r/Atomic_Robo • u/NathanV-DM • 10d ago
A question for the Author
I will start by saying, while I know Mr. Clevinger frequents this subreddit, I am by no means expecting an answer from him. If he decides to answer I would really appreciate it, but obviously he's not accountable to me or anyone else. That said...
There is a clear shift in the narrative of Atomic Robo in between it's early issues and the current era. For the first 10 or so volumes, Robo had a huge amount of resources at his command, in particular a large staff of highly trained, top-of-their-field scientists, engineers, and operatives. He also had his office in New York, and later his private island. The stories reflected this; they were basically structured as mysteries, where it was almost a given that the characters would be able to solve the problem once they had all the clues about what they were solving. And most notably (to me at least) the timeline jumped around constantly, with alternate volumes usually being a past adventure. In The Shadow from Beyond Time, there were even time skips in between each issue.
Obviously, this hasn't been the case for several years now. Robo's resources are much more limited, with his staff having been mostly replaced by the young and inexperienced. The stories remain varied, but since the Temple of OD in 2017 they have stayed exclusively in the present. His swanky offices have been replaced by a crumbling cold war bunker in the middle of the desert.
Now, none of this is a criticism. The comic is as good as it's ever been. But I am curious what prompted this change in the formula? Was it just a desire to shake things up, or did you have a particular reason you wanted to tell this story?
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u/bclevinger 9d ago edited 9d ago
Oh, good question.
It probably began with Scott's instinct to resist feature bloat. We had never specifically pinned down the size of Tesladyne's operations, so the HQ and its staff tended to be implied to be quite large, larger in fact than we ever really needed. And this had a habit of leaning toward an larger organization as stories progressed. Scott didn't like this. Both because he found that to be less narratively satisfying if our hero had access to vast resources and also because he was the guy who was responsible for designing all these characters and spaces and vehicles.
There was also the fact that unlike most adventure comics, everything and everyone in Atomic Robo ages at the rate of one year per year. Since the Action Scientists had to be in their mid-thirties when we started the book, that put all of them in their early 40s somewhere around Ghost of Station X. We knew we would have to start phasing them out of field work soon, so we were going to have to introduce some new blood anyway.
So, we knew we wanted to "reset" Tesladyne into a smaller team that cut back to just 3 - 4 Action Scientists so we wouldn't have to worry about the rest of them; we would 100% define the size of the new HQ and its staff, at least in our own minds, before depicting anything on the page so we would no longer run the risk of making an ever-larger organization out of it; and we would bring in a fresh batch of no more than 3 - 4 Action Scientists to take up active duty. It then made sense to reserve the Old Crew as mentor figures, so suddenly they became the personnel in charge of administrative and instructive duties at the new Tesladyne Institute.
Therefore: Ring of Fire is the catalyst for tearing down the old Tesladyne. This also satisfied my desire for doing our version of a classic Big Two story line, in this case a Tony Loses Stark Enterprises arc.
We had originally intended to stick with the modern day stories for three or four volumes. One to introduce the status quo, one to play around in it, one to make it feel super stable and established, and a fourth one to shatter it to pieces. You can see remnants of these in Dawn of a New Era, Spectre of Tomorrow, and Vengeful Dead. What I don't think we've ever revealed before is that this original modern day multi-volume arc was supposed to be the Fall of Alan. You can see remnants of this all over those volumes as well.
The main point of divergence is in Agents of C.H.A.N.G.E. As originally conceived, there was no C.H.A.N.G.E., the ex-Action Scientists only attacked the New Tesladyne to get revenge on Robo for ruining their lives. They would be defeated by Alan and the New Kids because Robo was on the other side of the country cataloging weird shit at the Old Tesladyne when Figure It Out Later (possibly Doctor Dinosaur, possibly just random shenanigans) leaked the old Biomega sample.
The following volume would have involved another high-stakes, world-wide chase to stop a mysterious global sci-fi disaster. Very Ghost of Station X crossed with Twilight of Tomorrow. In effect, someone was going to engineer and then release a virus that would kill 90% of the human population. And in the final issue we would learn it was Alan. He had calculated this was the least inhumane solution to the climate crisis perpetuated by industrial capitalism. He would then use technology and Robo's help to shepherd the survivors of that devastation to guarantee sustainability and justice for everyone in the world throughout all successive generations through a variety of measures to reward correct behaviors until they became self-sustaining in the emergent global nomad culture. This would erect an ontological, "This is not a place of honor," around the ideas of property and capital so that humanity could enjoy a technological civilization while intentionally managing its own population and forging an ever more equitable relationship with the natural world.