Time for another Atomic Robo hardcover edition! This time we're doing ATOMIC ROBO AND THE AGENTS OF C.H.A.N.G.E.
The final product will look something like this!
We've also got standees, prints, original art, and more! You've been here long enough, you know the routine. And definitely check out that campaign video, it's my least shitpostiest one yet.
WE'RE BACK, BABY.
Almost!
Pages from our newest volume, Atomic Robo and the Peril of Prometheus, will begin to go online in one week. We can't thank you folks enough for the patience and support you've shown since the Great Hiatus of 2023 began. You have no idea how excited we are to finally be making and sharing comics again. It's like we've been holding our breath for a whole year. Let's never be apart that long again. Deal?
And just to keep you updated on the rest of the September to Remember, our online store is still scheduled to come back online in the next few weeks. The next waves of deliveries for our recent Kickstarter campaigns will begin to go out the door as well, so make sure to lock in your shipping charges and add-ons through Pledge Manager!
And we're still serializing the failed Martian invasion of 1897 and the rise of Emperor Dracula with a new chapter over on Patreon every weekend.
A quick update so you know what's happenin' here at ye olde Atomic Robo HQ.
All inventory arrived at the new warehouse where they have been preparing and organizing everything to get us back in biz. They offered to make it "back in biznasty" but we were like, no guys, don't hurt yourselves. Currently, we expect the new online store to go live in September. For folks who completed their Pledge Manager surveys after everything was packed up to move to the new warehouse, your rewards will start to go out at that time as well.
Meanwhile, Scott has been churning out new pages like a beast! We are on track to begin releasing all new comics online in September. We knew when it began in 2023 that this would be the longest hiatus of our career. And, with any luck, that'll be true forever. Thank you so much for the patience and kindness you have extended to us. We can't wait to show you what we've been cooking up.
If you want something to read right now, check out our Patreon where every week I post a new chapter from the novel I'm working on. It is a bold work exploiting two of the most popular public domain works from the 1890s. Yes, that's right, it's War of the Worlds, only the germs don't stop them — DRACULA DOES!
Okay, folks. We're moving our entire inventory to another warehouse/fulfillment outfit this summer. That means it's time for A MONDO SALE to make sure the best fans in the world (that's you folks) can grab everything you want before we have to shut everything down for a few months.
Another way to look at this is that we're actually bribing you with a huge discounts to help us lower our transport costs. Well, I won't deny that factors into our calculations. But is it so bad to be plied with savings? I could have just relied entirely on flattery, but of course you're too smart to fall for that. And you smell so nice!
What are we offering? What aren't we offering! Uh, knives, I guess. We do not sell knives. But here is some of what is, in fact, on sale.
Atomic Robo the RPG and M12 Supplement — $30 for both
Tabletop nerds, this one is for you. These books are out of print and we have the final supply on the face of Earth!
Doctor Dinosaur's Time Travel Through the Backdoor — $15 softcover or $25 hardcover
Tesladyne Field Guide — $5 (a steal!)
All Print Sets — $10 Dawn of a New Era / Nicodemus Job / Spectre of Tomorrow / Real Science Adventures
Mystery Shirts Now Include Proton & Electron & Neutron & Hadron & Fermion & Boson
HARDCOVERS ARE 25% OFF!
I don't mean to alarm anyone, but Atomic Robo's very own co-creator and artists Scott Wegener is drawing pages for the first issue of the next series AT THIS VERY MOMENT.
Well, I mean, maybe not this exact moment. I can't know when you're reading this. But the main take away is that new pages are being made. We still need to color and letter these pages of course. And we want a nice, juicy buffer of completed pages before we start posting any. But new pages ARE HAPPENING and that's reason enough to celebrate after the year we've had.
Meanwhile, I'd like to draw your attention to two new projects.
Cult of the Morach is an investigative, event-based scenario for characters of experience levels 2 - 4. This adventure is campaign/setting-agnostic and compatible with any old-school fantasy adventure game. For use with modern fantasy TTRPGs, a GM need only swap out monster stats for the system of their choice.
8BTTRGWYTLWGITABODWBIAGWBTARBAT is literally what it says on the tin. We got rules for playing as the Light Warriors as they try to save whatever doomed world you build for them. Unfortunately, like 80% of what you do will backfire on you, or your friends, or innocent bystanders, and the world will not be saved. But, hey, you had fun the whole time and that's what matters.
Would you folks like to help us out? Of course you would!
We have got to clear out some inventory to make space in ye olde warehouse to make room for ye newe stuffe in the warehouse.
At this point you might want to ask, "Is he trying to get us to buy things so we can buy more things later?"
That's a fair question! Unfortunately we aren't taking questions at this time.
But what we are doing is helping you to help us by slashing prices on damn near everything in our online store for the rest of the year! Let's take a look at what some of those discounts look like.
First up, you can get the Skeleton King Chapter 1 book for just $8. It's just like a Twitter subscription only you get something out of it! Or you can get the whole Skeleton King Bundle for a just $20 — a whopping 98% savings (from the ludicrously high retail price that we would never charge anyway but it still counts)?!
You definitely want to pick up the Plushie Head of a Robot Named Robo for only $15. That's less than half price!
You want print sets? We got print sets! Real Science Adventures, Nicodemus Job, Spectre of Tomorrow, and Dawn of a New Era are just $12 each!
But that ain't all. The following volumes are all 24% off for the rest of the year!
The Fighting Scientists of Tesladyne
The Flying She-Devils of the Pacific
The Savage Sword of Doctor Dinosaur
RSA: The Flying She-Devils in Raid on Marauder Island
Whew, that's a lot of discounts! Please use them to buy things to help us make more room in the warehouse to make you more things to buy and don't stop to think about this process for even one second!
Woke up to find out I was suspended from Twitter.
You can find me on Bluesky.
You can join our Patreon.
Or sign up to our Newsletter that we've never actually used so it's not going to be something we spam.
There's also the unofficial subreddit.
And, of course, just visit your favorite webcomic (THIS ONE) and keep an eye out for fresh blogs.
So, why was I suspended? That's the fun part, no one knows!
Pretty damning stuff as you can see!
I appealed on the grounds of, well, c'mon already. The reply was instantaneous! Which is a sure sign that a human definitely exists somewhere in the appeal process lol lmao no sorry, zero percent chance there's a single person in that entire department anymore.
To be clear, I still have no idea what was posted or when. Oh, and I will never know! Extremely good and functional system they've got there. I absolutely do not wish for the whole operation to metaphorically and nonviolently burn to the ground.
Hey, you know how things cost money? Well, we decided some of our things are going to cost less money for the rest of August! Which things? These things!
Doctor Dinosaur's Time Travel Through the Back Door is 40% off.
The ULTRA Field Guide is 30% off!
Atomic Robo and the Spectre of Tomorrow is 30% off
Atomic Robo and the Dawn of a New Era is 30% off
Atomic Robo plushie head is marked down to just $25!!!
Print Sets for Spectre of Tomorrow, Dawn of a New Era, The Nicodemus Job, and Real Science Adventures are all 40% off!
And, lastly, the Mystery Shirts are just $12 (and good luck to ya).
"Are you guys going to make more Atomic Robo comics???"
Short answer: YES
Longer answer: we always have a hiatus between volumes. This lets us build up a buffer so we can work at a pace that we're comfortable with and produce comics that we are proud to put out into the world.
The current hiatus is a little longer than normal because we've been juggling some non-comics real life stuff (boooooo) behind the scenes all year. We felt that adding LOOMING DEADLINES wouldn't help things go any smoother.
The good news is that the vast majority of that stuff is behind us and we've been playing catch up on prior obligations to clear the schedule for full time Atomic Robo production.
Our current plan is to release a spin-off short story that's a semi-sequel to Agents of C.H.A.N.G.E. before diving into the next full on main volume, Atomic Robo and the Peril of Prometheus.
Thank you all for reading and for your support all these years. We can't wait to show you what's next. Stay tuned for more updates!
A couple weeks ago I said there were two major pitfalls with regard to research. The first was researching instead of writing. The second was writing the research instead of your story.
This is less common but I bet we’ve all come across it at some point.
You’re reading a story. Book, comic, whatever. And out of absolutely nowhere you find yourself in the middle of a scene that exists only to tell you about some research the writer did. Maybe they’re showing off. Maybe they’re just excited to share something they found super engaging or interesting. This isn’t always a problem but it usually is because the scene exists for the writer instead of the story. And as we mentioned before, the greatest crime you can commit against your reader is to waste their time.
Movies and TV shows are less prone to letting scenes like this slip in because more people are involved with making those, so it increases the likelihood of someone asking if we really need this scene where everyone talks about the price of wheat in ancient Rome for a couple minutes.
Now, as a writer I totally get the impulse to include this scene. You found something really cool and unexpected and you wanna share it with everyone! It’s the easiest thing in the world to convince yourself that this tangential conversation is appropriate and character building and interesting and relevant and arises organically from what’s going on. But really it’s just that you’re excited to talk about it, and probably have been for what seems like one million years, so the gravity of your interest has warped the text until it enters this unstable orbit around the object of your interest. And everyone on the ship (what) can see you’ve flown into this eccentric orbit that’s gonna crash and kill us all and they’re trying to make you correct the entry angle, but no, you’ve got this god damn death grip on the controls and you’re like, “But see, the fall of Rome and the price of wheat are inextricably linked! The entire Western world as we know it took its shape because of the economic viability of a single crop a thousand years ago isn’t that interesting?!?!”
And, I mean, yes it is!
But does it belong in your story? Probably not!
Also I was just making up that thing about wheat and Rome. I have no idea if there’s a correlation.
Maybe I should research it instead of figuring out how to give advice...
No, I must be strong!
Ahem.
Anyway, this is why I always bring up that thing about how only 5% of my research makes it to the final page. A lot of what I come across is surprising, or exciting, or funny. Sometimes it’s all of the above! But information that doesn’t actively contribute to the story is just trivia. There are ways to put some of this stuff in there. Characters are allowed to have hobbies or niche interests or strange knowledge they picked up from who knows where. But this is seasoning, not the whole meal. A line here. A reference there. Used sparingly this information can brighten up a story. But you shouldn’t let it take up a whole scene in the same way no one’s ever going to serve you a plate of salt for dinner.
Well, that brings us to the end of this blog series. I have no idea if any of that was useful! But it’s some of the stuff I’ve thought about and learned over the course of writing over one thousand five hundred pages of ATOMIC ROBO, so there’s got to be something in there. Even if my advice was so bad and wrong-headed that all it did was convince you to do the exact opposite?
That still technically counts as helping you HA-CHAAA!!!
