A while back I took a look at Atomic Robo, an interesting character and series whose pulp-inspired covers caught my eye. Atomic Robo is an intelligent and self-aware robot built by Nikola Tesla in the 1920s. He leads a group of “action scientists” who work for his company, Tesladyne, in a series of wild adventures.
Atomic Robo was created by writer Brian Clevinger and artist Scott Wegener as multiple online mini-series that were later collected into a trade paperback. A companion series with art by others is titled Atomic Robo Presents Real Science Adventures, which also usually has stories with other characters. They recently changed publishers to IDW, who now publishes both the comics and the collections, and the new comics are also serialized online.
Atomic Robo is the star, but many of the secondary characters are very interesting, such as Jenkins. Robo is a very human character, having a sense of humor (he is apparently based on Clevinger’s grandfather), but also a strong sense of ethics.
Since the last time I posted on the character, he’s gone through some strange adventures. One took him to Marconi’s secret science city in Venezuela that involved Dr. Dinosaur and a race of crystal people. Robo is actually tossed back in time where he confronts threats in the Old West, maybe becoming the origin of the legend of “Ironhide.”
In present time, Majestic12, the secret government agency that wants Tesla tech, emerged as “Taskforce ULTRA” and takes over Tesladyne. But when they mess up a biomega threat (basically giant monsters, kaiju style), prevented by Robo who has come back from the past the long way, they are shutdown. Maybe. Tesladyne tries to rebuild out in New Mexico. The current storyline deals with a new group of student-scientists who have joined Tesladyne, along with a new artificial intelligence created by Alan Turing and discovered and rescued by Robo. Plus Jenkins returns with a warning of a possible invasion by the vampire dimension!
We also got a couple of new stories in Real Science Adventures. The first, “The Flying She-Devils in Raid on Marauder Island,” about the adventures of an all-girl flying group in the post-World War II Pacific. The second, “The Nicodemus Job,” is pretty interesting. It’s a “caper story” set during the Byzantine Empire. A disgraced lawman gathers a group of unusual characters to steal back valuable documents from the Library. But they are betrayed at the end by their patron. I really hope we see a further story with this group. By itself this would be a fun movie.
I read the new stories when they appear on the website, then get the trade paperback collections. I’ve enjoyed this series, and there are some real gems in this. It’s a fun series, though it is serious at times.
