08 January 2009

What I Just Read: Atomic Robo vol. 1 (Red 5, 2008)


ATOMIC ROBO and the FIGHTIN' SCIENTISTS OF TESLADYNE: This trade from Canadian publishing upstart RED 5 collects the first six issues featuring the titular character and his team of gung ho boffins who are members of a paramilitary unit tasked to solve weird problems. And it's funny too. Think Hellboy with a little bit more one liners.

It's a good thing that writer Brian Clevinger can write the funny because these first six issues confused me a little bit with all the flashbacks. The humour distracted me somewhat from the jumping timelines and I just went with the flow. The story opens up in 1938 with Robo foiling a Nazi scientist from taking over the world (what else?), then jumps to the present, then shifts to 1940 China then back to the present and then to 1974 where we see the late Dr. Carl Sagan offering Robo a trip to Mars and then back to present-day Egypt where Atomic Robo and his team has to stop a mobile 5,000 year old pyramid from destorying Luxor with sunbeams and then that story just ends there when we are brought back to 2005 Italy. Or maybe that pyramid story was supposed to end there? But I wanna know how they defeated the giant mechanical cycloptic mummy, dammit! You have 22 pages of mayhem just waiting to be written right there!

So yeah...I found the jumping around a bit dizzying but not much. I enjoyed it enough. If you like comic books that feature a talking 83 year old robot, Nazi cyborgs, undead mummies, commandos with Phds and a pyramid that moves (and really, who doesn't like all that in their comic books?) then this collection is a keeper.

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