Technicalities
Scott’s about a quarter done with Issue 2.1 and I’m about half done with Issue 2.2. Despite what everyone has said so far, this second volume will actually be the first time we see Robo fight Nazis. It’s true!
Issue 1.1 pitted Robo against Baron Heinrich von Helsingard, a supergenius working with the Nazis. The mooks Robo fights in that issue aren’t wearing German uniforms or using German firearms. Their helmets even have little “H”s on them to brand the soldiers as Helsingard’s own personnel. There are a couple Nazi banners in the base, but there’s just as many Helsingard banners too. And, when Helsingard gets powered up, he talks about how his power and glory over mankind — almost like he wasn’t exactly loyal to the Nazis…?
Now, all those “hints” were very easy to overlook. I’m pretty sure everyone did, so don’t feel bad if you missed them. It wasn’t vital to the story for the reader to distinguish between Actual Nazis and Working For The Nazis, so we never went out of our way to establish the difference. It would have made the otherwise rapid fire action/comedy of that issue come to a screeching and awkward halt. “So why bother to make them non-Nazis in the first place?” you might ask. Because of the larger continuity. It’s not important to the reader now, but it will be one day. And in the larger scheme of things, it makes no sense for Helsingard to be a Nazi. Helsingard is…well, he’s not “bigger” than the Nazi party, but it would be accurate to say that he viewed them as his pawns. We’ll explore more of Helsingard’s role in the 19th and 20th centuries in later issues, but for now let’s just say that it benefited the Baron to have German resources available to him at that time. All you needed to know for the story to make sense was that bad guys were working on a superweapon; it would be bad for everyone in the world if they got it; and Robo was in the unique position to stop them.
Interestingly, this is the same set up as the FCBD story. Only this time it’s the early ’60s and a different scientist who’d been working with the Communists. One could accuse me of being lazy about my set ups, and one would not be entirely incorrect. But, honestly, if you are a government with relatively easy access to Robo, you are not going to ignore him as a potential resource. One has to wonder how many times Robo’s been coerced into this kind of service. It’s abundantly clear from panel 1 of page 1 that Robo is unhappy about the military coming to him for a mission in 1961. Yet he seems completely on board for his military actions in the ’40s. That’s quite a turn around.
And that’s a big part of the challenge and fun for me as a writer: Robo doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That’s actually one of our smaller rules that complement our big rules. I’ll have to cook up a post about them sometime. Anyway, Robo’s attitude and opinions change over time. It can be pretty subtle because he’s got to maintain a certain level consistency. I mean, there’s always a baseline amount of delighted arrogance to him. But his experiences mold who he is at any given point. And since we skip from one time period to another, it’s a bit of a juggling act on my part to make sure his motivations, experiences, and goals line up without contradictions. It’s kind of like putting together a puzzle made of discrete pieces of time instead of images in space.
It should be fun for the reader to watch the continuity resolve itself as the puzzle becomes more complete with every issue. It’ll probably be easy to overlook at first. We don’t spoon feed you. Exposition is clumsy and a barrier to new readers. Ideally, Robo’s world will build around you without you noticing (like Issue 1.1 and the Nazi-Helsingard thing). Once we release enough issues, the mythos of the Roboverse will reach a critical threshold and you’ll experience little eureka moments when you reread older issues given the new context afforded by more recent ones.
That’s the theory anyway!
