Big News Day

Last Updated on Thursday, 27 March 2008 01:20 Written by Brian! Thursday, 27 March 2008 12:53

First, Red 5 is working on its first movie deal! It will be very cool to watch this unfold from a semi-insider perspective.

Second, Atomic Robo and The Fightin’ Scientists of Tesladyne, the first trade paperback collecting Issues #1 – 6 (including all pin-ups and bonus stories) is now available to order! It should hit shelves June 11th, but you might want to claim yours sooner rather than later. The Robo buzz keeps building. I mean, Issue #6 pretty much went to a second printing the day it came out.

By the way, so you don’t have to go searching through Previews for the order number, it’s APR084084.

Progress Report

Last Updated on Friday, 21 March 2008 12:27 Written by Brian! Thursday, 20 March 2008 09:41

Not a lot going on, really. Team Robo pushes forward into Volume 2, Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War. Scott’s pumping out the best pages I’ve ever seen him do — the way he does on every goddamn issue — while I wrapped up the script for Issue 2.2 last weekend and started 2.3 shortly thereafter.

The first two issues are all about storming Sicily and killing the hell out of some top secret Nazi weapons. These are easily our most action packed comics yet. Especially Issue 2.2, as it’s pretty much an action scene leading to another action scene leading to another action scene. Oh, don’t worry, we squeeze in ample character moments and one liners for you folks out there obsessed with content. Still, I predict we’ll see a fair amount of complaints about how these two issues read way too fast. Sorry, hypothetical reviewer, you can find your decompressed comics filled with turgid dialog elsewhere. We’re too busy making a robot punch other robots to bother with that junk.

IGN actually had an interesting point in their latest review. The short version: “While every issue has been outstanding in its own way, they’ve also felt very similar to each other, which could present problems if Clevinger and Wegener don’t mix things up a bit with the upcoming ongoing.”

I think this is an example of looking for something to complain about for the sake of a review, but still, it’s an interesting observation. Are we overly formulaic?

One of our goals is that Atomic Robo should be the most pick-up-able book on the racks. Every issue is meant to be a jumping on point. We accomplish this partially by not being tied to a convoluted continuity that makes no sense even if you already know it, and partially by making every issue serve as a microcosm of the series as a whole. This is my Dragnet Theory of Writing, a concept so important I capitalized it and will blather about in greater detail another day.

I do think the concern that issues could be too similar to one another would be a bigger problem if we were doing an ongoing. But Atomic Robo was never going to come out twelve months a year. The game plan from day one has been to release mini-series after mini-series with short gaps between them. Each mini-series will revolve around a particular era, or theme, or foe while adding to the overall mythos. This, and our ability to hop around the twentieth century while doing it, ought to keep things sufficiently stirred up without compromising our goals vis a vis accessibility.

Volume 2, for example, is six stand-alone issues that make up three loosely connected story arcs that can each be summed up as “Robo takes out a top secret Nazi superweapon.” I mean, it’s basically Issue 1.1 times six, right? But we go from a WW2 beach invasion to a midnight train heist to a laboratory of horrors to a covert mission to save London gone wrong in those six issues. Three very different adventures all spun out of the same basic premise. So, are we too formulaic? I dunno, certainly doesn’t seem any worse than “Batman fights crime.”

Interview Madness

Last Updated on Sunday, 16 March 2008 12:32 Written by Brian! Sunday, 16 March 2008 12:32

In lieu of actual content tonight, I’ll just assume Scott or I said something insightful or interesting in one of the following interviews.

Alternate Reality Podcast and The Gigcast interviewed us back-to-back on the same night. We’re going to have to get Skype so we don’t sound all garbled and delayed and dumb on these things.

And if podcasts aren’t your bag, then newseedcomics.com has got you covered there as well.