(Smash Comics 001, 1939)
We open on a city (later established as almost certainly NYC) in the grip of terror. A robot known as the Iron Monster is wantonly robbing and murdering and also stealing one or more babies for reasons that are never made clear. Seriously, we never find out what the deal was with those babies.
The Iron Monster is the creation of Dr von Thorp, your classic scientist rejected from society for his outre beliefs, though considering the man and his work he may have been ostracized for something other than believing that he might someday build a robot. Regardless of why he was rejected, he has expressed himself in the traditional way, by turning his invention back on society as revenge.
The police have no hope of dealing with the Iron Monster or his boss, so Police Commissioner Hunt calls in private detective par excellence Hugh Hazzard, whose job is made considerably easier by the fact that von Thorp subscribes to the surprisingly common school of robot design that dictates that the robot contain a large, easily accessible space that a human can get inside and also take control of the robot from. Von Thorp's capture is almost anticlimactic, in fact.
The reason for this anticlimax is that this is not, in fact, the story of Dr von Thorp and his Iron Monster but the origin of Hugh Hazzard and the renamed Bozo the Iron Man. As introduced Hazzard is already one of those superhuman-adjacent comic book adventurers complete with a special method for the police commissioner to contact him and a love interest gamely resigned to spending most of her evenings alone. Bozo, despite eventually taking over the name of the strip entirely, is never more than a tool of Hazzard's with no actual personality or volition (though Hazzard does eventually switch to mostly travelling around inside the robot like the other, later Iron Man and Bozo gets a considerable boost in personality once it seems to be spouting quips from its fixed grimace).
In Smash Comics 002 Hazzard upgrades Bozo with both a considerably miniaturized controller (cellphone sized vs the old one's desktop PC) and a weird disc on top of his head that allows him to fly, so I guess that also makes him one of those hobbyist polymath types you get in old comics
Dr von Thorp returns exactly one more time in Smash Comics 018, wherein he and Hazzard battle for control of Bozo by blasting radio waves at him like two people trying to see who a puppy loves more. No surprise that Hugh Hazzard wins but killing von Thorp off-panel at the very end seems a bit mean.
Like I said, Bozo's role in the title of the strip if not as a character continued to grow until the end of their run in 1943. Since then Bozo occasionally turns up in a collection of DC Comics junk that some character has collected. Of Hugh Hazzard there has been no further sign.
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