Atomic-Robo.com

The one thing that disappoints me about Atomic Robo is that it’s one of the few American comics that treats women as people as opposed to objects that exist for male pleasure/interest/attention, but it probably won’t dawn on anyone for a couple more years. There just aren’t many women for us to work with in Helsingard’s Himalayan mountain base, the Nevada desert, a newly discovered 5,000 year old pyramid, NASA in the ’70s, Mars, or an underground abandoned mad scientist’s lair. That takes us through Volume One. Volume Two chronicles Robo’s participation in a part of the European Theater of World War Two and, again, not many women there either (with some exceptions).

Part of the problem is that as a book so heavily steeped in the early 20th century and pulp stories, the eras and settings we’re dealing with were male dominated as a matter of historical fact. It’s hard to work around that. I mean, sure, we put a fully functioning autonomous bipedal robot with human-like intelligence in 1923, so we take some liberties with history, but there’s a saying I can’t quite remember about how patently absurd things are easy to gloss over in fiction, but screwing up the little everyday details will piss off everyone. Like, you can deal with cheap faster-than-light travel without causality violation in Star Trek, but you’d never shut up if they said the Enterprise’s atmosphere was 86% ammonia, just like Earth’s. People can accept Robo as a character because it’s the big lie that let’s the story unfold. They will not accept that he helped the Women’s Paratrooper Squad to kill Hitler or that velcro was invented by a woman.

We do have more women characters planned down the road, but they are unlikely to appear before Volume Four. Interestingly, most of them are antagonists. I think it relates to the largely male dominated history of the 20th century I mentioned earlier. Actual history doesn’t make room for them, so we have to “lie” to put them in the action. And the easiest, most plausible way to get them there is to make them work outside the system built to oppress them. I mean, seriously, read about how they treated the WASPs before, during, and after the war. It would be disingenuous for us to install women in places of great power within the machine of a society that saw fit to send home fallen a WASP “at the expense of her family without any traditional military honors or note of their heroism”. It’s not like this kind of thinking was an isolated event. In many ways, being a second class citizen in the early 20th century would have been a step up for most women. Looking at modern comics, I honestly question how far we’ve actually come.

I hestitate to call Atomic Robo a feminist book just because it dares to treat female secondary characters exactly how the male secondary characters are treated, but against the backdrop of The Rest Of American Comics, maybe that’s all it takes to qualify.