The Mile High Club: Atomic Robo: The Flying She-Devils of The Pacific #1 Review

Summer’s barely half over, and to date, we have been shown a summer of Avengers fighting X-Men, beloved characters from a 1980s classic self-contained story ressurected for the generally accepted comics story motivation of “fuckloads of cash,” and an apparent cold war between the Big Two publishers over who can be more gay for the apparent purposes of mainstream media attention (“Northstar’s getting gay married? Well… Earth 2 Green Lantern’s gay! But we know that Marvel will escalate, so get George Perez on the phone and tell him to start giving Lois Lane man hands!”). All this big event posturing might be enough to make a person despair over whether the days of short-run, plain old fun comics is over.

Well, despair not. Because Atomic Robo is back. And not only that, this time he even has a message on sexual identity and politics for the people who are deeply enough invested in that kind of stuff to give a shit what Alan Scott puts in his mouth in the privacy of his own home.

The genius conceit that writer Brian Clevinger has built into Atomic Robo is that he only writes short miniseries about the character, and due to that character’s nature – genius, immortal science-based adventurer into the unknown – those short stories can be about almost anything, in any genre. Since Robo’s inception, we’ve seen him fight crime with 30s pulp adventurers, battle super villains, tangle with rogue artificial intelligences, curse Stephen Hawking while traveling to Mars, and even attack Cthuhlu himself. Clevinger has built himself an engine that allows himself to tell pulp stories, superhero stories, horror stories; he can pick and choose between any genre he wants. And this time around, he’s tackling the old pulp Air Adventurer stories of the 30s and 40s, seen most prominently in the comics world in the long-running and repeatedly-cancelled Blackhawks from DC.

In this first issue of the five-issue The Flying She-Devils of The Pacific arc, we find Robo test-piloting an unarmed jet fighter over the Pacific Ocean in 1951, when he is attacked by some new form of aircraft that can turn on a dime, stop dead in the air, and which resemble the head and shoulders of Robocop with helicopter landing skids for forearms and a giant 30-caliber dong sticking out of his chest. Somewhere, Peter Weller just woke up screaming. But I digress.

Robo is rescued by a group of people with rocket packs and a Batman utility belt of cool gadgets that allow them to do battle in the skies. The aerial battle sequence was clearly carefully thought out by Clevinger and artist Scott Wegener, because beyond the rocket packs, the tech used all makes period sense, despite being fantastic and utterly impossible. The rescuers use wads of plastic explosive with kitchen timers to blow up the attackers, and use harpoons with ropes attached to get close enough to the fighters to attach the bombs. The homegrown nature of the tech helps ground the story and distract you from the fact that, if rocket packs were available in 1951, we’d all be working for Spacely Sprockets and pressing buttons for food, clothing and questionable yet guilt-free sex acts from our robot maids right now.

We discover that the rescuers are classic, stereotypical pulp air adventurers: from the rocket packs, to the flying helicarrier to the secret island base, with one key exception: they’re all women. Supposedly deserters and AWOL military personnel from various World War II armies (including an obvious Rosie the Riveter with a big ol’ red pipe wrench that was, honestly, a little on the nose for my taste), they have banded together to escape their civilian lives and work to secure abandoned World War II military materiel that litters the Pacific Islands, available to any scumbag who wants to grab it. And Robo, being a dude robot, built by a dude in the dude-centric early 20th century, has to very quickly get his mind around the fact that he’s suddenly surrounded by capable independent women who aren’t interested in making anyone a sandwich, unless “sandwich” is an obscure Guatemalan word for “smoking ruin of once airborne machinery.”

So what we have here is working on a couple of levels, the first being that Clevinger lays the groundwork for a classic, and so far effective, air adventure story. It has all the nifty aerial gadgetry elements, plus all the necessary character archtypes: daredevil pilots, a genius-but-eccentric chief engineer, and a tough and apparently-capable commanding officer, complete with eyepatch. But by making all those characters women, Clevinger builds a framework under which a stereotypical guy, with stereotypical 1950s guy attitudes, has to come to terms with whatever prejudices he has in the face of those prejudices being visibly proven wrong, probably over and over again. And while Robo is shown as handling this generally well in this issue (beyond the repeated, “But you’re all ladies!” he stutters), it’s pretty clear that this is a plot point that will get some examination over the course of the story.

In short: there is a lot going on here for a story that ostensibly is about a bunch of air pirates performing shoot-em-ups in the sky.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with this issue: Wegener’s art, particularly in the opening air attack sequence. I will grant that the storytelling of an aerial battle against a stark light-blue background, where the enemy aircraft all look the same, must provide challenges to a comic illustrator. But the tricky part about this sequence is that Wegener chooses to show the rocket pack pirates as wearing big old round goggles, some with blue lenses, which appear very similar to Robo’s eyes. So in some of the panels, you you don’t look closely enough, it can be hard to tell if you’re looking at Robo having ejected or a pirate. In addition, some of the panels show damage to the attackers happening almost off panel, so if you’re not paying attention, you can lose the flow of one attack or another; there’s one transition where I couldn’t tell until my third read-through that two different attacks were occurring in two different places. But other than those storytelling issues, Wegener’s style – a cartoony, medium-lined and simple look – continues to be distinctive, and serves what at heart is a light and exciting adventure story.

Clearly Clevinger and Wegener have some reasonable big thematic ideas going on under the covers of this story, which should be satisfying for those who are looking for that kind of thing (Hi, San Diego Batgirl!). But those things so far aren’t getting in the way of what’s kicking off to be a rollicking fun adventure story, that even in this first issue is packed with action, humor, and just cool technology, just like previous Atomic Robo stories. The only caution I can offer is that I hope that Wegener gets a better handle on the storytelling of the aerial combat, because if it remains mildly confusing, it’s gonna be an Achilles Heel that hamstrings how good the overall story winds up being to read.

Still and all: this is big, fun comics, with a message for anyone looking for one. Give it a shot.