Been a hot minute since we talked about Atomic Robo, huh? Well, more like 8 years. We left off with Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, the penultimate Robo story released through Red 5. Dawn of a New Era is the last story released through IDW. There were several mini-series in between, none of which had a splash page. Which wouldn't necessarily stop me now, but back then, when I was more rigid about the "splash page" thing, and after I'd spent several weeks on Robo already, was a good excuse to move on.
So what happened in the 5 years between those 2 mini-series? Briefly:
Knights of the Golden Circle: Dr. Dinosaur's "time bomb" (5 nukes he stole, tied together in the shape of a dinosaur) threw Robo back to the 1860s. 20 years on, he teams up with Bass Reeves and Doc Holliday to stop Helsingard from conquering the United States, before Robo's reactor runs out of power.
Ring of Fire: A group called ULTRA has seized control of every super-science organization on Earth, including Tesladyne, under the auspices of saving the world from the Biomega threat. What's left of Tesladyne have to find what's left of Robo, build him a body, and find a way to stop an entire living island without causing nuclear winter.
Temple of Od: Set in the 1930s, Robo's on a mission in Manchuria for the U.S. government, working with Chinese resistance (including old acquaintance Helen McCallister from Deadly Art of Science) to rescue a Chinese quantum mechanics expert the Japanese captured because he figured out how to harness zero-point energy, what Edison called the Odic Force, and which a Japanese physicist has turned into a weapon.
Spectre of Tomorrow: Robo has the new Tesladyne open, which is going to focus on science and not saving the world from random weird shit. Seriously, you guys. Robo means it! To prove it, he's spending all his time holed up in his lab, while Vik and Lang try to deal with Richard Branson's annoying Homeowner's Association Complaints. Then unknown cyborgs start breaking down all over the world, and that leads back to Hashima Island (from The Ghost of Station X) and ALAN.
Which brings us here. One of two big developments is gung-ho badass Jenkins appears for the first time since Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, looking a lot like Cable, with the cybernetic eye and hand. He's taking a break from waging his one-man shadow war against the forces that destroyed Tesladyne because he's worried about an invasion from the Vampire Dimension. He needs Tesladyne to help kick those bloodsuckers in the keister.
The Tesladyne Institute he finds is more of a school, with 3 students - Margo, Ben, and Olivia. Who immediately set to sneaking around the facility and trying to listen in on faculty meetings. As good, curious action scientists-to-be should. More troubling for Jenkins, Tesladyne has just 4 mentors. Great, in theory, ratio for teaching. Not so great for stopping an invasion from an entire planet of vampires.
In practice, it's not so great for the teaching either. Bernard, never entirely over losing the connection he had during the adventure in Hollow Earth (though at least he's past his apathy), is using mapping an extinct volcano as a test for a potential mobile robot assistant for future exoplanet exploration. Then he disappears (as far as everyone on the surface knows.) Vik and Lang (the latter rocking a white beard, making it look like he's aged dramatically since Spectre of Tomorrow) are supposed to be on vacation, but find an incursion from the Vampire Dimension at the particle accelerator. Jenkins? Jenkins is not suitable for young children. Or college-age students. Or anyone, actually.
Clevinger gives Robo a good line when Foley asks, in regards to what Jenkins might be able to teach, what the man does in his off-time. Robo's response? 'Intensifying isn't really an answer, is it?'
Which leaves Foley, the youngest mentor, to do the teaching. Here, that's mostly about getting them to understand the difference between practical and impractical science. Being asked to design a paper airplane and coming up with a design that requires warp drive and hypothetical materials one Planck width thick is certainly creative, but not useful for getting you an actual paper airplane.
The other big development is the emergence of ALAN 2.0. Robo shot the computer that housed ALAN's brain with, as he put it, a lot of bullets, at the end of Ghost of Station X. But they needed its computing power and manufacturing capabilities to build Robo a new reactor power source in Ring of Fire, and that activated enough sentience for it to upload into some little drones Robo built during Spectre of Tomorrow that helped him keep Helsingard from taking control of ALAN's resources.
The rest of the staff are understandably pissed once they find out, given ALAN was going to use the Earth for fuel and irradiate the rest when he blasted off into space with the power of the hundreds of nukes he stole (and framed Robo for that theft, putting them on the run.) Robo argues this is the original version of ALAN Dr. Turing created, before decades alone in the dark. They can raise him to respect humanity, rather than regard them as a resource to expend if other things appear to take priority.
Lang's extremely hostile reaction is strong evidence Robo might have been right keeping ALAN hidden in his lab while he built him a body and taught him how to control it. When Lang comments it isn't reassuring to have one artificial intelligence vouching for another, everyone else looks either horrified or vaguely embarrassed at such a robo-ist comment. Even Jenkins is standing there with a frown like, "Yeah, that was over the line."
At least this version of ALAN can run if they decide to kill him. Initially he's just a box on a table, looking about like a Playstation 4 with one of those vertical stands. Wegener gives ALAN a much less formidable body than Robo's. Human-shaped, bilateral symmetry, opposable thumbs and all, but wiry (taller, too.) Which may not mean much when you're talking limbs constructed of who knows what metal, but it doesn't hurt. Robo outright says he gave ALAN a body like humans to make them at least somewhat more inclined to accept him, the same reason Tesla did that for him.
Wegener also gives ALAN a video-screen for a face, which can project various symbols. Smiley faces, question marks, things like that. Which is both more and less expressive than Robo's own face. Sometimes it's just a blank screen, which would be unnerving to look at, but Robo can really only show emotion through his eyes and body language. ALAN at least can project basic emotions.
By the end of the mini-series, nothing has been resolved as far as the vampires, or Jenkins' concerns regarding the lack of preparation, but ALAN is the newest student of the Institute, and his classmates seem to take well to him. And this makes Foley a good choice for the mentor, since she seemed the most in alignment with Robo's idea that helping ALAN feel like part of society would make him less inclined to see humanity as expendable.
Whether that's going to work out? Well. . .
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