Where Monsters Dwell #25: The Ruler of the Earth!

Where Monsters Dwell #25, with an issue date of November 1973, reprints the cover story, "The Ruler of the Earth!," from Journey Into Mystery #81 (June 1962). To give you an idea where that falls in Marvel's publication history, in this month when Thor: The Dark World is set to earn over a $100 million in movie theaters, The Mighty Thor would debut two months later in Journey Into Mystery #83.

"The Ruler of the Earth!" is a classic Silver Age Lee-Kirby tale. Mankind, convinced that it is headed for destruction due to the escalating Cold War, decides to create a massive supercomputer to make all decisions. The supercomputer known by the acronym R.O.E. (Ruler of the Earth) has built into its underlying code that it is inferior to humans; hence, a fail-safe designed to prevent R.O.E. from wreaking havoc on the human race with its omniscient powers. Hydra, the nefarious secret organization bent on world domination, seeks to corrupt R.O.E. by injecting "greed, deceit and dishonesty!!" via "tubes" into its operating system. Stan Lee, in a nice turnabout, has R.O.E. foil the plot by detaching the corrupting tubes while saying the following words:

They attempted to corrupt me by linking these tubes to my power plant!

But they were fools! The qualities of greed, deceit, and lust for power can never affect ROE!

For I am incapable of any wrong doing! 

It is only man who can be evil!

And I am inferior to man, for I am only . . .

. . . a mere machine . . . 

The idea that the Cold War was fast headed toward a genocidal conflict was the prevailing wisdom at the time. The Cuban Missile Crisis was only a half-year away when "The Ruler of the Earth!" first arrived at drug stores and candy counters. In an interview last week Oliver Stone said that the generals of the Joint Chiefs were convinced that the U.S. would be at war with the Soviets by 1970. They were ready to go hot and heavy on Cuba because they felt they had a nuclear advantage that could take out Russia with a first strike. Thankfully, Kennedy had the stones to stand up to his Joint Chiefs.

Note how Hydra is represented as Russian. In one panel there is even a guy in Soviet military garb. Now, at least in Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates, Hydra is represented as Tea Party militia types.

Finally, "The Ruler of the Earth!" turns out to be not too far off the mark. With IT ruling the roost, server farms occupying a critical place in our global capitalist economy and the National Security Agency controlling the equivalent of the R.O.E. supercomputer, we should chalk another one up to the prescience of Lee-Kirby, with the caveat that the present day is far more dystopian than they were allowed to reveal in their comic books.