Tales to Astonish #42
In *Tales to Astonish* #42, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko deliver a haunting tale of identity and alienation in "The Voice of Doom!"—a robot, crafted with human guise, flees his creator’s lab seeking belonging among people, only to confront the cruelty and indifference he finds. As his artificial face and clothes become a burden, he faces a quiet reckoning that challenges the very idea of what it means to be human. The story’s chilling final exchange, rendered with Ditko’s signature precision and Kirby’s iconic cover art, lingers long after the last panel.
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A humanoid robot escapes his creator's lab with an artificial face and clothes in order to live among humans as a man. He is so disillusioned with human beings inhumanity to their fellows that he removes the mask and allows his creator to bring him back to the lab. His maker says to him "You must have known you could never have passed for human for long." to which the robot replies to the startled engineer "Has the thought never occurred to you that no robot would want to?"
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).