Not Nostalgia
One might get the impression that we’re steeped in nostalgia ’round here, what with phrases like “retro-future” and “eye to the past” plastered up at the top of the page.
Well, no.
Atomic Robo combines two of my favorite things: history and robots. I put Robo’s origin as far back in time as I could allow myself (1923 for you heathens out there) and still it pains me that he is unable to take part in the Old West. Sure, Robo being invented in 1840 is every bit as impossible as inventing him in 1923, but by the ’20s we’d had our minds collectively blown by crazy ideas about the cosmos and light that made no intuitive sense. It was a time when the most absurd things were becoming possible. Plus, electricity. An autonomous steampowered ‘bot isn’t going to get much mileage. He’d probably forget everything he knew every time he ran out of coal. It’s just poor design, people!
We tend to talk about Robo as a return to the energy, optimism, and fun of the old pulps. Again, sounds like nostalgia, but no. We’re just admitting what most people tend to dance around.
You play video games, but you probably don’t bother thinking about how the game mechanics of your very cutting edge games are just slight variations on the game mechanics they invented thirty years ago. Often the variation is skipped entirely but they sure do make them look nice. I’m not saying this to slight game makers today, this is just how things work. People in Western civilization have been writing stories for thousands of years, but basically, we’re re-writing The Odyssey, itself a re-write of who-knows-what. Even the crazy ultra-double-plus-post-modern stuff is just a reaction to more traditional methods and is, therefore, as tied to them as anything else.
Modern comics has its origins in the pulps. Robo goes right back to that source, pulls out all the fun parts, and wraps them up for modern audiences. Like the tagline up there says, we are looking forward but with an eye to the past.
So, to keep going with our video game comparison, when we say Robo brings back that pulp “vibe”, we mean we’re stripping away all the unnecessary excess and getting right to the gameplay. Think of us as Tetris. You don’t play Tetris now because it makes you think warm fuzzy thoughts about when you used to play it. You play it now because it’s as solid a game now as it was then.
Atomic Robo #1 is a perfect example of this. Origin story? No. Anything you need to know about Robo is summed up in two sentences on the inside front cover. The origin story is page goddamn zero. By page two he’s been offered a mission on the other side of the world and on page three he’s on that side of the world. The next nineteen pages are just fun. Not stupid, not frivolous, just pure enjoyment. I guarantee that you will break out in a big goofy smile at least once while reading this issue. But, hey, you’ll find out next week!
