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Atomic Robo and the Ghost of Station X #5 should have been released in the first week of January 2012. But it will not go on sale until February. Our hope is that it will be in the first week of February, but it’s still too early to tell.

And it’s all our fault!

The short version!

October screwed us. Scott works about 6 days a week on this stupid comic book, minimum, but October wrecked that. A combination of conventions, travel, random family stuff, and the day-to-day bullshit of, well, day-to-day bullshit killed most of his working days that month.

Even this would not have been a problem, so guarded is Team Robo vis a vis scheduling and buffers and such, except as a result every single page of Issue 5 was then pushed into that dreaded November – December corridor.

I mean, I guess we could’ve had Scott slack on that last issue. Just scribble anything to get it through the pipeline. But could we? Really? Just as we promised not to deliver a late issue, we also promised to never deliver less than our best issue.

Caught between those mutually exclusive goals we chose to give you our very best a little later. Really, there wasn’t much of a choice. Being late with an issue is a temporary embarrassment, but having a shitty one clog up the trade is something that never goes away.

We hope to have your understanding and that this hasn’t strained your patience too much.

In the meantime, we don’t intend to make a habit of this. The treacherous nature of October is unlikely to change in the short term. We already adjusted our 2012 schedule to account for it.

Short version: we’re teaming up with Evil Hat Productions to make our comic book into an interactive game of your mind. And also the minds of some friends.

It’s probably a sad statement about our business savvy that most creators can talk about their projects in terms of the movie deals they’re bound to get. Scott and I? Even before the first issue came out, all we wanted was a tabletop roleplaying game. Y’know, because comics just wasn’t niche enough.

All we can say right now is the game will use a version of the FATE system to be designed by the brilliant Mike Olson. Our plan is to emphasize accessibility, ease of play, and fun so anyone can pick it up and run a game even if they’ve never touched FATE or RPGs at all. And I’ll be contributing a ton of information about Robo’s world. Like, our Timeline, only quite a bit more so.

I got a call from DC Comics earlier this year. They wanted me to helm a new on-going Firestorm series in the wake of his increased visibility in Blackest Night and Brightest Day.

As luck would have it, I’d just finished writing Atomic Robo and the Ghost of Station X a week or so previous, so I could do this without the slightest worry of impeding our progress on Robo. So, hey. Why not, right?

My editors and I went back and forth on a six issue arc. The following represents the final document that got me the “OKAY” to begin scripting. I completed the first issue and outlined the second before the reboot derailed what we were doing. Alas.
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