John Wagner, Ian Gibson & José Luis Ferrer Robo-Hunter: Verdus (1979)
I just couldn't leave this one in the book store. The pull was too powerful. I grew up reading 2000AD from issue twenty onwards and this was, in my opinion, one of the very best things from those early years before the comic grew up and Judge Dredd took to dropping the occasional reference to Baudelaire. Robo-Hunter was Sam Slade, a man who hunted robots as is probably obvious from the title. Here, in his debut strip, he travels to an entire planet of robots.
Seriously, what more could you fucking ask for?
More or less every single page of this thing was like stepping on a memory sherbert landmine, and best of all is that somehow this comic strip about a man who shoots robots which is very clearly targetted at twelve-year old boys and which makes not one single reference to a Portishead album remains an absolute delight when read in Trump year IV by a fifty-five year old man. Even the jokes are still funny.
I think it works because Robo-Hunter takes itself approximately seriously whilst also being completely fucking stupid, and joyously so. I'd forgotten, for example, how Sam is held prisoner by BO, the unfortunately designated sewer robot, and is required to play Robopoly in order to win his freedom. Robopoly is robot-themed Monopoly complete with tiny robots as playing pieces. BO's pieces cheat, and so Sam bribes the tiny robot coppers inhabiting the board game's jail to knobble his opponent. You simply never had that sort of attention to detail in Blade Runner.
Verdus heaps absurdity on absurdity as it goes on, somehow without ever seeming cynical, culminating in robot religious leaders arguing in the robot parliament, and one of them is a mechanical Rabbi doubtless drawn from the films Woody Allen made when he was funny and arguably less creepy; and it works because Gibson's art has just enough elasticity to stretch to such ludicrous excesses without losing its dramatic footing. He was never quite one of my favourite artists, and I don't even like to think about those later strips which seemed to be mostly just wavy lines approximating women resembling Daisy Duck, but he had the balance just right with this one, keeping those loose lines in check with large areas of black or letratone.
I sort of object to the whole thing about spoilers, because if the matter of whether or not the butler did it is pivotal to your enjoyment of whatever it is you'd rather not have spoiled, then you're probably watching some shit allegedly bingeworthy TV show rather than engaging with genuine culture; but, even though Robo-Hunter is pushing forty, I'll refrain from telling you how it ends in case you don't already know because I'd forgotten the ending - which is actually quite weird and shocking and is probably indicative of why Robo-Hunter could only ever have been born from the pages of 2000AD. I guess I'd forgotten how great this comic used to be when they got it right. Sometimes it really was the galaxy's greatest, and this was one of those times.
I just couldn't leave this one in the book store. The pull was too powerful. I grew up reading 2000AD from issue twenty onwards and this was, in my opinion, one of the very best things from those early years before the comic grew up and Judge Dredd took to dropping the occasional reference to Baudelaire. Robo-Hunter was Sam Slade, a man who hunted robots as is probably obvious from the title. Here, in his debut strip, he travels to an entire planet of robots.
Seriously, what more could you fucking ask for?
More or less every single page of this thing was like stepping on a memory sherbert landmine, and best of all is that somehow this comic strip about a man who shoots robots which is very clearly targetted at twelve-year old boys and which makes not one single reference to a Portishead album remains an absolute delight when read in Trump year IV by a fifty-five year old man. Even the jokes are still funny.
I think it works because Robo-Hunter takes itself approximately seriously whilst also being completely fucking stupid, and joyously so. I'd forgotten, for example, how Sam is held prisoner by BO, the unfortunately designated sewer robot, and is required to play Robopoly in order to win his freedom. Robopoly is robot-themed Monopoly complete with tiny robots as playing pieces. BO's pieces cheat, and so Sam bribes the tiny robot coppers inhabiting the board game's jail to knobble his opponent. You simply never had that sort of attention to detail in Blade Runner.
Verdus heaps absurdity on absurdity as it goes on, somehow without ever seeming cynical, culminating in robot religious leaders arguing in the robot parliament, and one of them is a mechanical Rabbi doubtless drawn from the films Woody Allen made when he was funny and arguably less creepy; and it works because Gibson's art has just enough elasticity to stretch to such ludicrous excesses without losing its dramatic footing. He was never quite one of my favourite artists, and I don't even like to think about those later strips which seemed to be mostly just wavy lines approximating women resembling Daisy Duck, but he had the balance just right with this one, keeping those loose lines in check with large areas of black or letratone.
I sort of object to the whole thing about spoilers, because if the matter of whether or not the butler did it is pivotal to your enjoyment of whatever it is you'd rather not have spoiled, then you're probably watching some shit allegedly bingeworthy TV show rather than engaging with genuine culture; but, even though Robo-Hunter is pushing forty, I'll refrain from telling you how it ends in case you don't already know because I'd forgotten the ending - which is actually quite weird and shocking and is probably indicative of why Robo-Hunter could only ever have been born from the pages of 2000AD. I guess I'd forgotten how great this comic used to be when they got it right. Sometimes it really was the galaxy's greatest, and this was one of those times.
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