Robo 6.5 — GET IT!

It’s not out in Arizona until, I presume, next week.  I will seethe with jealousy at the people who get to read it this week for the next seven days!  Damn you, Diamond!

Availability appears to be all over the place. Random shops simply didn’t get any, but most did.

Thaaat’s Diamond!

Long story short: our publisher decides how Atomic Robo is distributed.

As usual the reviews are glowing

Rough ballpark on the trade?

Damn Diamond.  No Atomic Robo (I usually get 2 copies, 1 for the collection, 1 for my RPG group’s party treasure).  Looks like I will be getting the digital & 2 copies-Team Robo’s gain, but you are not alone in hating Diamond.

It appears to be available from the Comixology website, but not the iPad app.

That is correct. Purchase it one one place and you have access to it in all places.

At least, that is how it seems to work for me. (all comics, not just Robo.)

That’s a really good point. have you thought about emailing them this idea?

We’d love an atomic Robo Hardcover. We’ve talked about it and everyone likes the idea, but you guys keep forcing us to reprint the TPBs, which uses the money we might have had for hardcovers.

Its a viscous cycle of people enjoying and purchasing our over and over again.

It will happen eventually though.

Holy smokes, a Robo hardcover would be bananas. I just purchased the first two Chew Omnivore editions at my LCS. It’s sparking a new obsession for hardcovers in me. Within me.

Yepper, we are huge Robo fans at the gaming table.

I enjoyed the hell out of this issue. I am going to re-read it now, for the third time.

Thursday was my birthday and getting 6.5 in my pull on Wednesday was the perfect birthday suprise. I really didn’t expect it to come out until next week. Now I shall use my birthday money to buy the trade as soon as it comes out!

 I know. I am mega bummed. Like mega ultra super duper bummed.

Hmph. Another case of Australian retailers getting kicked in the balls by Diamond (Even worse for my local store, as Diamond doesn’t consider them big enough to bother with, and we have to relay via a bigger store in the state capital. Yeesh…) Thank god for the digital option. Loved this story arc, and Alan was suitably creepy. His honest confusion at Robo’s ‘You could have helped them’ line put him in perfect perspective. I am a little sorry Team Sparrow didn’t get to take a more active role in the conclusion though. 

Oof, that’s rough. I buy everything digitally these days, then purchase the physical TPBs if I really enjoyed a series.

I have access to dozens of amazing comic shops, but what I lack is the time to get to them. When I do leave the house, its with the wife and kid to go do something as a family. And while I could spend hours rooting around in a comic shop, they only last about ten minutes. They also enjoy comics, but in different ways. Then I feel rushed. And we all get irritated. It ends up being not much fun for anyone.

The moral of the story is that digital is awesome, and a great supplement to the physical books. I end up purchasing more TPBs than I can read because it was so cheap and easy to sample new work digitally.

Also, because a lot of people ask us this; we make about the same money regardless of how you purchase our stuff. Because it is a non-physical item digital costs much less to make and “distribute”, so the over head is lower. That is why it is typically much cheaper.

(Though yes, we know, Red5 is experimenting with different pricing models with Vol.6 -sorry for that.)

I was a little surprised by the ending.  I could see Robo doing that to Von Helsingard.  Alan was creepy, but yet in a way he’s similar to Robo.

So it all comes down to their fathers?  Tesla, the kindly but quirky hero of electro-physics, counting the letters in his alphabet soup, vs. the absentee Turing.  I mean, that’s the primary difference in their experience of Automatic Intelligence, beyond locomotion.

 I don’t ever use my paypal account, but doesn’t it require either a bank account, CC, or debit card to -get- money through it? And if you have a bank account these days, don’t you have a debit card that will work as a visa or mastercard?  *shrug*

With the spoiler barrier passed:

I knew going into GoSX that Turing had to be involved somehow, though I expected he was going to be an uploaded copy *pissed* at his meatspace treatment. It’s a shame there aren’t enough pages or momentum to have had a history on-page, but that “lost security clearance” was a well-chosen  chilling understatement for those of us in the know.

I don’t perceive this as being any sort of argument, but it made perfect sense to me that Robo would be revolted by ALAN in a different way from any of the other foes we’ve seen, and attempt to destroy him utterly. To regard humanity not with an eye to dominance or insane hatred but with complete indifference – I map it to Harry Frankfurt’s philosophical distinction between a liar and a BSer. I was actually a little surprised not to see a HAL-style disassembly-by-hand.

And since I’m posting anyway, the high point for me was “ALAN, do you know why I’m here?” It chilled me; perfect line, perfect expression transition. A new classic Furious Robo Gutting Past Horror and Talking to a Psychopath Because That’s What He Does moment.

So Brian, I’m curious. Robo obviously experiences emotions. Did Alan have that capability? He seemed to completely lack empathy for the consequences of his intentions, but was that due to his isolation (i.e. he was capable but a sociopath), or did his design not include such constructs?

Yeah, I would have loved to have a couple more pages on this issue. The original draft gave us a better idea of why Turing lost his clearance, but it was one of the many “cool but not necessary” details we had to trim for that one super-dense exchange to fit.

The original ending I had in mind involved a flash forward to Robo giving a speech on Turing’s mistreatment. The idea being: while we can’t change what happened to him, we can change how we treat homosexuality on a societal level today.

That never made it to the script stage though.

We decided early on that Atomic Robo was not a venue for social crusades — we never have Robo save Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr., or stop the Holocaust with a punch to Hitler’s jaw. It’d be crass. I mean, there are definitely respectful contexts for those kinds of stories — Ex Machina’s treatment of  9/11 for example is central to its premise — but Robo is not one of them.

We prefer the activism of Atomic Robo to be in presenting a world we’d like to see with a quiet dignity (never mind the dinosaurs).

In my original version of the ending, Robo build a giant ramp on mainland Japan then jumped the gap to Battleship Island in a nitro-boosted Honda, packed with dynamite.

Robo, the car, and the entire island exploded on impact and Robo landed comically in a smoking crater somewhere in Siberia. He then delivered a lesson via an Animaniacs-style Wheel of Morality.

Brian’s last minute inclusion of a holographic Alan Turing, and all the exposition which that required, forces us to rework the exploding Dukes of Hazard idea. 

But only a little.

Thank you!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Can’t say I’ve ever read Stephen Baxter though.