Doctor Will Magnus is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics.
Publication history
He first appeared in Showcase #37 alongside his creations, the Metal Men and was created by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru.
Fictional character biography
One of the most impressive geniuses of the DC Universe with doctorates in theoretical mathematics, mechanical engineering, and particle physics, William Maxwell "Will" Magnus often offers scientific advice to other characters. His greatest achievement is the one for which he first received renown: the creation of the Metal Men. The method through which Doc Magnus created the Metal Man has varied over years with various writers. At first they were just blank slate robots with responsometers, devices which generated their intelligence and personalities which just happened to be evocative of the metals from which they were formed.
In an attempt to boost sales of the comic book, the characters underwent vast changes. The Metal Men all assumed human alter egos, while Doc Magnus became a fugitive scientist dedicated to global conquest. His personality change was credited to having been kidnapped, reawakened, and brainwashed by a mad dictator. Sales plunged instead and the comic was not printed for a few years. Eventually Metal Men was picked up again with Doc's sanity restored and he returned to assist his Metal Men.
At one point he saved Doom Patrol's Robotman, whose original body had been destroyed by Madame Rouge. Doc Magnus recovered Robotman's brain and built him a new cybernetic body.
In 1993, a four-part Metal Men miniseries retconned much of their backstory. It was revealed that the responsometers were not responsible for the Metal Men's sentience and that the Metal Men actually were imprinted with the intellects and personalities of real people: Magnus' own brother Mike, his fiancee Sharon, two lab workers Redmond Wilde and Randy Pressman, a janitor named Thomas Tinkham, and a pizza-delivery man named Jack. These unfortunate personalities were accidentally transferred to blank robots in a lab accident. At the climax of the miniseries, Gold, one of his robots, was permanently killed and Doc Magnus mortally wounded. Doc permanently transferred his personality into a blank robot known as Veridium, made of a green alien metal, becoming the new robotic leader of the Metal Men.
52
With the advent of Identity Crisis, Gold is back and Doc Magnus is once again human and played an active role in the series 52.
As revealed during Infinite Crisis, when Superboy-Prime pounded on the walls of reality, he caused the very fabric of reality to shift, changing and merging histories. The "blank robots with responsometers" origin is said to be the definitive origin while the "human personalities" origin and the 1993 miniseries has been described as the byproduct of a mental breakdown suffered by Magnus. When Booster Gold visited, asking for help with Skeets, Magnus commented that the Metal Men "don't quite work anymore".
The responsometers are now described as containing an "artificial soul" invented by Doc Magnus, as inspired by T. O. Morrow, who is revealed to have taught him at college and to have been the only one not to laugh at Magnus's theories. After the unexplained dismantling of the Metal Men, Doc Magnus is unable to recreate these souls and restore their personalities. He now takes Prozac for the bipolar disorder which caused his nervous breakdown and the depression which led to the creation of the Plutonium Man, a tremendous, nearly indestructible superweapon based upon the Metal Men, but with Magnus' then-own deranged, twisted worldview as its operating system. It is implied that although the medication is keeping Magnus from doing anything irrational, it is also deadening his imagination and creativity and that this is the reason he cannot recreate the Metal Men.
Magnus is approached by government agents hoping to use the Metal Men as soulless smart weapons, an offer Magnus rejects. Through all of this, Magnus visits Morrow in his cell in Haven. Morrow warns Magnus that there have been numerous abductions of "mad" scientists, including Doctor Sivana, whose lair Magnus investigates.
Eventually Morrow himself disappears, leaving a note for his former student with a string in machine code. Using the code, Magnus is able to revive Mercury, but his robotic friend and creation is apparently destroyed again while trying to save him from the conspiracy trying to kidnap every mad scientist in the DCU.