Playing With History
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.