Broken Frontier

Nikola Tesla would be a happy man. If he were alive. In the last few years, the ground breaking scientist has been portrayed in Matt Fraction’s The Five Fists of Science and played by another ground-breaker, David Bowie in Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige. And that’s not all. One of Tesla’s greatest legacies may just be a heroic robot with a heart of gold, a mind of wit and fists of action. Given life in 1923 Atomic Robo serves Tesladyne Industries, a think tank focused on new discoveries and battling weird foes while they’re at it. Robo’s other creators, writer (and creator of webcomic 8-Bit Theater) Brian Clevinger and artist Scott Wegener debuted the hero with new publisher Red 5 Comics in late 2007. The series immediately gained attention as a title intent on putting the fun back in funny books.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Why do you think fans have responded to Atomic Robo so kindly?

BRIAN CLEVINGER: I think it's because much of what informs Atomic Robo as a title comes from our own dissatisfaction with mainstream comics. We're the anti-Big Event Book and more people are coming to realize they like that. We're not trying to make you buy into tie-ins or change everything you know about the status quo forever (or three months, which comes first). We're just telling fun adventure stories with a cool main character who doesn't need his whole history re-written every year to make sense/generate sales.

BF: What’s the reasoning behind the smaller volumes rather than an ongoing series?

BC: It was the most elegant solution to several concerns. It gives us a little extra time to work on every issue. It encourages us to build up and maintain a buffer so that minor delays behind the scenes don't affect our release schedule. It shifts the whole focus from putting out anything just to have something published to doing exactly what we want when we want. And it gives us clear divisions between story arcs. Slavish devotion to a monthly publishing schedule just seems to lead to an endless soap opera of clones and alien invasions. It leads to wrap up issues and filler issues that do nothing but segue from one story arc, tie-in, crossover, or creative team to the next. By sticking with individual mini-series, we can always jump straight to the meat of an adventure while we build Robo's world and history with every volume.

BF: What exactly is The Shadow From Beyond Time? A multi-tentacled creature? An obtuse mathematical concept? A men’s fragrance?

BC: The Shadow From Beyond Time is a bundle of hyper-dimensionality that intersects our universe simultaneously at several points in space-time starting in 1908. The theory is that, if left unchecked, its intersections would multiply across the entire universe until nothing but it remained. Atomic Robo is all that stands in its way.

Of course, we couldn't let a mathematical construct try to devour the universe, because that's what Grant Morrison is for. So, we figured this higher dimensional thing projected into our universe would look like a monster made out of hate, tentacles, and teeth.

BF: Can you see anyone but yourself and Scott Wegener on the series at this point? Have you got a vice like grip on Robo?

BC: Vice grip. We love to let other artists play with Robo in our back up stories, but even then I do the writing so we can maintain control over what happens. The problem there is that we've got far more stories than we'd ever have time to do ourselves!

BF: How will volume three differ from the previous two volumes?

BC: This one is a combination of the first two in a way. The stories are more directly connected, like Vol 2, but they take place throughout the Twentieth Century, like Vol 1.

BF: What’s the reason you place historical figures throughout the series?

BC: Are you kidding? History is amazing! Originally I was going to make up a fictional inventor to build Robo. But then I read up on Tesla and realized two things: 1. there was no character I could make to match him, and 2. there was nothing I could attribute to him that would be less believable than what he actually did.

And this isn't unique to Tesla. History is filled with people who were too incredible to have lived. That Robo's long life of adventure and celebrity allow him to interact with these kinds of people is one of my favorite things about working on the title.

Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time #1 goes on sale April 15th from Red 5 Comics.