About book ATOMIC ROBO 4. ATOMIC ROBO Y OTRAS RAREZAS (2000)
I thought Volume 3 was great, but this one blows it out of the water. All of the single-issue stories here are good, but Atomic Robo vs Doctor Dinosaur has me laughing out loud, multiple times. The sheer absurdity of the situation, coupled with the great dialogue, makes this an issue that everyone should read. The vampire dimension and Science Team Super Five and the ghost are all fun too, but Doctor Dinosaur is fantastic and a distillation of everything that makes Atomic Robo a must read. It's more of the same from writer Brian Clevinger's and artist Scott Wegener's Hellboy meets Iron Man-meets Indiana Jones-meets the Rocketeer-meets 1950's sci-fi serial films ongoing series.Bypassing a biography of Atomic Robo himself, the fourth volume of this series, entitled, "Other Strangeness," somehow manages to marry disconnected stories that ultimately create a truly "strange" collection and narrative for Atomic Robo, including an invasion from the Vampire Dimension, the attack of a kaiju monster in Tokyo, a showdown with an anthropomorphic dinosaur (named, aptly and humorously enough, "Dr. Dinosaur," as if he couldn't think of a better and more villainous name), and the revelation of Atomic Robo's greatest adversary, the ghost of Thomas Edison!In a world of "funny books" inundated with "dark" characters and similarly "darker" plotlines, it's refreshing to take a respite with a character like Atomic Robo, his singular cast of supporting characters, and his inimitable gallery of villains. What makes ATOMIC ROBO as a series successful is its unwillingness to delve into heady material when comic books, as a media, demand that the storytelling remain "fun."Still, the selling points for this particular volume are few, but a previous review or two may have neglected to point out, as it is with "Other Strangeness," that the Most Valuable Player of this series would appear to be artist Scott Wegener.How Wegener infuses life into the seemingly lifeless face of Atomic Robo himself will be beyond most readers, as he transforms the metallic facade of our hero with irony, sarcasm, and pathos, all against a backdrop of situational humor.And worth the price of the entire volume is the Socratic dialogue created by Clevinger between Atomic Robo and Dr. Dinosaur, as the two debate, amidst battle, of villainously appropriate names for an archenemy and socially-retarded nomenclature for both the human race and metallic robots foolish enough to stand in the way of world domination. This chapter of the volume alone is priceless and makes "Other Strangeness" required reading, either for fans of Atomic Robo or fans of brilliant humor.Where creators Clevinger and Wegener intend to go with Atomic Robo from here will remain a mystery for now. Readers expectant of a mythology for our hero synonymous with Dark Horse Comics' Hellboy or the Goon may be disappointed, as these creators seem content, for now, to simply tell entertaining stories. However, the seeds are planted for future conflicts for Atomic Robo, including the aforementioned Dr. Dinosuar and the ghost of Thomas Edison, the first of which has humorous possibilities in Atomic Robo's future, and the latter of which could spell for a more dramatic venture into storytelling than readers have come to know so far.Whatever the future holds for Atomic Robo, the effectiveness of the stories published here are anything but "strange"......Stranger still is how readers might miss out on future collections of this series, which has anything but metallic lifelessness in its future.
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One of Robo's nemeses is an insane time-travelling dinosaur. Yes. :)
—Loo
Purchased through Comixology.More adventures of Atomic Robo.
—biancamarietta
Atomic Robo is the best title in comics today. No contest.
—alexis
