Random Back Issues #3 - Flying She-Devils of the Pacific #3

Just like Captain America! Short response, jump out of a plane. Who needs a parachute when you have a metal body? 

As briefly described in Sunday Splash Page #43, when Robo fights flying things, he resorts to hurling himself at them like a missile. It buys the She-Devils time to regroup and escape, but gets him captured by a Japanese super-science division that isn't ready to give up on winning World War II, even a half-decade later. This group is led by the pilot who shot Robo down twice during the fighting over China. They square off again in issue 5, and either Robo hasn't gotten any better, or his opponent has.

This issue is just a big fight. The Japanese forces attack the She-Devils' home base, and eventually destroy it with a super-science bomb, a more powerful version of which they plan to turn against California. I really like the shade of green Filardi uses for that explosion.

There's planes and people in jetpacks zipping around all over the place, so in most panels, Wegener focuses in just a small piece of the action. One or two of the She-Devils and roughly the same number of enemy planes. There's not usually much sense of how the different dogfights are located in relation to each other, but that works since the whole thing is incidental. The planes attacked to lure the defenders out, so the base could be attacked more easily. So every so often there's a panel of the enemy sub, or their more advanced aircraft as they put that plan into motion. In those cases, if you can even see the dogfights, they're off in the distant background, a bunch of insignificant blips, because the real battle's being won right here.

[Longbox #1, 238th comic. Atomic Robo and the Flying She-Devils of the Pacific #3, by Brian Clevinger (writer), Scott Wegener (artist), Nick Fildari (colorist), Jeff Powell (letterer)]