DC's title THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD is known primarily as the "Batman and--" team-up feature. However, at various times the title played host to swashbuckling tales, "strange sports stories," and showcases for possible regular features. But for about two years before Batman became the feature's exclusive selling-point, the title also played host to a number of more inventive crossovers. I assume that the men behind the comic approached these crossovers in the same spirit as the Golden Age JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA: a title in which the company's strong sellers could theoretically boost the weaker properties.
By the time "Revenge of the Robot Reject" appeared on stands in 1964, the Atom had enjoyed his own feature for roughly three years, edited by Julius Schwarz, and the Metal Men for two, edited by Robert Kanigher. This story, edited by George Kashdan, shows writer Bob Haney and artist Ramona Fradon-- best known for their co-creation METAMORPHO-- attempting to mimic the relevant aspects of both franchises. Haney's script delves far more into the Metal Men mythology than that of the Atom, though he finds a satisfactory premise that allows him to play the Tiny Titan off Doc Magnus's six robot heroes-- who are, for any not hip to the feature, are Gold, Iron, Mercury, Tin, Lead, and Platinum (the only female robot, and the only one who gets a nickname, that of Tina).
In the regular METAL MEN feature, Kanigher tended to soft-pedal any intimations of the robots' inventor as being their parent, even in the figurative sense that one sees in Mary Shelleys' FRANKENSTEIN and the Universal adaptations thereof. In contrast, "Reject" starts out with Magnus having his six robots visit an orphanage to entertain the kids. Tina, the only female robot in the group in 1964, was always seen expressing her undying love to her creator, and "Reject" is no exception. However, I don't think Kanigher's METAL MEN ever showed Tina waxing maternal, and in the opening scenes of "Reject," Tina is apparently so charmed by all the munchkins that she suggests that she and Magnus should marry and have kids. When her bemused creator reminds Tina that a robot can neither marry nor conceive, she cheerily responds that Magnus could just build "cute little robot replicas of you and me."
Once Magnus and his six quixotic creations return to their HQ, Tina's burst of erotic enthusiasm is still with her, and as a result she dances about, unintentionally courting thanatos so that she falls to her death into a generator. In the regular title, this isn't a problem, since the Metal Men are always getting reduced to piles of mangled scrap, only to be magically resuscitated by their inventor's peerless skills. But this time, Magnus can't restore Tina, because her atomic structure has been altered somehow. The next seven pages then read like a quickie version of "Ten Little Indians," as each of the other Metal Men also fall victim to peculiar accidents, and again, Magnus cannot revive any of his "children."
Magnus sits alone in his laboratory, emulating Dorothy Gale as he muses that he'll miss his sexy female robot most of all (not exactly in those terms, of course). Then the villains responsible for the Metal Men's decimation appear. One is the first robot Magnus ever created, Uranium, and also the "reject" of the title, since Magnus attempted to destroy him. The other villain is Uranium's own creation, a silver female robot named Agantha, who bears a nodding physical resemblance to Tina and whom Uranium designed to be his version of Magnus's "girl robot creation." (In other words, Uranium may not be Magnus's literal child, but the robot-reject's doing his darnedest to follow the scientist's example.) Uranium announces that through his command of all elements, he was able to remotely guide the Metal Men to their respective dooms and then to alter their atomic arrangements so that Magnus couldn't bring them back. He did all this because he resents that Magnus tried to destroy him-- even though a flashback shows Uranium being callously destructive, much like the element he's made of-- and because now he wants Magnus to help him devise a world-conquering weapon. Agantha is just as vicious, though she does pay the scientist a backhanded compliment: "If it weren't for [Uranium] here, I could go for you-- now that your platinum girlfriend is gone."
Threatened with immediate death for non-compliance, Magnus helps the project to buy time. He also manages to send out a distress signal. Ray (The Atom) Palmer receives the signal in his own lab, dons his costume, and rushes over to Magnus's HQ to help. Being unobtrusive, the Atom's able to infiltrate the HQ and figure out what's been happening, and being a physics major, he assembles the remains of the Metal Men and figures out how to use his "atomic" skills to restore their integrity-- at which point the robots reconstitute themselves.
Meanwhile, Uranium's project is finished, but he's still victim to daddy issues, unable to kill Magnus because "he is the man who gave me life." Agantha, who's become Lady Macbeth in a few pages, has no such compunctions and prepares to destroy the robot-maker.
In burst the Metal Men, and Tina, though she didn't witness Agantha flirting with Magnus, immediately calls her a "silver hussy." The two ductile damsels fight it out, with Tina winning due to her greater knowledge of the elemental sciences (is silver really more vulnerable to sound-waves than platinum? I dunno). Uranium proves a tougher nut to crack, for his creativity doesn't stop with making his own robot-doll. He reveals that he can manifest the radiation in his body into three missile-shaped mini-minions, who are named after their types of radiation, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. (The reader shouldn't need more than one guess as to why these energy-constructs look like missiles.)
Though the radiation-minions can't harm Lead, the other Metal Men get kicked around pretty good. The Atom, who's been confined to the sidelines during this high-powered scuffle, suggests that they take Mercury aside and bond his atoms to those of Lead. That way, when Mercury attacks Uranium again, the radiation-minions can't hurt him. Uranium can't understand what's happening, and keeps bombarding Mercury until the villainous metal exhausts himself and devolves to a hunk of inert radium. Magnus does express some regret for his own hubris: "It was really all my fault from the first! I made you wrong, to start with!"
The psychological myths about robots and their creators are fairly lightweight here, but Haney does a good job-- better than many of Kanigher's stories-- at putting forth the cosmological myths necessary for both of the crossover-features. Maybe all the elemental research in this toss-off tale helped inspire him to co-create the Metamorpho concept with Fradon.
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