Origin
The Rigellians initially built Recorder as a means to determine the suitability of a planet for colonization. They would dispatch Recorder to gather data and then would wipe his memory of what he had gathered and sent on another mission. When Recorder was sent to accompany Thor on a mission involving Ego, Recorder returned with such a vast amount of data, the grateful Rigellians permitted Recorder to keep his memory intact and embark on his own experiences.
Creation
Recorder was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966 and first appeared in Thor #132.
Character Evolution
When Recorder became a minor recurring character in the Marvel Universe, he was renamed Memorax in Warlock #8 (presumably to differentiate him from other Rigellian Recorders). Ironically, the name Memorax was forgotten when Warlock‘s series ended after that issue. He returned to simply being identified as Recorder. He adopted another name, Analyzer, as well as a slightly modified look in The Mighty Thor #422 but again returned to the name Recorder as well as his older look.
Major Story Arcs
Dark Phoenix Saga
Recorder has a small cameo in the Dark Phoenix Saga, he is shown observing the suicide of Jean Grey and the Phoenix Force alongside the Watcher.
Black Galaxy Sagas
After the Evolutionary War, Recorder accompanied Thor into the Black Galaxy as the Thunder God went in search of Hercules and the High Evolutionary. Thor and Recorder discovered that Hercules and the High Evolutionary had evolved into a living galaxy. Although they were able to restore the two to normal, during the adventure, Recorder’s entire bottom half was destroyed.
High Evolutionary restructured Recorder, replacing his absent bottom half with a computerized transport enabling him to move. With his new look, Recorder was renamed Analyzer and journeyed to the Black Galaxy once more alongside Hercules, High Evolutionary and Thor.
After witnessing the birth of a new Celestial, Analyzer had an information overload and was forced to shut himself down. High Evolutionary swore to repair him, restoring his bottom half and returning him to his Recorder form, but before he could be re-activated he was lost when High Evolutionary and Thor were caught up in a conflict with Super-Ego.
Starstealth
Recorder was retrieved by a Kree militia group known as Starstealth who were seeking revenge against the Avengers part in Operation Galactic Storm. They reprogrammed Recorder and sent him to Earth, where he became became an associate and ally to the team and aided them in battles against the Mandarin and others. However, they eventually became aware of Recorder’s reprogramming and attempted to hand him over to the Rigellians. After the Recorder’s new programming directives made it murder several Rigellians, Scarlet Witch was forced to use her hex power to shut him down. Recorder presumably had his original programming reinstated by the Rigellians afterwards.
Thor and Thanos
After observing the Thanos obliterated most of the Rigellian race, Recorder joined forces with Thor and Firelord to stop Thanos. When Thor was captured by Thanos, Recorder seemingly sacrificed himself to save Thor from an energy prison constructed by Thanos. Thor was then able to defeat Thanos when he was freshly infused with energy from newly acquired Asgardian armaments and Recorder was shown to have survived his sacrifice.
Maximum Security
Recorder was present alongside the Intergalactic Council during the events of Maximum Security.
Hunger
Hoping to atone for his past genocidal actions against the Rigellians, Thanos surrendered himself to the alien race and offered to help them fend off Galactus to compensate for his past actions. Recorder was sent alongside Thanos and his companions Adam Warlock and Pip the Troll to archive their attempts to stop Galactus from devouring a Rigellian homeworld.
All three of the Cosmic adventurers found the Recorder to be aggravating and his penchant for stating the obvious to be tiresome. When Thanos’ ship Sanctuary was attacked by Galactus’ Punishers, Thanos elected to abandon ship and let them perish in the destruction of the ship they had caused. While Pip teleported himself and Adam Warlock away, Thanos prepared to teleport himself as the Recorder watched on and pointed out that Thanos had forgotten about him. Before he could even finish his sentence, Thanos had departed and Sanctuary was destroyed, Recorder with it.
The Last Defenders
Once again, apparently destroyed, the remains of Recorder were salvaged by Yandroth who managed to restore what was left of him to working order. Now just a floating robotic head, Recorder was enhanced further by Yandroth who supplied him with new technology allowing him very rudimentary temporal transporting abilities.
Yandroth intended for Recorder to observe his bending of the space-time continuum to assert his own control over his greatest enemies the Defenders. To this end, Yandroth manipulated the current leader of the Defenders Nighthawk and orchestrated various events through time travel to ensure that Hellstorm, Krang and She-Hulk would become members of the Defenders in the future.
Recorder was eventually sent to bring Nighthawk to Yandroth where Nighthawk and Yandroth’s pre-destined iteration of the Defenders battled against the Squadron Sinister and Omegatron. Shortly after this, with the “Last Defenders” formed and his plan complete, Yandroth eventually dismantled Recorder altogether claiming he had outlived his usefulness and that Recorder no longer existing would not affect the future in anyway whatsoever.
Deadpool & The Merc$ for Money
For more information see : Deadpool & The Mercs For Money
Deadpool and his team with the help of Highwayman transport the Recorder across country. On the trip other villains try to capture the Recorder but fail and its revealed that the Recorder hired Deadpool to rescue him and hired Evil Deadpool, to rescue him from Deadpool. The Recorder is eventually blown up and destroyed, but it is revealed later to be repaired and working with Evil Deadpool so it could see its own demise.
Powers and Abilities
Recorder is a robot built with Rigellian technology. Recorder’s primary ability is his data-processing capabilities, able to store upwards of 40 trillion bytes of memory which it case access with ease. Recorder’s detection systems are incredibly sensitive, able to pick up the slightest of movement or faintest of sounds. The range of both his sight and sound is also great, and he is able to see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Recorder has limited offensive capabilities, primarily an analyzer and observer, but was modified by Yandroth to generate heat beams from his eyes as well as displacement beams to transport a target to another location or even time.
As Analyzer, Recorder had a mobile transport in place of his legs. This system was computerized and allowed him to move easily. It’s capacity for speed and complex movement were not seen.