Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time By Brian Clevinger

 Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time

By Brian Clevinger

“There's no such thing as Time Travel” 

Atomic Robo... To his own younger self... 

(Fun thing, readers.  We are on the eleventh Review document.  Each one is a hundred pages long, on average.  So we have over a thousand pages of these things.) 

 So the good news about these graphic novels, so far, is that each one tells a self-contained story. So you can pick up Volume I, II, or III, and without any prior knowledge sit down and start reading. That said, let me hit the high concept driving this series. First, Super Science, the kind you see in comics and some science fiction movies? Works. Second, Nikola Tesla was just as good and intelligent as the internet wants him to be (In reality he was brilliant and slightly insane.  He loved that pigeon…). In fact, he was so good and smart that in the 1920s he created a living person out of metal, driven by some unknown atomic energy. That person happens to be our protagonist and most certainly epic hero Atomic Robo Tesla and yes that is his actual factual legal name.

In Volume III, we got to see Robo in four separate periods of his life as he deals with a creature that seeks not only to destroy our world but our whole physical reality. Starting in the 1920s, when a pair of old associates of his father, Tesla, comes knocking at their New York home. It's revealed that Nikola himself once lived a life of adventure and now unfinished business is coming back to haunt everyone. This is a problem because Tesla is currently in California and they’ve got minutes to act. Luckily, young Robo is here with the power of science guns and the burning desire to be a hero (He’s so sweet and earnest.).

This introduces an interesting idea that Tesla has a large part of his life that he simply doesn't tell Robo about. Then again, isn't that the way with all kids and their parents (Not if you ask the reactionary fucks I had to listen to four hours at a school board meeting. They demand Total Informational Awareness of their kids, including whether they are LGBTQ, so they can proceed to abuse them into suicide exercise parental authority to teach them Christian values. {Weird how those values never show up in the New Testament but go on I guess (Oh of course not.  These people and their “Christian Values” would make Jesus puke.)}).  This volume does this by showing a father and son dynamic between Tesla and Robo. Tesla clearly wants Robo to be safe and seems to want to protect him from the outside world, and does that by isolating him (Which is accidental abuse in this case.  {Considering what’s waiting for Robo outside, I kinda get where Tesla is coming from}). I can understand why large chunks of that world would simply refuse to consider him a person. I mean, if I somehow became a super genius and built mechanical life in my garage, I could see any number of forces in our society go all out to strip that life of legal person-hood and reduce it to a commodity(Oh hell yeah.  In a heartbeat!). I mean, we do this to each other, which is one of the reasons I honestly believe that as a species we have no right to be attempting to create new sapient lifeforms. Not until we can work out our own shit and figure out how to treat each other with dignity and respect and guys, we're nowhere close to there yet (No we are not.. Take your collective desire for Artificial General Intelligence, fellow nerds, and put it on a shelf.  We are not ready.  All we’d do is create a mechanical slave-race.{Also if you have to ask why that is bad, you’re part of the reason we’re not ready!}).

On the flip side, Robo is alive and young and as such he wants to be out in the world experiencing it. This isn't the mainstay of this volume, however. What is the focus of this novel is how Robo at different points of his life deals with a threat that would reduce most of us to gibbering wrecks and might have been what drove H.P Lovecraft mad in the first place (Oh Boy!  Excuse me, I’m gonna be singing Shoggoth on the Roof for this one.  Who day and night must slumber in R’yleh, waving tentacles and dreaming nasty dreams?  And who when he wakes from deep beneath the sea, will drive humanity insane?  Cthulhu!). A threat he counters through a variety of means, whether by inventing an entirely new science, reaching out to his rival Carl Sagan or building an implosion device that goes off outside of all space and time (Wait…how does it implode? {how does it exist outside all time and space?}). Mr. Clevinger is clearly having a lot of fun just putting Robo in different periods and contexts to show us the contrast. He's able to provide a lot of laughs and fun doing so. For example, Robo's somewhat understandable but hilarious phobia of bugs is great. He'll face off against undead Nazi scientists with nothing but dry humor but one little swarm of bugs and he's screaming in horror (Arachnocommunist will do him no harm.).

We get to see a young and wide-eyed Robo, an experienced and somewhat brash Robo, a Robo who has been tempered by experiences, and finally a Robo who is just done with your shit. In giving us this tour, we also get to see the broad strokes of Robo's life up to a certain point. It's certainly looking like an epic and well-lived life spent in the pursuit of knowledge and driven by a desire to help people. As motivations go for a protagonist, I honestly kind of like it (It’s simple and pure.  I approve.). Atomic Robo is a character who invokes hope and that there's more to heroism than just the exercise of power and violence. That technology and science, despite all the problems we've created using them, can also be used by us to solve problems if we put in the effort.

I also enjoy Robo himself, who clearly has no illusions about humanity but likes us anyway. Despite everything, Atomic Robo believes that humanity has within itself the spark to be better. To reach a better state of existence and to learn and grow. This is despite or perhaps because of his experiences in World War II fighting the nazis and in the Cold War. Now I'll admit part of the reason I like Robo is that in a world where Skynet and Ultron are the usual representatives of mechanical life. Intelligences who take one look at us and decide “Yeah I'm going to kill them”. It's nice to have Datas, Visions, and Atomic Robo who believe in the better angels of our nature. That they also kill monsters beyond our ability to process so they don't eat all of time and space, that's a nice bonus as well. Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time gets an A. It's good, two-fisted fun where math and a willingness to engage in unorthodox explosions save the day, what more do you want?

I hope you enjoyed this week's review, which was chosen by our ever-wise patrons.  If you’d like a voice in choosing future reviews or adding to the recommendation list consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for just a dollar a month!  As a quick note, I am considering a revamp of the patron rewards tier, I have already put one possible new version up for a vote by patrons, so join now and you can help decide how future patrons are rewarded!  Next week we look at Heroic Legend of Arslan, followed by GI Joe Classic Volume X.  Hope you join us, and until then stay safe and keep reading! 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders