All the line art for Volume 2 is done; Ronda is coloring the fifth and final issue; and soon Jeff will make my dialog look like it’s worth reading. We are on track to have everything ready on schedule. Maybe a little early. Team Robo loves you that much. Kinda like a Skrull god.

Volume 2 Issue #3 comes out in a couple weeks – Oct 15th, mark your damn calendars! I’m curious what the reaction will be. Every issue of this volume is faster and crazier than the one before it. Issue #3 is the divide between the somewhat realistic walking tank action of the first two issues and the vat-grown soldiers and intercontinental rail guns you’ll find on the other side. Y’know, the stuff They keep out of the history books.

Meanwhile, I have turned my attentions toward Volume 3: Atomic Robo and the Shadow From Beyond Time. It’s another five issue series. The structure is something of a mix between Vol 1’s time-hopping and the thematic cohesion of Vol 2. Which basically translates to time hops starting in the 1920s and ending in the modern day with a common thread that ties every issue together.

This just in: we’re participating in FCBD ‘09 with an 8-page story. I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about it, but I will ‘cause it involves a character I’ve been trying to introduce since the first volume, Dr. Dinosaur. I’m not sure what else Red 5 will pack with our story, but I assume it’ll be some of the new titles they’ve got in the works. Like Brothers Gemini why not. I read the first issue a few days ago and would be very pleased if Robo’s FCBD story were to be used as a gateway drug for it. There’s another title they’re trying to get into print, a webcomic, that could benefit hugely from some delicious FCBD exposure. I’ve been wanting to tell you guys about it since San Diego, but I’m sworn to secrecy on that one for now. And, no, it’s not 8-bit Theater, it’s a webcomic that deserves to be in print.

As the myths go, someone asked Scott what he thought about Kirkman’s little speech. This was a couple weeks ago now, so in internet time it took place somewhere in the previous Ice Age. But Scott promised we’d talk about it, and so we are talking about it!

I’m not sure I have much of a response to it. I mean, super paraphrased here, he said that comics creators should concentrate on creator-owned works and to stop thinking of working for Marvel or DC as the goal.

I guess Scott and I are ahead of the curve since we never had any real interest in working for anyone but ourselves. I mean, if Marvel or DC wants to toss some work to either of us, and we can do it without interrupting Robo’s schedule, and it’s something we’d enjoy working on, then sure, why not? Their money is as green as anyone else’s. But it was never and will never be the goal for either of us.

Kirkman didn’t say anything I haven’t heard creators talk about privately and publicly for years, and that was before I was “in” the business. These were probably sentiments that were rumbling around several years before I ever caught wind of them. What’s interesting about Kirkman giving this message is that he’s in a fancy position at one of the larger American comics publishers. Maybe now the message will be heard by the people who need to hear it: the other publishers. Maybe he can help to frame the message in a way that interests them. Because, right now, the big plan is to gut them of their major talents. Perhaps you can imagine why these publishers don’t do anything to encourage that?

Something’s got to be done though. American comics is an industry in the decline. The only thing keeping it afloat right now is the ridiculous influx of interest and funds from Hollywood, and when that bubble bursts…well, I don’t know. Some folks seem to think it won’t be that bad. That comics will weather it much better than the ‘90s speculator bust. I have my doubts. The speculator craze drove readers away. The readers we have left today aren’t buying enough copies to honestly justify about half the titles out there. Once you remove Hollywood money (or the potential for it) from the equation, you’re going to see a lot of titles and publishers go missing inside of a year. What kind of effect is that going to have on your average reader? Your average retailer? I like to think we’d survive, but I rather like a thriving comics industry better and I just don’t see that being sustained for very long. If I’m wrong, man, that’d be great.

There is one major problem with the “only do creator-owned work”. And this from someone who only does creator-owned work. There’s not a tremendous market for it. Kirkman’s Invincible and The Walking Dead are very popular indie books, but combined they sell a fraction of the number of Amazing Spider-Man comics that are sold in a week. This isn’t an indication of quality, it’s just that very few indie creators have the kind of forty years of promotion and branding that Spider-Man and its ilk enjoy. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not economically feasible, at all, for most creators to go the indie route. Atomic Robo is probably the indie success story of 2007, but after #6 went on sale two things became immediately evident.

1) People loved Robo and they wanted more.

2) It was mathematically impossible to us to afford to do any more ever.

For a book in its position (unknown title, unknown character, unknown creators, unknown publisher), I think Robo broke sales records for this particular era of the industry. I consider it to be exactly the kind of book this industry needs. Reviewers, bloggers, and readers agree. And it still wasn’t earning enough to be self-sufficient. Let me be absolutely clear on this point: Red 5 Comics made Volume 2 possible. Without their support, I’d have long since gone bankrupt and there’d be no new Robo comics for you.

So, that’s the kind of barrier that’s facing creator owned works. When one of the best titles to debut in years can’t keep itself afloat, there’s a problem.

From my position as an indie creator and as a retailer, the problem appears to be that there’s too many of the wrong kind of reader. I’m talking about the lifers who stick to Marvel and/or DC. People who routinely shell out $50+ per week on books they don’t even really enjoy, but who are afraid they might “waste” $3 on something they “might” not like when they acknowledge to throwing away $50+ on books they largely dislike.

There’s too many of that kind of reader because Marvel and DC did everything they could to create them. These were the kinds of readers they needed to get through the long cold winter. And now we’re stuck with them. These are the readers who are keeping the industry’s output in a perpetual infancy. These are the readers who have built the comics market into a giant barrier that actively discourages exactly the kinds of new content and new readers the industry needs.

That’s how I see it anyway.

I don’t know if Kirkman’s plan, insofar as there is one, is the solution. But if it gets publishers together to talk about it - or, hell - if it just raises fan awareness of how the industry works and why it’s in their interests for us to change that, then that’s good enough for me.

I think I worry too much, and by that I mean both in frequency and, I guess, scope.

For instance, I worry that people won’t like Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War. As much as Scott’s art evolved over the course of our first volume, it’s evolved that much over again between that one and this one. It’s a huge improvement, and Ronda’s colors are – and I can’t believe this was possible – an even better match than before. And the stories this time around are different. There’s less emphasis on the comedy that everyone went nuts over in volume one. Then again, I only considered Issue #4 to be our “funny” issue last time around, so, who knows, maybe volume 2 is hilarious afterall. Anyway, I’ve made a living by entertaining people long enough now to know that any change, no matter how good it is, will create a very small minority to become incredibly vocal about how they hate the changes forever.

So, I worry about that. It’s probably a small thing to worry about, but it’s par for the course for me. I worried over the reception of every single issue for volume one. “This is it,” I’d say to anyone near enough to hear me. “This is the one where they figure out we’re morons who don’t know what we’re doing.”

“Who are you?” they’d say. Good times, good times.

At least that’s worrying about something within my sphere of influence. I can’t control what people like, but at least I can put forth my best effort and claim victory if it works out or blame everyone else for being uncultured slogs if they don’t like it.

Whatever a “slog” is.

But the other things I tend to worry about are a little out of my control. Like the energy crisis. Which leads to worrying about the stability of civilization. Which leads to worrying about the fate of all human knowledge. I mean, as far as we know, we are the smartest things in the universe. I don’t want that to be the case, but so far that’s what all the evidence points to. Don’t we then owe it to, uh, everything, to try to understand it?

I mean, you can make a case that even if intelligent life is incredibly, incredibly rare, there must be other life at least as smart as us out there somewhere in the universe because it’s really quite huge. But the problem is that evolution doesn’t have an end goal, it is merely a process by which organisms continually better adapt themselves to their environment. Intelligence is by no means a guaranteed result of “enough” evolution. The universe could be teaming with life no more intelligent than mold. It’s a very real possibility that we are it. And if we aren’t, there’s no guarantee that intelligence will necessarily lead to the development of a scientific method much less advanced technology. And if they do, the likelihood of a global catastrophe hitting at some point during the civilization’s lifespan is far greater than the likelihood of there being a civilization in the first place.

So, yeah. I worry about this kind of thing a lot.

In lieu of actual content tonight, I’ll just assume Scott or I said something insightful or interesting in one of the following interviews.

Alternate Reality Podcast and The Gigcast interviewed us back-to-back on the same night. We’re going to have to get Skype so we don’t sound all garbled and delayed and dumb on these things.

And if podcasts aren’t your bag, then newseedcomics.com has got you covered there as well.

Scott’s got some interesting thoughts on Volume 2 regarding fiction, history, and how to mix them without insulting the reader or the source material.

As should be obvious, history is a big part of Atomic Robo. We’ve always sought to present history with a sci-fi twist but without trivializing the efforts of people who lived through the real events. Scott and I both had grandfathers who fought in WW2 and these men were heroes to us – and would have been with or without their military service – so we felt a personal need to be extra careful with the World War 2 content of this volume.

Mostly, we manage to respect history when we play with it by having Robo’s adventures happen on the fringes. It’s our theory that tackling history in this way is the best way to tell entertaining stories in historical settings without invalidating the actual contributions of real persons. It also has a side benefit of being Anti-Forrest Gump Insurance. The last thing Scott and I want is for Robo to be at the center stage of every major moment of the 20th century. He’s an important person, yes, but the forces that mold history and shape the future are far larger than any single person. If he’s at the fringes of history, then he can’t be perceived as the primary motivator of it.

An example of fringe historical adventure would be Issue 1.1 (first volume, first issue). It’s a classic early anti-Nazi pre-war pulp comic. It was an easy story to do because it was entirely fictional. While the Nazis had an interest in Himalayan peoples and history, and there was genuine interest in vril-like occultism, they never built a mountain base there to research it, so we were free to go nuts. You can’t mangle a history that never happened. Conversely, Issue 1.4 put Robo right in the middle of the Viking I mission to Mars. He’s on the rocket—not exactly a position on the fringe. But nothing Robo does for NASA lessens the contributions of the scientists and engineers responsible for Viking I and II’s successes. He is literally there for the ride. It’s not a story about how Robo saved unmanned space exploration, it’s a story about how there’s nothing for him to do. The men and women of NASA get the job done at every step.

So, we had to find a way to put Robo into World War 2 without trivializing the sacrifices made by the soldiers on both sides and the civilians trapped between them. Again, our theory of fringe historical adventure seemed like the best path to take. The danger was in going too fringe. I mean, if we had Robo battling 50ft tall Juggernaut Mechanazis, that’s clearly something that never happened (like the premise for Issue 1.1), so we should be in the clear. Right? Well, we couldn’t shake the feeling that it was insultingly fictional. As if we would be saying that the real WW2 wasn’t “interesting” enough.

One could maybe argue that we were over thinking it at this point, but really, you can go to just about any other big action comic book to find aliens and giant warbots. We wanted to do something a little different. It was always our goal to be as realistic as possible. Or, perhaps more accurately, to be as plausible as possible. Yeah, our main character is a walking impossibility, but other than that we aim for plausibility. And frankly, the Germans just didn’t have the time/resources/tech to build giant robots. Intercontinental cannons and orbital weapons are another matter, of course…

In the end, we decided to give Robo missions that went alongside actual World War 2 events. Issue 2.1 concerns the Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky. Robo is tasked to destroy key targets concurrent to the invasion. An interesting dualism kind of generated itself in this arc: the actual invasion is a background event to Robo, while Robo’s mission is a background event to the invasion. I just now noticed that, but I’m totally taking credit for it if anyone thinks it’s cool.

When we first started thinking about a World War 2 arc, we were talking about this exact set up for Operation Overlord and the Normandy landing. But, really, everyone does Normandy. We wanted to help raise awareness that there was more to WW2 than Normandy. Hell, there’d have been no Normandy without the costly lessons learned in Sicily, but that’s another topic altogether.

The invasion of Sicily and the Italian Campaign that followed are these fascinating, pivotal moments in the war, but they’ve been forced to the fringe of public awareness by the Hollywood-ization of World War 2 and an almost fetishistic focus on Normandy. In essence, even though Robo’s missions are critical to the success of the war effort, we’ve managed to put him at the fringe of a fringe. Hopefully, he won’t step on any toes there. Dude weights a quarter of a ton, it’d really hurt.

Most people who work in comics are comics fans. It only makes sense. I mean, you don’t become a auto mechanic if you hate cars. And this is what’s wrong with most comics. They’re written and drawn by people who think comics are doin’ just fine. If Atomic Robo has any kind of advantage, it’s that its co-creators kind of hate comics.

See, Scott and I collected comics in the early ‘90s because that’s when we were stupid teenagers. The state of the industry and the benchmark for quality in those days eventually pissed us off and we both gave up on comics. It would be years before we’d come back to them, and it would be a slow and grudging effort.

We enjoy the idea of comics and take great pleasure in a number of titles from a number of companies and creators, so maybe it’s unfair to say that we “hate” comics. More accurately, we hate the reality of the state of American comics today; what comics have become in an overall gestalt sense; what people come to expect out of a comic. We see so many titles making the same mistakes that pushed us away from comics in the ‘90s, and the tragedy is that these are wholly unnecessary elements and easily remedied. But it feels like no one ever does.

So, when we were brainstorming on what we wanted Atomic Robo to be, we came up with a list of rules. It was nothing formal, but things would come up in conversation, like:

“Man, I hate it when comics do X.”

“I know! Let’s never do that.”

“Agreed.”

So, a little while ago, I put together a list of things that Team Robo guarantees you’ll never see in one of our comics.

In no particular order, Team Robo promises you:

No angst: Loading characters up with angst was a revolutionary move on the part of Marvel Comics back in the ‘60s. I haven’t looked at a calendar today, but that was four decades ago. There are other emotions and motivations available to characters. Atomic Robo is not a comic that will be 100% sunshine and jokes, it would idiotic to portray a complicated life of 80+ years as a nonstop party with scientists, but we aren’t going to delve into melodrama either. You are not going to see Robo mope about his lack of emotions, or pine to be human, or throw a tantrum over daddy issues, or whatever childish nonsense passes for characterization in most comics these days.

No “cheesecake”: This is nothing more than Scott and I having the audacity to treat women like human beings. I mean, come on, 99 times out of a 100, there is no reason at all to frame a panel from the perspective of a girl’s ass. Grow up already.

No reboots: They’re frustrating, unnecessary, and a jarring reminder that all fiction is a thinly veiled series of lies. The major events of Robo’s lifetime were plotted years before we worked on the first page of the first issue. Anything Scott and I add to that has to fit organically into the existing framework. If it doesn’t fit as naturally as if it’d been there all along, then we skip it and move to the next idea. This is a much better solution than making a deal that the character would never make with the devil he’d never deal with to change “one” thing that alters the entire universe in ways that no one in charge seems to fully comprehend or address. Ahem. Everything that happens will fit into the larger mythos; everything that happens will happen for a reason; and nothing that happens can be “undone.”

No filler: This one’s pretty simple. Why should we devote a month of our short lives to creating an issue if it isn’t worth reading? And then why should we try to sell you an issue that isn’t worth buying? The main source of filler issues seems to be due to moving set pieces from the aftermath of one event to set up the next one. Since we have no reason to follow Robo’s life as a linear chain of events, we’re free to jump straight from one adventure to the next. Maybe Robo fights a sea monster. Maybe we follow the lives of Action Scientists when off duty. But it ain’t filler.

No delays: This one’s even simpler. The industry’s gotten so bad about delays that they have become the norm. No one is surprised any more when a comic is delayed. And when a comic has no delays, there’s that unspoken “yet” or “in a while” tacked at the end. Red 5 Comics was constantly praised, praised, merely for delivering books on time. What kind of industry is this? Think about it for a minute. Imagine if you were lauded by co-workers and supervisors just for showing up to work on time. It’s ridiculous. We could make more money if we gave you 12 issues a year, but we take a break between each mini-series to build up a buffer on the next one. We’d rather deliver nine issues a year exactly on time than promise you twelve issues and deliver one of them late.

Pick up any Big Two title and you’ve got a 50% chance of finding one, some, or all of those rules broken between its covers. Pick it up for a year, and it’s a 90% chance. This is what’s wrong with comics today. I mean, honestly. What kind of maladjust goes out of his way to read melodramatic borderline misogynist stories with incomprehensible continuities that constantly shift when there’s a story at all if it shows up on time?

It’s not that people don’t like what mainstream comics are about. NBC’s Heroes proved that. So it’s got to be something else. Do you really think Heroes would’ve taken off if every scene involving Claire or Nikki was shot at ass- or boob-level? If the events of previous episodes changed with every new episode? If the show occasionally aired an hour, or a day, or six weeks late?

You can blame cable television, and DVDs, home entertainment systems, and PC and console games for the decline of comics readership. I don’t doubt for one second that those contribute to the problem. But, maybe, just maybe, people sought other forms of entertainment because it is a rare comic that treats itself or its readers with respect.

Too bad it’s not quite as cool as it sounds.

Apparently there’s a scene in the upcoming Superhero Movie that takes place in a comic book convention where Red 5 Comics has a booth. Among the booth’s props is a 6ft tall cut out of Robo from the first printing of Issue #1. No idea what kind of screen time we’ll have, but it’s got to be tough to miss something like that.

If there was any kind of immediate feedback system in theaters, I’d ask folks to watch it. The message, “I paid eight bucks just to see Atomic Robo in a movie,” would not be a subtle one. But, alas, there is no such immediate feedback system in place.

Continuity is consistency. A finished film appears to be a consistent whole because continuity exists between camera angles, between scenes, objects within the scenes, the characters, and the plots they drive. Hell, the very motion of “motion pictures” is an illusion your brain manufactures from the continuity between individual frames.

Continuity is the clear path of cause and effect from origin to conclusion. Without continuity there is anarchy. It would be fair to say that continuity is the basic building block of all storytelling.

So why is continuity such a huge problem for comics?

Well, The Big Two have made continuity their problem. This isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just the inevitable result of maintaining a cache of un-aging characters for five to seven decades with hundreds of creative teams overseen by dozens of editors. Today’s comics creators and editors are in the ineviable position of figuring what to do to maintain continuities that were never meant to be maintained.

Good luck with all that.

So far DC’s decision has been to nearly completely erase their existing history to reboot the multi-uni-multiverse every so often (and more and more often). They can’t be faulted for doing it the first time because, hey, it had never been done before. They couldn’t hope to have foreseen some of the inconsistencies it would cause. They can even be forgiven for doing it a second time because “Surely,” they no doubt thought, “We figured out what went wrong and this time we can make it stick!

Short version: they didn’t. The third reboot is where it’s fair for us to make fun of them for it. I guess DC’s reboot policy is, “Fool me seven times, shame on you. Fool me eight or more times, shame on me.”

Marvel’s solution tends to work better. They just quietly ignore and/or update the past as needed. Iron Man, for example, originated in a Vietnam-like war and battled Cold War-like enemies. Today his origins are tied to the Middle East and he fights terrorist-like enemies. Same actor, different stage.

Marvel recently attempted a DC-type “clean slate” reboot, in miniature, with the Spider-Man storyline One More Day, which is what got me thinking about continuity today.

If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, check out the multi-part interviews with Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada and see Spider-Man writer J. Michael Straczynski’s perspective from the other side.

TL;DR version – “We think we should see other people.”

To say that reaction to this story has been “mixed” would be, well, lying. The reaction is negative in a big way and by a large margin. It’s probably impossible to find out for certain, but I bet reaction would be more favorable if the story wasn’t a DC-type continuity reboot or if, at least, it arose naturally from the characters instead of spontaneously arriving care of left field.

I think part of what riles fans so much about these kinds of events is that they are meant to “solve” a particular (and sometimes merely perceived) problem with continuity when all they really do is bring to light that comics characters’ continuity is very poorly maintained when viewed with the slightly scrutiny. It calls into question the consistency of the character (or setting) as a whole. It breaks the illusion.

Atomic Robo is a reason to love comics.

Atomic Robo is one of IGN’s best new titles of 2007.

I finished the script for our FCBD ‘08 offering. Robo has to stop a global radioactive crisis in sixteen pages. Can he do it?! The story takes place in the ‘60s so, yeah, it probably turns out okay in the end.

This was probably the hardest time I’ve had with a Robo script. Turns out that sixteen pages is an incredibly awkward length. It’s way too long for a quick fire mini-comic (of the type you’ll see in the backs of Atomic Robo #3 – 6) and way too short to indulge in slowing things down for a moment as in a full length story. On average I have to write every page about three to five times while searching for the right pace between action beats, plot beats, and comedy beats. Some of this re-writing is done in my head, but either way it takes time. It was the same with this FCBD script. Then I’d get to the end of Act I, realize it was moving way too slow, and then re-write the whole Act. Repeat for Act II. And for Act III. It was a pain in the ass, but I’m very happy with how it turned out. Scott’s done a few pages already and they’re wonderful. I was so jealous of the quality of his work in Killer of Demons and Punisher War Journal #14/15 after he finished Atomic Robo #6. So it’s great to have him back on Robo again after nine months of powering up.

The issue is a bit of an experiment for us. We’re working in a more cinematic format. I tend to think in cinematic terms when scripting – my initial scripts were written in screenplay format because that’s what I was most familiar with – because I’d taken several years’ worth of film courses in my crazy college days. It’s a more regimented layout, but on the other hand it frees us up to do some interesting shots. And I feel like I’m better able to utilize the page. It’s like 8-bit trained me to get something done on every page and this new format taps right into all of that training. I don’t know if we’ll stick with it, but it’s been a fun format to work in so far.

What’s next on my plate? Why, writing Atomic Robo Vol, 2 Issue #2, of course! There’s no guarantee that we’ll see a second volume – we need you guys to support the next three issues of the current mini-series for that to happen – but it can’t hurt to be prepared just in case we screw up and succeed.

Blog thingie appears edit-able and HTML enabled. Happiness.

Marvel just opened a digital distribution service. It’s not quite what it should be, but I suppose they’ve got to figure out for themselves that the internet isn’t there to destroy their business.

Things to Fix

Things They Got Right

Just seeing what this thing does.