The Assassin That Never Was

I must be a nerd if a fox like Nightshade doesn't draw my attention to this cover of Captain America so much as the chugga-chugga-chugga robot threatening our heroes:

And we're not just talking any robot--this bruiser just happens to be "the Deadliest Robot Assassin of All Time"! That's quite a reputation for a robot that's seen maybe a minute and a half of action before the plug was pulled on it. (More on that in a sec.) So what makes this robot (code-named "Wild Bill") so deadly? Well, Bill is definitely packing some heat:

But it's not what you would really call an assassin, seeing that it never made it out of the testing stage. And it's not likely to, with Cap on the job:

Scratch one deadly assassin-in-training. Still, we have the good memory of either writer Tony Isabella or artist Frank Robbins to thank for bringing "Wild Bill" out of mothballs, since it was first seen in the pages of Strange Tales over nine years before its second appearance in Cap. In its debut, it showed great promise, if you go by Nick Fury's first impression. Unfortunately, it was also out of control at the time he was singing its praises:

Yee-haw, pardners--"Wild Bill" has got you in its sights. But it has yet to run up against its deadliest enemy:

A control panel.

Well, no wonder the thing went haywire--Tony Stark hadn't yet checked it out before it was activated by some hapless S.H.I.E.L.D. tech, whose time clock is about to be punched hard by Fury before he's escorted off the premises.