Atomic Robo Presents: Real Science Adventures vol. 2
The first volume of this series was an anthology that worked as nearly all anthologies do: the quality of stories it featured was decidedly uneven. However, amongst them there was one entry that stood above all the rest. “Tesla’s Electric Sky Schooner” not only featured an imaginative and fast-paced script from “Robo” creator Brian Clevinger (who also wrote all of the stories in the volume) and fantastic art from the team known as Gurihiru that made the story the standout entry in that volume. There was much gushing about it in my review and I even went so far as to say that I’d love to see a full-length tale featuring Gurihiru on art.
Now I had no idea what Clevinger had planned for the next volume of “Real Science Adventures,” but my dreams were half-answered here. This is a full-length story featuring Nikola Tesla’s “Centurions of Science” as they work together to stop an evil industrial triumvirate from taking over the United States. However, Gurihiru is nowhere to be seen with the six issues collected here featuring six different artists. This turns out to be a dealbreaker as none of them are on the same level as that team in terms of quality or storytelling. Sadly, the story being told here comes off as a huge disappointment in terms of the expectations I had based on the original short.
Frank Reade Jr., Jack Wright and Robert Trydan are all titans of industry with very particular thoughts about the direction the U.S.A. is taking as the 20th Century approaches. So particular are their thoughts that they’ve taken steps to usurp control of this country for themselves. To the detriment of their scheme is the fact that their plans bring them into conflict with the Centurions of Science who are ready to use their unique skills to thwart this threat.
The idea of Tesla teaming up with industrialist George Westinghouse, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, investigator Charles Fort, escape artist Harry Houdini, secret agent Winfield Lovecraft (father to H.P.) and martial-arts master Wong Kei-ying (father to Wong Fei-hung) is one that holds great appeal. Even if the basic concept was already done by Alan Moore in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” the catch here is that these are (mostly) real people with the threats being particular to our world — with some elements of the fantastic thrown in to spice things up. Clevinger and Gurihiru’s original story served as an excellent template for how future stories involving this team would go along with how the team worked together.
So what went wrong? Mainly it’s the art. I admit that Gurihiru’s work is a hard act to follow, but the seven artists don’t really come close to meeting, let alone equaling that standard. Erica Henderson, Caanan Grall, Ryan Cody & Leela Wagner, Erich Owen, Enduro and M.D. Penman are all clearly influenced by the animation/anime/manga stylings of Mike Oeming, Kazu Kibuishi and Bryan Lee O’Malley. Those are some good influences to have, yet much of their work comes off as pretty rough in how it looks on the page. If you told me that this was the first professional work of these artists, then I would have no trouble believing you. Ironically, the one artist who worked on the first volume, Cody, turns in the most disappointing work here.
The art also suffers from another issue that rarely comes up in the comics I read: bad coloring. It’s not that the colors used here are inappropriate, but a lot of the scenes in this story take place at night or in dark places and the action in those parts becomes hard to discern as a result. Now it could be the result of the artists going crazy with the inks or giving bad directions to colorist Erica Henderson. However, the simple fact remains that a great colorist can work around these issues and make the work of an artist who favors dark tones stand out even more. Trish Mulvhill’s work on Eduardo Risso’s art, starting with vol. 3 of the paperback editions of “100 Bullets,” exemplifies this best. I’d have loved to see what she would’ve done with the art here.
As for the story, there’s no denying that the art saps a lot of energy from it though I think it errs in a key area as well. While seeing the cast separated for the first half of the series is a bit frustrating, that move allows Clevinger to focus more attention on their individual efforts and give them their own moments to shine. That’s still true in the story’s second half when they’re all working together, yet even with all of this extra space the writer doesn’t flesh out their personalities any more than we saw in the original short. They’re all basically one-dimensional ciphers working towards a common goal. Seeing this diverse set of characters work together is amusing yet there’s no indication as to why they continue to work together or if they all like each other.
That said, the key issue I mentioned? It’s how grounded the threat they face is. We get flashes of the fantastic throughout the story and even some fairly advanced heavy machinery at the end. Yet the original short had them on a flying airship trying to take out a flying fortress far more fearsome than theirs. I know you can’t go that big all the time or things would become boring and repetitive. The problem is that setup suggested boundless imagination and adventure, which the conflict against this threat fails to deliver.
All in all, I can’t say that this volume of “Real Science Adventures” was actively awful as my sensibilities weren’t offended by anything I saw here. I just kept getting a greater sense of disappointment with each page I turned while reading it. This was no way to follow up the original short and now I’m wary of seeing more stories featuring the Centurions of Science if this is how they’re going to turn out. If they got Gurihiru back to do the next one or had regular “Robo” artist Scott Wegener take a crack at things, then I’d feel reassured. As it stands, I bought this volume without a second thought given how much I like the series it’s based on. Now I’ll have to really think about picking up any future volumes after reading this one.