I was a big fan of 2001, and bought every issue. I didn't find that Kirby's first seven issues captured the ambiguity and mystery of the monolith the way I wanted, but it was close enough to the concepts from the film to keep me reading. I definitely remember being disappointed to see this series diverging into a more conventional superhero comic, but that wasn't entirely apparent from this first issue, which for all I knew might have been another 2-parter, after which Kirby would return to his earlier format for the comic.

I don't recall being especially impressed by the concept, since we already had The Vision and The Red Tornado out there, super-powered robots who were as human as you and I. That's not the kind of mind-bending concept I was there for. Kirby, of course, probably had little or no awareness of those two characters, and I was conscious of that; I didn't consider Mr. Machine to be an imitation of them, but just tired ground that didn't match Kirby's imaginative heights. It only occurs to me now that Kirby may have been planning to explore, unfettered, some of his original intent for The Silver Surfer (before Stan Lee took him into a quite different direction): a metallic, super-powered, alien being living amongst and learning about the human race.