In 1953, a 25-year-old director named Phil Tucker had $16,000 in just four days to make his first

sci-fi film.

The plot, a creature comes to Earth with a death ray and wipes out all of humanity except for

eight people who are immune to the creature's weapons.

He called the film robot monster.

With a swiftness of a deadly cosmic ray, the earth is invaded by indestructible moon monsters their ghastly mission death for all humans

The film was so low budget, Tucker couldn't even afford a good alien costume, so he had the

monster in a gorilla suit with a TV for a head.

What astounding technical developments are being made to protect mankind?

The release was a disaster. It was widely panned.

Its lasting legacy would have been that it was one of the worst movies of all time.

But in the early 2000s,

a kid from New Jersey with a knack for drawing comics

saw a picture of the robot monster, and it stuck with him.

I've never even actually seen the film, but I saw pictures of this creature over the years

and they've got like a TV set kind of circular space looking head and they have like a guerrilla body

and I was like I want a superhero that's kind of inspired by this.

The kid's name was Gerard.

He'd been writing comics since he was 15

and was on his way to making it

as a professional comic book artist. I went to art school and I was an

illustration cartooning major. So comics were kind of like my major and I was like this

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