Atomic Robo and The Ghost of Station X #5 (of 5)
Written by Brian Clevinger
Art by Scott Wegener
Colors by Ronda Pattison
Letters by Jeff Powell
Red 5 Comics
Released February 8, 2012
Cover Price: $3.50
One of the amazing things about Atomic Robo is the way each story arc has managed to tell its own kind of tale. We’ve had war stories, pulp adventure stories, and horror stories. With Atomic Robo and The Ghost of Station X, we get a full-fledged mystery, and with issue #5, we finally learn who has been behind the various problems that have been besetting Robo for the previous four issues. What we learn is surprising and a little heart breaking, and is just another example of why this is such a great series and why it should be on everyone’s reading list.
The Ghost of Station X started with Robo getting a call from NASA saying that he was needed to rescue some astronauts from an impossible situation. It turns out there wasn’t any actual danger, except for Robo, who gets blown up in space and crashes to Earth, barely surviving the experience. Then, Robo tracks down who he thinks sent him on the wild goose chase in space, only to find himself framed for terrorism. In this issue, Robo has tracked down who has been behind the scheme the whole time. I don’t want to spoil who is behind it, but it is someone who totally fits into the Robo universe, and makes for a great villain for the future.
What writer Brian Clevinger does with this issue is pretty amazing. He has shown us Robo’s humanity in the past, but he does a particularly good job in this issue, offering us a villain who is basically a mirror image of what Robo could be if he had no empathy. It’s important to remember that Robo is almost human, and it is this humanity that we as readers identify with. If he was just a boring robot, we wouldn’t care. Clevinger has spent the whole series forging Robo (sorry, couldn’t avoid that) into a fully realized character that the reader will be interested in. This really hits home at the end of this issue, and you can see that Robo knows that he is all too similar to the villain.
Of course, the reader wouldn’t know all of what was going on in Robo’s head without the art of Scott Wegener. Wegener has always been able to express Robo’s emotions with just a few lines and he continues to grow as an artist. He gets a lot of very subtle emotion out of his main character, and again, it is this subtlety that gets the reader so invested in the situation. This is another tour de force effort from Wegener, and it continues to be so much fun to see what he does with this series.
Atomic Robo continues to be an amazing series with each and every issue. It is the perfect comic for anyone who likes high octane action and adventure. Clevinger and Wegener have crafted one of the best series of the last few years and there is no reason not to be reading it. Just pick up any of the trades and check it out. You’ll be instantly hooked. Atomic Robo and The Ghost of Station X gets a 5 out of 5!
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment