Orlando & MegaCon (Edit)

I’ll be down in Florida this weekend for MegaCon. I’m traveling light, but I’ll be doing sketches, and I’ll have some Atomic Robo and Punisher War Journal pages to sell. Brian ordered those awesome Robo shirts. Looking forward to seeing some of you guys there. We’ll be at table BLUE 8 in the Independent area.

I don’t think I’ve got anything huge to report this week. The machine that is Team Robo is chugging along –I officially hit the middle of V2 Issue #1 today.

The pages I’m working on are challenging in a way that is entirely new to me. Its not Robo, or any of the things that he is going up against –that’s become my bread and butter. It’s the secondary characters and their story. Almost half of 2.1 follows a young Army lieutenant and his platoon through the invasion of Sicily on July 9, 1943. Operation Husky, as it was called, lasted until August 17 and somewhere in the neighborhood of 55,000 soldiers went from being healthy young men to being casualties –dead, maimed, or otherwise having a shitty day.

The larger Italian campaign that kicked off shortly thereafter was typified by a lack of coordination, poor planning, military bungling at the highest levels, and no clear goals –other than to kill Germans. At times the fighting resembled the wholesale slaughter of the first World War, and was just as pointless. It is estimated that between September 1943 and April 1945 some 60,000 Allied and 50,000 German soldiers died in Italy. No campaign in Western Europe cost more than Italy, in terms of lives lost and wounds suffered by infantry forces.

So how do I draw that without trivializing it?

Here is a page I finished in the wee hours of Monday night/Tuesday morning. It took two days of non-stop work to finish it. All that work and not a robot in sight.

The other day, while I was bombarding Ronda with photo reference for uniforms, tanks, and other assorted war stuff, she asked me, “What is it with guys and World War Two?” There wasn’t any sarcasm there –just honest curiosity. And it’s a good question. I could (and have) rattled off a half dozen things about this period in history that fascinate me. But beyond all the geo-political stuff it’s the stories of the average men and women on all sides of the conflict that attract, horrify, and mesmerize me. I say women even though this is predominantly a ‘dude” subject, because in addition to the amazing accomplishments of women working on the various home fronts, women were active combatants in the Soviet forces and in hundreds of Resistance groups across the world. I also say women, because it’s a fact of war that since the dawn of history, women and the children and elderly they are left behind to care for, always die in much greater numbers than the soldiers with their guns, bombs, swords, or crossbows. So its that universal story of average, faceless, nameless people enduring what we can barely wrap our imaginations around that really grabs my attention.

In many ways this first story of V2 is all about Robo hopping about punching bad-guys. And that’s all well and good. But its of equal importance to Brian and I to acknowledge that real people died and endured horrible trauma –apparently in the name of giving Robo something cool to do. And they did it all not really understanding what it was all for. As we write and rewrite history it seems obvious. Nazis were evil, right? Well sure. But so was our pal Stalin. So are many of our allies today. What does that mean? The war in Europe gets center-stage in our histories because we can point at the death camps and say we did it for the Jews. And some of by best friends are Jewish and my life would be greatly diminished without them. But to say we fought WWII for them would be a lie. However, after the fact, their plight was something that we could use to shape and give meaning to the event. It’s just as false to say the Civil War was about freeing slaves. Not really –that just became a political tool that the Union could use later.

People like their history to be as black & white as possible, and their truths to come in neat, easy to digest, packets. If only that was how reality worked.

At the end of the day we make a pulp sci-fi comic book. Pretty small beans on the grand scale of things. Still, that doesn’t mean that we can’t tip our hats to those who did what they did to make the world we have today –warts and all. Because chances are sickeningly good that 65 years ago I would have been one of the corpses on the beach that I’m drawing right now.

Atomic Robo on The Pullbox.

Atomic Robo in Newseed Comics. And again.

A happy little review of Atomic Robo #5 & #6.

Alternate Reality have really given Atomic Robo some rave reviews. This week you can listen to Brian and me sound like total idiots for 30 minutes via Skype (I HATE SKYPE!) on Alternate Reality’s Episode #114.

RANDOM SPLENDOR

- Hole. E. Shit. Iron Man.

-The Ten Best Post-Apocalyptic Survival Vehicles.

-IBM Sets Humanity On The Path To Armageddon.

-Wind Power. Its Just Misunderstood.

-The Ten Worst Products Ever Created For Men.

-If you read this blog with any regularity you know that I like video games. And yet I hate them too. The overwhelming majority of games are “hard” and “gritty” –which is a different way of saying “self important” and “cynical”. Its sort of like how I view comic books in a lot of ways. What the world needs is more “war” games like Battlefield Heroes. It is a cartoon shooter aimed at having fun and “not getting shot in the face repeatedly by a swearing, ultra-skilled 15 year old boy, who plays the game every day for 8 hours.”