If Only Robo Had Lips

Back when Robo first debuted, Brian and I put together a commentary track for the first issue. Basically, we take one of our comics, start at page one, and talk at each other about it as we go. This time we’re flipping through Atomic Robo Volume 2, Issue 3, “Going Off Track.”

Join us, won’t you.

Before we get into it though, I want to remind everyone about the Boston Comic Con this coming weekend, and the Portsmouth show on November 16th.

Now on to the commentary:

Scott: Anyway lets do this. I’ve got stuff to do today.

Brian: Well lah de dah.

Scott: You only WISH you could go to the dump and weatherize your home for the coming brutal winter.

Brian: I am sick with jealousy.

Scott: I know you are.

Brian: Well, this whole Sparrow thing was your bright idea, I’m making you start.

Scott: Uh, okay, but where? I’m trying to remember what kicked it off.

Brian: She was a he and I assumed based somewhat on the pulp guy you based Robo’s final design on.

Scott: Right, and I had a vague notion about wanting to include him in the WWII story. But it was the fact that half our readers seem to be girls that screwed that all up. I think it was after 2.1 and 2.2 were plotted out that we noticed that, unlike Vol.1, there were no cool female characters like we had in Ada and Lang.

Brian: Yeah. The events we tackled in Vol 1 didn’t really lend themselves to interesting roles for women. You don’t see many of them in secret quasi-Nazi Himalayan mountain bases, Mars, or 5,000 year old pyramids. And we were worried we’d go a whole other volume without a cool lady because, again, not a lot of them were on the front lines in WW2.

Scott: Vol.1 was a little sparce on the lady front, but when the Action Scientists were around they were a big hit with a lot of women I spoke to at conventions. So, I figured okay, this character should be a girl. Then I started thinking in terms of Richard Quartermain and the idea of a family tradition: passing down some genetic quirk of monster hunting. Except in our case it would be not so much monster hunting, and more a family knack for kicking butt.

Brian: I still say it’s less to do with genetics and more to do with just a strict tradition of raising their kids from day one to be the vanguard of Britain’s safety. But that’s another topic!

Scott: We can argue that forever. Like Robo being a Jew, when I think he should be too smart to join any religion, or his exact height and weight.

Brian: He’s not practicing! It’s a symbolic thing ’cause some rabbis in NYC were cool with him back when his status as a living being under the law was controversial especially amongst conservative religious leaders. Dangit!

Scott: Aaaanyway . . .As usual, once we started tossing the idea back and forth, the idea of what the Sparrow was changed completely from my original concept, which is cool. I thought when I suggested we make him a woman you would be against it though.

Brian: No way! Hell, I wanted to use Virginia Hall, but she didn’t really fit in the stories we locked into for this volume. Soon as you suggested Girl Sparrow, I was on board. Also, you’re the one who rejects great ideas, not me. ZING.

Scott: Besides Dr. Dinosaur, who is still utterly retarded, despite the fact that I am loving every minute of him in the new FCBD story, what have I rejected? Name one thing.

Brian: The OTHER pyramids at the end of the the Hawking issue.

Scott: Name twelve things!

Brian: You got me there.

Scott: And besides, my giant diaper wearing cyclops was way cooler than more pyramids and led to a very funny back-up story for Vol.2. So there.

Brian: I’ll grant equivalent coolness all around with a bonus cool point for leading into the back up story where we Jenkins the monster away. So, fine, you win.

Scott: Okay fine.

Brian: Good.

Scott: What were we talking about…?

Brian: Sparrow was all my idea and you were against it from the start.

Scott: Right!

Scott: Hey, wait…!

Brian: Too late.

Scott: I know that I instantly regretted even bringing the idea of her up once I started designing her wardrobe.

Brian: Ha, yeah. I felt bad. We both really liked The Sparrow, but designing her nearly killed you and then when you finally had it all figured out you hated every panel you drew with her in it.

Scott: It’s that hair! That goddamn hair!

Brian: So, how about this opening sequence with the three different yet converging sub-plots that all meld into one?

Scott: You mean the three converging sub-plots that the clods at IGN said was boring?

Brian: Am I a genius or am I just amazing? Huh? Huh?

Scott: But that the Secret Identity Podcast said was brilliant?

Brian: The very same. It’s funny. Most reviewers loved that sequence, but some people were utterly boggled by it.

Scott: Some people are utterly boggled by zippers and packing peanuts too.

Brian: They don’t taste like peanuts…

Scott: I instantly liked that opening sequence for 2.3. I knew that visually it would be somewhat repetitive and lacking in explosions etc. but I thought it was a great way of bringing everything together. I really enjoyed it.

Brian: Since you’re my harshest critic, I’ll gladly take that.

Scott: It’s my job. You’re not nearly critical enough of yourself.

Brian: How can I be with all this GENIUS?

Scott: You’ve been listening to your 8-Bit fans again, haven’t you?

Brian: You know better than that.

Scott: My point is, we can’t please everyone, and some people just don’t always get what we do. And some people are just dumb.

Brian: And probably ugly.

Scott: Ugly and dumb. No doubt about it. Have fun editing this so it makes sense, BTW.

Brian: I’ll edit this so one of us makes sense, that way it’ll save time.

Scott: Okay. So, all my lines will be reduced to “jibba-jabba, jibba-jabba.”

Brian: More or less. Okay, that whole opening sequence is worth it to me just to have Robo spring out of that crate and put on a disguise.

Scott: Heh, yeah that was funny. Though I still have no idea how he got that crate onto that particular train.

Brian: Me neither! Or why, if he had that kind of access, he didn’t stow away with the Laufpanzers themselves or blow them up before they got on the train.

Scott: Yet another gaping plot hole in the Robo-verse.

Brian: Maybe not. In 2.4 it’ll become obvious that (technically a spoiler) the Laufpanzers weren’t on that train, so maybe Robo had to sneak into the crate to get on the train to get to Otto where he would necessarily have fewer resources/troops available to counter Robo? Not that I’m stretching at all here!

Scott: Not at all.

Brian: (whew)

Scott: Oh man, I watched THE TRAIN a few weeks ago. I wish I’d known about it when we started on this issue. The camera work was brilliant.

Brian: So, you failed us again.

Scott: I did. Sort of like when I found that 6 page diagram of the Mercury capsule after pulling my hair out during Robo’s mission to mars because I couldn’t find any photo reference better than a crappy old G.I. Joe toy.

Brian: That may have been my favorite moment from the whole Volume 1 experience.

Scott: The Universe. It mocks me.

Brian: I’m fond of how all the Nazi soldiers appear out of nowhere after we go through all the trouble to show how Robo and Sparrow bust in.

Scott: Yeah that was . . .another oversight on our part that worked out nicely. The script made no mention of them until they bust into the dinning car, which read just fine, but looked weird once I drew it. Like, “Hey wait, where the hell did these guys come from?”

Brian: Well, the idea was that they were supposed to be seen actually flooding into the car. But I think we changed the panel layout either here or later on such that there was no room for that sequence.

Scott: Something like that.

Brian: But it worked great with even Robo wondering how they got there. We enjoy an exploitable ability to get away with the patently impossible even while maintaining an amount of historical and scientific accuracy that ought to be incompatible with being as goofy as we sometimes are.

Scott: That is true. The rules are much more flexible for us than they would be of we were a more serious book, or grounded more firmly in reality.

Brian: But at the same time, I like that we don’t go overboard with it into, y’know, absurdism. Most comics, they make a joke, and suddenly their universes are governed by laws of the Looney Tunes. I think we inhabit a middle ground where we can grab readers who are into the comedy or into the action or into the history. And people into all those things get to have a 22 page orgasm.

Scott: I think you and I are the only people into all three of those things.

Brian: Great, now everyone knows our dirty, dirty secret.

Scott: I’ve heard complaints about these pages. People don’t know weather to read across the two pages, right to left, or read down one and then down the next. Though once you read it all it makes sense to me. More Zipper and Packing Peanuts.

Brian: Yeah, it’s from the same people who didn’t get the opening sequence. That one big panel that goes across the top of both pages? That’s your clue that the layout goes across both pages!

Scott: So Vanadis. She was sort of an out-growth of The Sparrow, and we talked a lot about her being the result of her parents experiments with making Arian Supermenches and her being both a bad ass and a genius.

Brian: Yeah, we didn’t get to explore her past too much in Vol 2, though the next issue gives us some hints that there’s more to her than Just Another Nazi Mad Scientist. There simply wasn’t room to go too in-depth with her in the middle of everything else that was going on.

Scott: That’s where I was going with that. We’re going to have to bring her back.

Brian: Absolutely. Speaking of Vanadis, remember when her Brutes were Wehrwolves?

Scott: Yeah those guys looked awesome. But like with Vanadis there wasn’t room for them AND the Brutes. I just put together a new sketchbook of my work this year, which is 99% Robo related, so its called “The Dawgs of War Sketchbook”, and I included those wolfie SS guys in there.

Brian: Yeah, we’re not abandoning those designs.

Scott: Hell no. Argentina, here we come!

Scott: Or maybe Faciast Spain. I like Spain.

Brian: Antarctica! That reminds me, though. I do love that the mini-series is named after YOUR “werewolf” soldiers and then at the very last minute, literally the morning you were going to pencil the first page with them, you go “Naw, let’s not do wehrwolves.”

Scott: I’m good like that.

Brian: At least Red 5 made us change it from “The Howling Commandos” to “The Dogs of War” for fear of DC lawyers. Again. We can write off Dogs of War without having canids around, but Howling Commandos would have been a stretch.

Scott: I think my favorite thing about Vol.2 so far is that Robo get’s his ass kicked throughout the entire thing. I always felt like Vol.1 was just too easy for him. I remember arguing for more Robo-beatings to make it more exciting. Which I think we saw some of in 1.6.

Brian: Yes. Issue 1.6 was as brutal as we’d been to Robo up to that point. Here in Volume 2 it’s like that’s where we start and it keeps getting worse. In this series he’s lucky when he’s only beaten that much, y’know? I was going over Volume 2’s last issue yesterday for final corrections…man. It’s just goddamn brutal what happens to the guy.

Scott: Oh God yes, Robo gets seriously brutalized in 2.5. I don’t know why that makes me so happy when I love the little guy so much. Some people who have seen the cover for 2.5 have been mildly horrified.

Brian: And the cover is only the beginning!

Scott: The fact that Otto, a regular if extraordinary guy, basically maintains the upper hand for the entire mini-series is a lot of fun.

Brian: Yeah, I love that. Robo manages to defeat him, but every time they meet you look at Robo and you look at Otto and you don’t get the sense that Robo is the winner AT ALL.

Scott: Robo carries the day, but he never gets Otto. The whole thing with Otto, it’s a good “young Robo” story. Like in the last Indiana Jones, er, the last last GOOD Indiana Jones movie, where River Phoenix is Young Indie. He fails to stop the bad guys stealing the priceless artifact, but he fights the good fight.

Brian: Yeah. I think old/modern Robo is a little too cunning to get as wrecked as he does in these pages.

Scott: Well yeah, he’s an old man by the 21st Century.

Brian: I’m not sure which is more brutal, 2.4 or 2.5. He gets mangled way more in 5, but he spends almost all of 4 getting thrashed.

Scott: The Uber-Brute does wipe the floor with him in 2.4. In 2.5 the damage is done between scenes so you don’t have to witness it.

Brian: So, the whole Sparrow/Robo dynamic was a lot of fun for me. I just love the idea that Robo teams up with people who don’t really want or need his help.

Scott: Yes the way they played off each other was great. It’s a classic set up and you know that in the movies, they would end up together in some steamy kiss. If only Robo had lips.

Brian: What I love about them is that their reactions tell us everything we need to know about them. Sparrow is 100% business and she’s deeply insulted by Robo’s carelessness and lack of experience. Robo is kind of annoyed at her and doesn’t see what the big deal is because he knows he can just walk into a room stuffed with Nazis and eventually win. I think over the course of this volume Robo learns that it’s not always that easy, but I don’t want to give away too much. Anyway, there’s this minority voice in the comics blogging world that likes to claim we don’t have much characterization or that they don’t know “who” our characters are after reading stories with them. I assume this is because these people read so many mainstream books that they’ve forgotten that you don’t have to put everything on pause while characters tell each other what they think and how that makes them feel. As if characterization doesn’t come from the sum total of a characters reactions and choices to a variety of situations!

Scott: Feel better, princess?

Brian: A little.

Scott: I like how and why she doesn’t like him. It’s stupid to assume that everyone will think he’s this great thing. Like Jack Tarrot, our Mystery Man from the ’20s. What we have planned with him and Robo is a lot of fun because there is tension between them. Though I have no idea when we are doing that now since Jack, another brilliant idea of mine, got written out of Vol.3.

Brian: Yeah, we’ll never come back to Robo’s early days. EYE ROLL. But yeah, Jack’s opinions of Robo ought to make Sparrow look like his number one fan.

Scott: Haha, nah I saw him being a bit nicer but also more brutal. Like the classic martial arts teacher who loves his student by abusing the shit out of them. Sparrow has no love for the ‘bot at all.

Brian: See, I thought Robo would see Jack as a mentor while Jack would see Robo as this guy who won’t go away!

Scott: When you put it like that i can’t help but chuckle. Maybe we should compromise and start out that way, but end with my idea.

Brian: That works. You readers at home, you just witnessed the brilliant Team Robo creative process at work.

Scott: I need to get rolling so we should wrap this up.

Brian: Hey, how about that cliffhanger ending!

Scott: I hated you for that ending…like I hate you for most of the things you make me draw.

Brian: It’s how I know I’m doing my job right.

Scott: Actually, I like it. It forces me to learn to draw things that I would otherwise avoid.

Brian: Like super-intelligent dinosaurs.

Scott: Yes. So, do you have a favorite moment thus far in Vol.2?

Brian: Damn. That’s a tough one. Pretty much any panel where Sparrow sass mouths Robo makes me happy.

Scott: So 2.3 is your favorite moment.

Brian: Until 2.4 happens. Then the sassing and the savage beatings will become my favorite.

Scott: Fair enough. Mine is back in 2.2, but its an art moment, not a story one. You know how rarely I actually like what I draw. But I can still look at this page and feel proud of it. It’s just after Robo drives the kubelwagen into the Laufpanzer and they are down in the gully. The Laufpanzer kicks Robo and the car into the air. That page. Robo is floating up through the air with the car. I love how he and the car look. Sort of weightless. But that next panel is my favorite. It’s sort of “fish-eyed” and Robo is wielding the car like a melee weapon, the ‘panzer is looking up at him, and Lt. Everret and his men are sort of dumbfounded by the whole scene.

Brian: Okay yeah, art-wise, that one’s easily my favorite too.

Scott: The whole “shove this so far up your exhaust you’ll have to open the glove-box to use the bathroom” line kills me.

Brian: Yes, but if I say “butt” you will smile.

Scott: Tee-hee! As far as the story goes I’m torn. It’s a toss up between Lt. Everret and the letter he writes to his wife (I basically love every panel with the G.I.’s ) and when Sparrow breaks the stalemate in the dining car by instigating the brawl.

Brian: Oh, and let’s thank Lauren Pettapiece for the back up to this issue. It’s the Jenkins story I’ve wanted to tell since I figured out that Robo is Jenkins’s sidekick.

Scott: Oh hell yes! Next time she does a back-up we need to make sure she’s not running a 103 degree fever though.

Brian: I can promise nothing.

Scott: Okay I need to run or the dump will close.

Brian: Tee-hee! Dump.

RANDOM SPELDOR

I’m really losing track of the RS pics. Did I post this already?