Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids

 

John Wagner, Alan Grant & Ian Gibson
Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids (1982)
While Verdus seemed like an essential purchase, this collects material which I vaguely remembered reading as a kid, and there it was in the store next to the first volume so it seemed worth a punt. Day of the Droids didn't make quite such an impression on me first time round, and I can see why. It does a job and it has its moments, but it reads somewhat like an attempt to repeat the formula - our man Sam on a one-man mission to put down an entire robot revolution, albeit this time back home on Earth. The sheer absurdity which made Verdus work is still in evidence, but here it feels a little as though Wagner was scrabbling around for things to send up. The cheery stupidity of Hoagy, Sam's assistant, is sufficiently chucklesome, but the robot version of Woody Allen's version of the Mafia feels a bit of a stretch, or at least it did to me and still does. As a whole, Day of the Droids is entertaining as fuck, yet falls some way short of the surrealist riot which was Verdus. I don't quite follow why anyone would have built pinstriped robot hoodlums, and Ian Gibson had apparently reached the point by which he couldn't be arsed to make them look even vaguely mechanical so we may as well be looking at extras from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Also we have Carlos Sanchez Stogie, a robot cigar created because IPC had adopted an anti-smoking policy, so Wagner came up with a robotic alternative to Sam's usual cigar based - it says here - on Carlos Ezquerra. Although Stogie is a lot of fun and it could be argued that Wagner here predicted e-cigarettes, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Ezquerra. I never met the man but I'm sure there was more to him than pronounceeng everytheeng like thees with occasional references to tacos.

I've seen it suggested that Alan Grant's run on Robo-Hunter was where it all went downhill, and yet his Beast of Blackheart Manor - the second strip in the collection - avoids the pitfalls of Droids for all that it's more or less Scooby Doo with robots. Grant actually manages to do something slightly different with Sam Slade and Gibson's art is clean, tight, and more dramatic. It's hard not to wonder whether somebody complained about Day of the Droids' gradual slide into sketchy panels full of wavy lines resembling a sort of amalgamation of Monet and Carl Barks.

Beyond this I have no coherent recollection of later Robo-Hunter strips beyond something headachey drawn by that bloke who drew everyone as massive pairs of eyes surrounded by cross-hatching, so if it was Alan Grant's fault, Blackheart Manor thankfully wasn't necessarily any indication of what was to come.