Posted May 14, 2015 at 10:30 am

So, here we are.

The entire Atomic Robo back catalog is online for free. This week we've been uploading our first online debut, The Trial of Atomic Robo. Next week we're moving on to the first volume to debut online, Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire.

To celebrate, we're bringing all nine volumes back into print. As hardcovers. And we're adding all-new bonus content to each of those volumes -- THE SECRET FILES OF DR. DINOSAUR!

Check out our Kickstarter campaign for all the details!

 

 

Posted May 11, 2015 at 10:05 am

We're uploading the rest of The Trial of Atomic Robo this week. You may have noticed we changed to one page per day. Hey, you couldn't have possibly expected us to keep delivering sixty-six full color pages per week.

Next week we'll start the first of four prologue mini-comics leading up to the newest storyline, Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire.

We hope to have your continued support as we move into the next stage of sequential robot adventure art.

Posted May 8, 2015 at 12:20 pm

Hope you enjoyed Knights of the Golden Circle. I'd apologize for that cliffhanger, but naw.

Next week we'll finish up the second half of The Trial of Atomic Robo, our A Free Comic Book On A Day in 2015 special. But if you're impatient, you can always grab the whole thing at comiXology right now.

After that?

We'll release four all-new short stories. These will take us back to 2013, just after the events of The Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, and help set the stage for our new storyline, The Ring of Fire. You guys have no idea how hard you want to read these pages. We can't wait to share them with you!

Posted May 2, 2015 at 11:01 am

Hope everyone is having a great Free Comic Book Day with which we are definitely not affiliated.

However.

By sheer coincidence, on this website where we debut comic books for free several times a week, we are giving away a comic book for free today as well! Click dat dino and score your free comic!

It works like this.

The first half of The Trial of Atomic Robo is online today. Wow, amazing! You'll have to hit up the good folks at ComiXology if you want the whole thing right now.

"Ahhh!" you might be wailing, "but I'm a big baby and I don't want to do the ComiXology thing!" because, let's face it, you are a big baby.

No problem, we've got you covered!

The rest of the story will go online at this very website from May 11th through the 15th. Why the wait? So we can bring you the rest of Knights of the Golden Circle without further interruption! Duhhhhhhh.

Once we've uploaded all chapters of Knights and every page of The Trial, we'll start bringing you all new Atomic Robo content that's never been seen by anyone. Ever. It's a little thing we like to call The Ring of Fire.

Posted April 30, 2015 at 01:59 pm

In case you missed yesterday's news, we're releasing all new free content this Saturday in the form of a short Atomic Robo comic book story. Perhaps you should think about visiting this website in between your Free Comic Book Day festivities to see it.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's tackle THE MAILBAG.

 

Here's how it works. Our Patrons submit questions and then we answer them for the good of all mankind. Join the fun.
 
 
Ok, since we've gotten to this storyline, I wanted to ask about the Magma.  Is it special in some way or were you just ignoring that the heat coming off of it should be cooking any non-robotic action scientists foolish enough to get close to it?
 
Michael- 
 
It's just the magic of storytelling. Scientific accuracy can be fun and interesting. No question. But it isn't always fun and interesting.
 
Would it have been fun and interesting to watch Lang, Vik, and Bernard be cooked to death from the inside also while suffocating on air hot enough to boil their lungs? No, of course not.
 
We always prefer to err on the side of plausibility over accuracy. We have always found plausibility opens up more interesting options than pure accuracy.
 
Consider, for a moment, our spin-off series about Nikola Tesla's team of 19th century adventurers. One of them is Winfield Scott Lovecraft, the father of ol' H.P. Lovecraft. Is it plausible that Winfield was a Secret Service agent dedicated to investigating super science threats to the United States? Yes. Is it accurate? Lord, no, he was a salesman.
 
But which one is fun and interesting?
 
 
Hey Brian
 
Been reading your comics since 8-bit and I was wondering who your biggest influences are as a writer. Thanks!
 
Scott (not Wegener)
 
No duh, Scooty Wegs doesn't read comics for the words, so he'd never ask this question!
 
I had to think about this one for a while. You'd think it's a straightforward question with a straightforward answer, but it's not. Well it is, but then it isn't.
 
I mean, there's the obvious answer. I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in third grade and didn't make it past the first page before I decided to become a writer. And that lead to Terry Pratchett, P.G. Wodehouse, The Kids in the Hall, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and Seinfeld.
 
Wow, that's a lot of British stuff what the hell. And it's only gonna get worse! Because I think the single largest influence on my "modern" writing is the first UK series of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.
 
Yeah, I know that sounds strange but hear me out.
 
Gordon's primary concern is the customer's experience. Put another way: the meal is for the customer, not the chef, or the chef's ego.
 
And that's at the crux of my writing these days. These comics aren't for us. They're for you. What I find interesting to write is meaningless unless it's something that will be interesting to read. Like, there's a piece of advice, we've all heard it, that goes: create the comic (or book or game or whatever) you want to see.
 
And that's good advice! Great advice, really. But there's a difference between the thing you want to write and the thing someone would want to read.
 
I see a lot of writers mistaking the first one for the second one. And, hey, it's an easy trap to fall into! For one thing, sometimes there's no way to know the thing you're writing doesn't have an audience until it's done. For another, the act of writing is performed for an audience of one. Writing is the most solitary and self-absorbed thing you can do, so it's easy to forget that it's ultimately for other people.
 
The sooner you can view your own writing through the lens of What Would Be Fun For Someone To Read, the sooner you can take your ego out of the equation and deliver an exceptional experience using fresh ingredients prepared simply.
Posted April 29, 2015 at 11:21 am

Hope you guys got a kick out of the cliffhanger in the previous chapter. You're lucky. You only had to wait a couple days to find out what happened next. Imangine the poor slobs who were kind enough to be reading our comics in print. They had to wait for months! But not you, no. You get to dive right in to our Back to the Future III / Tombstone crossover fanfic.

Okay, so! Saturday, May 2nd, is Free Comic Book Day.

As you may have noticed, there is no Atomic Robo story this year. This news has come as huge a disappointment to quite a few folks, and we think we can see why.

But, as always, we are thinking of you, gentle readers. Only of you.

Allow me to suggest that you check out this very website on Saturday, May 2nd, Free Comic Book Day. On that appointed day you may come across some free content that would be in addition to the usual selection of free content we give you every week.

Stay tuned.

Posted April 21, 2015 at 03:04 pm

Pretty cool news today.

The Atomic Robo Roleplaying Game was nominated for a 2015 Origins Award. To celebrate our inevitable loss to a D&D product, we've added some Robo RPG books and dice to the online store.

But that's not all!

We're offering a combo pack that gets you the dice and the book with the coupon code ORIGIN2015 for 10% off your purchase.

How can you resist it?

SIMPLE, YOU CANNOT!

ORIGIN2015 for 10% off!

Posted April 20, 2015 at 04:36 pm

Hope you guys enjoyed reading The Flying She-Devils of the Pacific. It was a tough one for us. We'd been talking about it since we finished Fightin' Scientists of Tesladyne. We kept pushing it back because we knew we weren't ready. Scott's art wasn't up to snuff and I could barely keep a story going for more than one issue.

We figured out that we'd never really be ready for it. So one day we just decided to stop running away from it and do the damn story.

This week we're bringing you The Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur. For the first time it's a direct sequel to a previous storyline, The Ghost of Station X. For those of you reading it for the very first time as we're putting it online, I'll just say: if you think we've ever done a cliffhanger before, wow, are you in for a heck of a ride. And it's not gonna end for a while.

Enjoy!

Meanwhile! We've got some super huge news coming at you guys in the next month or so. I hate to be so cagey about what we're brewing up, but argh, you guys. You guys!

Okay, fine. I'll give you one little glimpse of one of the things.

What could it beeeeee?

Posted April 16, 2015 at 09:55 am

If you'd like to participate in our letters column, just sign up with the ol' Patreon and send us a dang letter!

Like these chumps did.

So my question is kind of a multi-aspect one.  One of the wonderful things about Atomic Robo is, of course, the historical aspect.  And one of the wonderful things about comics in general is the collaboration between artist and writer.  And so I find myself wondering about how the historical characters get developed.

Historical characters; how much is fact, how much is Brian, how much is Scott, and how fun is it to blend it all together?

Thanks!

Eric

It’s a tremendous amount of fun to play with historical figures, that’s why we use them so often!

There’s no set ratio of realness to fictionality. We do our best to stay true to the spirit of the historical personality because what the hell is the point of putting them into your story if you’re going to make up a character for them? Just to have a famous name associated with your own? Sounds kinda crappy to me. 

That said, we aren’t slaves to historical fact either. We got big fun time sci-fi stories to tell. And, I mean, Atomic Robo himself is the most historically inaccurate thing in the pages of Atomic Robo the comic book. But Tesla was one of our earliest pioneers in what could reasonably be considered robotics, so while it’s impossible for Atomic Robo to be made by Tesla, at least it’s within the purview of Tesla as a character to make something like Atomic Robo.

Similarly, Edison never pursued an immortality formula as we posit in Volume 5, but he was definitely an ambitious business man and innovator who dabbled in spiritualism.




Ever since we read volume one both my dad and I have loved Atomic Robo. Obscure science! History! Robots punching things! It's all here! I have volumes 7, 8, and 9 right next to my bed ready to read. We've got the Patreon too, and the RPG. But enough gushing about this awesome action science comic. It's time to turn on the swinging lamp because I have some questions for Brian and Scott! Respectively!

Brian- Do you have any plans to include Sergei Korolev in the future? He's a great obscure science guy who spearheaded the soviet space program.

Scott- What's the secret to the Wegener crud/weathering surfaces?

Dave & Gabe 

No specific plans for Sergei. Yet. But don’t worry. I’m a huge fan of the space race, especially the early Soviet efforts. We’ll soon plant some seeds that could lead us to elaborating on what our version of Sergei got up to back in the day. Stay tuned!

Scott had this to say about his cruddiness…

There's no real secret to be honest. When I first started drawing comics I just wanted things to look kind of scuffed up and gritty. As a kid Star Wars looked like this totally lived in and thus believable universe, and that always stayed with me. I loved the abstract way that Mignola did that, so I just applied little abstract shapes to anything and everything because I thought it looked cool.

In other words I had no idea what I was doing, so it was successful about 50% of the time.

Eventually I started looking at this desire to create a specific look with some purpose. In The Deadly Art of Science I stopped inking my work and switched to very tight pencils instead of inking the pages.It's very easy for pencils to look muddy and just kind of gross and I wanted very much to avoid that. I wanted a nice clean and almost animated look to things. So I was no longer able to do any sort of shading because the pencil strokes would always show up no matter how careful I was, and I found it kind of broke my own immersion in the fictional world we were creating.

Enter the Crud.

I have learned, literally through years of trial and error, to use my crud/weathering as a shorthand to stand it for the visual depth that would normally be created with cross hatching and spot-blacks. Obviously my colorists also play a huge role in this. I find that when I get it right, the scuffs and stains that I use help create a sense of volume to characters and objects that would otherwise look very flat and bland. So I decide who or what needs to really pop and what can fade into the background, and then go to town making a thousand little tick marks on each page.

Posted April 13, 2015 at 12:04 pm

Here’s the best links turned up by my research and general internetting last week. I offer this as a service to you weirdo degenerates who unaccountably do not follow me on Twitter.

World’s first head transplant "could result in a hitherto never experienced level and quality of insanity.” - Science Alert

Augmented vision while driving couldn’t possibly backfire and especially not at highway speeds oh my god what are you people thinking? - The Verge

Quantum communication gets a little more possible with fibers that can bring light to a practical standstill. - Phys.org

 

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