This is a tale of contracts ending and product evolution.
Two months or so ago, some of my favorite people decided to take a chance with their creation, Atomic Robo. They are bringing the entirety of their work for the last 9 volumes online as a free webcomic and launched a Patreon to support the comic going forward, in addition to the Atomic Robo supply depot. Brian Clevinger got his start in webcomics with 8-Bit Theater, so this is somewhat a return to ye olde tymes in a swanky format to him but for Scott Wegener this is a a bold, new, different, and thus somewhat scary frontier. To be be honest, not many careers seem to be as cruel yet rewarding as comics artist, so my read on the scary level is “Can’t be much worse than normal, but I do like food now and then.” I could be wrong, but I think Scott is fighting Bob Cratchit for the last lump of coal in the scuttle right now in the midst of New England spring which hasn’t quite gotten the memo about winter being over.
Because I have the pleasure of being their Weirdness Consultant (I got a promotion from mere science nerd recently), I knew this was coming and I wanted to do my best to help them make the most of it. Because people are more than a little excited about the prospect of FREE ROBOT SCIENCE PUNCHING COMIC, the traffic that came bearing down on them was similar to the catastrophic Leo Laporte/TWiT Army load testing of my own website (despite my best efforts to Warren Ellis-proof it). You guys brought them crashing down but thanks to Hiveworks they’re up and better than ever. I’d been haranguing them for what seems like years, because it totally was years, to get themselves some sort of merch up and running as they kept making wonderful images and words that needed to be available as consumer products.
I cannot adequately express how not excited they were. They make art and words, and try really hard not to think about sales of things that are not comics because that is distracting. I point blank told both of them that if the poster in the background of NASA Director Bolden’s office “SPACE: IT’S OUT THERE!” did not become a purchasable item, that they clearly hated money. This is very similar to how I tell researchers I have no interest in accounting when discussing their work with radioactive materials; if something is going wrong, I want you to talk to me, not worry how much things may cost down the road. Luckily, they got themselves George Rohac who actually likes the business and logistics side of the house and fired up the store like it had never existed before. Just for the record, for those of us that like fine paper products, it’s their intention that trade paperbacks will continue to be available.
Atomic Robo has always run on the slightly weird schedule of roughly nine months of comics per year and then three of downtime for business retooling (see also: Scott’s excellent new Wacom tablet), story development, and remembering that loved ones exist. Unlike Brian & Scott’s normal incredibly busy breather, this one has been marked by the actual transition to the online comics. Issue by issue, the old volumes of Atomic Robo, including the Free Comic Book Day specials, have been appearing on the website at the rate of three per week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Eventually, they’ll catch up to Volume 10 and the new releases will begin in early May.
I bring all this up because they just hit Volume 6, Issue 1 “The Ghost of Station X”. Issue 2, which starts next Monday, is where my alter ego, Dr. Phil Broughton, Action Scientist, first appears on the pages of Atomic Robo. This is my reward for having helped over the, umm, more than decade that all this has been rattling in Brian & Scott’s heads. I take it back; the real reward has been getting to help bullshit with them endlessly and help make Atomic Robo as wonderful as it is.
They also made these two wonderful Tesladyne and Atomic Robo labels for my BBotE bottles and let me use them when I really needed to help my mom after my father passed. In turn, I now toss back profits from those back in the pot for their Patreon in thanks.
If you’ve never read Atomic Robo before, now is a great time to start for the low, low cost of free right here at Volume 1, Issue 1. If you’ve been reading all along and were confused about the transition online, now you have the straight dope on how to proceed.
In short, REMAIN CALM. TRUST IN SCIENCE.