Sunday Splash Page #44

"Conan Needs to Hit the Gym", in Atomic Robo and the Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur #4, by Brian Clevinger (writer), Scott Wegener (artist), Nick Filardi (colorist), Jeff Powell (letterer)

I really enjoy Dr. Dinosaur as an antagonist, because Robo tries to take this fairly logical approach to science, and here's this thing claiming to be a time-traveling Velociraptor scientist going full Silver Age DC. Everything powered by crystals. A "time bomb" that is five nukes put together in the shape of a dinosaur. It's all just completely daffy, and yet his stuff works.

At some point Robo really needs to invest more time in figuring out how it works, instead of constantly insisting it can't, since it clearly does.

The question was whether Dr. Dinosaur's shtick would get old over five issues, since he's typically a one-off villain. I think it held up, by Clevinger and Wegener wisely keep things split up enough he isn't front and center constantly. Bernard and the other Action Scientists get roped into helping liberate the citizens of Hollow Earth from Dr. Dinosaur (Bernard's still grappling with the fallout from that). Majestic-12 makes an overt move against Tesladyne while Robo's away that gets a lot of time.

This is kind of an odd mini-series because, while most Atomic Robo mini-series have one full-page splash, two tops, this one had at least seven. I don't know if Wegener asked to go big more often, or if he and Clevinger felt it suited the unusual setting (three or four of those splash pages are showing the landscape or a city), or they just wanted a change of pace. Of course, Dr. Dinosaur usually has a lot of dialogue, broken up into panels of him saying something, then pausing for effect, then some addendum. 

(Example: Panel 1: "From Hell's Heart I stab at thee!" Panel 2: silent pause Panel 3: "In the heart!" Panel 4: "Ha!")

So maybe it balances everything out. And I did enjoy most of the splash pages. Wegener made good use of the space, and Filardi's colors pop nicely, with all the neon pink and green playing against the muted greys and blues that otherwise dominate the subterranean world.