Clevinger/Wegener: Building Atomic Robo's Nucleus
Brian Clevinger is the creator of Atomic Robo and is also responsible for the webcomic 8-bit Theater and the superhero comedy novel Nuklear Age. He lives in Orlando, Florida, where he spends most of his time hiding from the sun.
Scott Wegener's work has appeared in the Image titles Wicked West 2, and Negative Burn. Atomic Robo is his first full-length comic book and he is currently working on a horror-comedy with New X-Men co-author Chris Yost, titled Killer of Demons. (Viper Comics 2008). Scott lives in New Hampshire with his family and shares a cramped office with his washer/dryer and a box of dust that used to be his cat.
Somehow, these two odd and funny gentlemen managed to find each other and put together one of the more promising indie books, Atomic Robo: A fictional history that is two parts pulp and one part science fiction. The two of them sat down to talk about the upcoming release of the book and what it took to get Robo to this point. Atomic Robo is a six-issue miniseries from Red 5 Comics and the first issue goes on sale this Wednesday, October 10.
Matthew McLean (MM): For those not familiar with the title, why don’t you give us a run down on what Atomic Robo is all about?
Scott Wegener (SW): Sure. Do you want to start Brian?
Brian Clevinger (BC): I think you do a pretty good pitch.
SW: OK. The five second sound bite I’ve come up with is that he [Atomic Robo] is a little Iron Giant, a little Rocketeer and a whole lot of Indiana Jones all mashed together into this five foot tall, 300 pound robot who wears pants. It’s a return to fun exploration kind of stuff. It’s more of a pre-superhero, mystery man pulp than it is super high-tech science fiction.
MM: Kind of like Doc Savage?
SW: Yeah – G8 and his flying commandos, the Spirit, the Shadow – all of that good stuff.
MM: Unlike those pulp figures, though, Atomic Robo is completely artificial. In this fictional world his creator is Nick Tesla.
BC: Nicola Tesla.
MM: Not many comics have their origins involving Mr. Tesla. How did the idea for Atomic Robo evolve?
SW: That’s all you, Brian.
BC: OK, I’ll take this one. Coincidentally, both Scott and I are into early 20th century history. But myself, I’d been reading about Tesla and the stuff he came up with reads as if its science fiction. You couldn’t make up a character like Tesla the way he actually was. The more I read about him I realized it was completely plausible that he could have invented this robot. I mean, it’s a little bit of a stretch, but it would have fit in with everything else that he did. So I figured that would be a good way to bring Robo into the early twentieth century, so then the comic could explore a whole range of historical events and pulp and different kinds of adventure stories – spy stories and war stories or straight up fighting dinosaur stories.
MM: It mentions early in this first issue that he’s a product of Tesla Heavy Industries.
BC: Sort of. We’re a little bit vague about his origins. The general idea is that, historically, when Tesla would have invented Robo he was this laughing stock of the scientific community and desperately poor. In our comic book world, this happens to be when he unveils this robot, gets a ton of media exposure for it, and that reinvigorates his business. So, technically, Tesla Heavy Industries is a product of Robo.
MM: Other than a love for pulp and robots, obviously some history has influenced Atomic Robo. Do you want to give readers an idea how long the stretch of time the first story arc will encompass? How long is it going to be?
SW: Well, in the first mini-series, that I’ve been calling the Atomic poo-poo platter ‘cause it’s just kind of a sampling of the 83 years that he’s been on the Earth. We start off in 1938 with Baron Von Helsingard who is working with the Nazis to create this kind of superman formula. Then in the second issue we jump close to the present where Robo is outside of Reno, Neveda fighting giant radioactive ants. And that’s interspersed with some flashbacks to his time as a mercenary in the 1940s fighting with the Flying Tigers in China against the Japanese. Then we’re back in the desert for the third issue, deserts seem to be a theme, where he’s fighting a giant Egyptian pyramid that has unearthed itself from the sand after thousands of years. So we try to touch on all of the bad (meaning good) science fiction, pulp and horror stuff and mash them all together. The only thing we’re really missing is a giant flying saucer touching down in Springfield USA or something like that.
It seems to have evolved from whatever we started at to Brian and I just completely geeking out on history and trying to figure out how to wrap it into stories that involve our robot.
BC: A big part for me is that real history is often so fascinating. So what I’m trying to do is transfer Robo into these actual events without taking away from the people who were in them. We find comedy in there, but we see interesting things about actual history.
MM: Without even being out yet, there have been some comparisons of this book to “Hellboy” and “Screw-On Head”. What’s your reaction to that?
SW: Anger, lots of anger.
[Laughter]
When people read the book those comparisons kind of disappear. Visually, I definitely had my Mike Mignola prayer mat for years and years, until I started doing sequential story-telling. I realized I couldn’t learn that from his as he has his own wacked out system of how he does things. Currently, I can list off six other artists that are influencing the way Robo looks. I’m strill trying to find my own voice, so I think its natural to look at others who are already doing the sort of stuff visually that I want to do. 
I think that because the first issue involved a tough character, he’s basically just a big metal punching bag, fighting Nazis, Hellboy seems to have cornered the market on fighting Nazis, but really if we’re stealing from anything it would have to be Indiana Jones or something like that. The tone of the book, though – Hellboy is very melancholy and backward looking and mystical and a little depressing sometimes. Sometimes the best part of reading a Hellboy story is that after you’ve read it you’re a little sad and you need a Zoloft or Paxil, whereas with Robo after reading it you’ve got a big stupid grin on your face. Or at least I do anyway.
As for Screw On Head that might be pretty accurate. That was a pretty quirky kind of book. It seemed like he just threw in a mixed bag of references and visual queues and whatnot.
But if it’s a knockoff of anything I’d say Indiana Jones and movies like it. When I was working on it I frequently had a movie like that on in the background. Movies like that, where there’s some dude with a machete and a shotgun.
Brian, would you like to elaborate on that?
BC: Sure. On the surface there are some similarities. Robo is this long-lived character who’s pretty strong and gets beat up a lot. Whereas Hellboy, though, focuses on the supernatural, Robo is all science fiction all the time. One of the primary themes is the development and use of technology and the interplay in the sense that Robo is kind of a force to make sure that technology isn’t abused. The supernatural has very little to no play in this setting. Once you get past the superficial elements, they have nothing in common.
MM: Despite being a very tough customer and a 300 lbs. steal punching bag, Robo’s sentience comes up pretty early. How will his self-awareness affect the overall story?
BC: Basically Robo is as human as anyone else. He’s not a super-computer, he’s not emotionless, he’s not a cold calculating machine, he’s not obsessed with killing all humans. He has a fully developed, normal human personality with quirks, a sense of humor, and emotions, and the whole she-bang. We establish early on in the first issue that it was a problem since technically he’s a new being – the laws of the United States do not account for him. He is, legally, somebody’s property. We’re laying the ground work here for his involvement in the Civil Rights movement and, before that, Women’s Suffrage.
MM: Next to Atomic Robo you are probably most well known for 8-bit Theater, which most of the time the character is that are the opposite of Atomic Robo in that their not terribly bright and often function as their own worst enemy. Is that style of humor going to play into this at all? 
BC: It would be fair to say that there’s a running theme in my work, in Nuklear Age and also in Atomic Robo that there is a certain self-antagonism. It’s toned down a lot in Robo, but despite being a very bright individual with a PhD, his solution is often to just punch things. So there is quite a bit of slapstick. There’s a certain hint of 8-bit in there, but mostly Robo is its own animal.
MM: Scott you’re in New Hampshire and Brian, you’re in Florida. Out of curiosity, how did the two of you end up working on Atomic Robo together?
SW: Ah, the magic of the Internet.
BC: Scott has some incrementing photos of me.
SW: Yes, as long as I keep getting work from this guy, those photos don’t go up on the Internet.
[Laughter]
SW: How did you find me?
BC: How did that happen? I’d been developing Robo for about 10 years, but I got really serious about it at the beginning of 2006. I just got sick of not making it happen, so that’s when I buckled down and hammered out a lot of storylines. So I started looking for an artist online to draw them. After going through a few people I found Scott’s site randomly. What impressed me was that the samples he had in his gallery he had some very mundane stuff next to pictures of monsters, but it all looked cohesive. You could believe that all of these disparate creatures existed in the same universe. And that was really important to me because Robo is this mash of the ordinary and the fantastic. So I emailed him and he jumped right on board.
MM: How did you end up going from a creator/employer relationship to co-creators?
BC: Those incriminating photos.
[Laughter]
SW: When he had found me I was still working a day job and was doodling in my free time. One of the things I was fooling around with was this kind of pulp figure who was not a robot, but a secret agent for FDR in the ‘30s so I had been researching that era and the whole pulp genre at that point. So when Brian contacted me about working on Robo I thought it was cool that they were kind of similar.
That took a long time to figure out, though. Brian said, “I have this idea for a robot,” but failed to mention the fact that he wears clothes and that kind of thing. Everything he just told you about Robo’s personality took about three weeks for him to get around to telling me. [Laughter] So I was drawing these big giant robots, big clanky mecha lookin’ things ‘cause I had no idea. Then he said something that made it clicked and I thought, “Oh, this guy is basically a robotic version of the same thing that I’m working on.” So I ended up abandoning that idea and taking everything I had really liked about it and sort of poured it visually into the pictures I was working on for Robo. I also ended up begging Brian to take a lot of things off Robo. He started off as this kind of Swiss Army knife robot.
BC: Yeah, he had a lot of shit going on.
SW: Yeah, there were blasters and he could fly. What the hell else could he do? He had a lot of attachments and gear. The idea evolved that as time went on and we moved further ahead in history the stuff you could slap on this robot would just get more and more…powerful, I guess. So what was once a machine gun hidden in his arm became a fusion blaster. We ended up having a lot of discussions and back-and-forth about how much was too much. Then we were talking about super-heroes and who is more interesting as a character; Superman, who’s nigh indestructible and can fly, the whole nine yards, or someone like Spider-man, who’s a lot of fun and kind of quirky and routinely gets the snot beat out of him but still comes out on top somehow. Then we both agreed it was the scrappy underdog who was a lot more interesting as a character because you can relate to them better as a reader. So the Robo I was introduced to wasn’t the Robo we had a couple of weeks later. So Brian just declared out of nowhere that we should be co-creators instead of a work-for-hire arrangement. Which was probably one of the coolest moments of my life so far.
MM: So when this really started to gel for you, how did you end up working with Red 5 comics in order to get it out the door?
SW: That was totally by accident. Kind of the same way that Brian found me. Just kind of looking around the internet. Someone sent Red 5 a link to Brian’s 8-bit site, just a random link in their mail with a message to check it out. We got to talking with them and now they’re publishing us. It was absolutely as random as that. We had submitted to…how many publishers?
BC: At least half a dozen.
SW: And we hadn’t heard anything back from any of them. And out of the blue Red 5 ended up contacting us. So it worked out pretty good.
MM: Excellent. Scott, you’ve worked with Image and have an upcoming project with Chris Yost. How did a gent from New Hampshire end up working these kind of odd jobs in comic books?
SW: Again, it’s totally the internet. Two years ago I was working as a flight instructor at a college up here and I was a bit of an internet geek and there was a couple of forums that I had been a member of for a while. I had made friends with this guy from Germany about ten years ago. He was really into comic books and knew that at one point I used to be. I had kind of divorced myself from the whole thing when I went into aviation. He had got into an online comic book community and had pestered me about doing a pin up for an anthology they were doing and I decided that would be fun. A writer saw the pin-up and talked me into doing a four-page story. While I had no idea what I was doing, it apparently came together in a way that was pleasant to someone. It ended up getting put into this anthology next to a story that Chris Yost had written. So when he got his copy he contacted me and told me about his work with X-Men and in animation and said he wanted to expand his portfolio. 
At that point I thought, “Wow, maybe I can make another go of this,” and took another year or so and hunted around for whatever freelance work I could get. When I had gotten enough of it, I took the plunge, quit the day job and started doing something I really love. I guess I always secretly wanted to be an artist professionally, but I never admitted it to myself. So far it seems to be working out OK…I guess? They haven’t shut off the lights yet.
[Laughter]
MM: Well that’s always a good sign. Brian, God knows you’ve been around awhile with 8-Bit Theater and Nuklear Age you’ve been quoted as saying your, “favorite comics are the ones where the jokes are on the reader.” Would you like to take a moment and explain how that’s an incentive for readers to pick up the book?
BC: I find that to be a fun ride as a reader, especially with Nuklear Age. There are so few surprises today. Usually you can see an ending coming a mile away or you really hope it goes in this one direction and things are leaning that way then they’ll cop out and do the typical thing. So I enjoy as a writer giving people the opportunity to actually get surprised. Few people take the risk of jerking the audience around – not in a mean way, but in a fun, rollercoaster kind of way. But with Robo we’re not trying to fool anybody, it’s just is what it is.
MM: Well great. I look forward to reading it. Is there anything you’d like to add?
SW: Buy more Robo books so we can make more.
MM: And with those words of wisdom I think we can call it a day.
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