superhuman adult. NoMan reversed the fantasy. Not merely reinvigorated and stronger than human, Dunn was now arguably immortal.
“Once free of his human shell, he was able to transfer instantaneously from one android body to another, thus becoming effectively immortal as long as the androids held out — and though the androids were expensive, he worked for a government agency with vast funding, so that could be a very long time indeed,” noted Markstein.
“Having become stronger and more agile than most humans, NoMan (so called because he considered himself no longer a man) was eligible for work as a field operative; and when T.H.U.N.D.E.R. started handing out devices to turn a few of its agents into superheroes, he received a cloak of invisibility. While his android bodies were expendable, the cloak, a unique prototype rescued from the laboratory of a dead scientist, was not, which often put him in the position of having to retrieve it from his own corpse.”
In terms of the team dynamic, this stealthy superhero played Batman to Dynamo’s Superman. But NoMan also shared something of the vibe of the Spectre — an eerie-looking cloaked figure who could become invisible. He was even dead, at least technically.
“T.H.U.N.D.E.R.’s synthetic superhero was the least derivative of the entire lot,” Mougin noted. “Naturally, the gimmick of placing a human mind in an artificial body had been around at least as long as Frankenstein, and had a clear pair of genre antecedents in DC’s two versions of Robotman, but NoMan was clearly not a copy. And he soon gained the best characterization of the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. cabal as writers began to play up the psychic crisis of adjusting to life in a non-human body. (Oddly enough, nobody in the series except NoMan seemed to notice the difference! To Dynamo, Menthor and Lightning, he was just ‘one of the boys.’)”
Marvel and DC would follow up with angst-ridden android superheroes of their own — the Vision and Red Tornado. By the time they debuted in 1968, NoMan was just about to really disappear, along with the rest of Tower Comics.
About Author
