“Yesterday’s” Trade: Robotman Takes Off

Someone should tell him Earth is in the other direction.

Robotman Takes Off

World Almanac Publications (1986)

collecting comic strips published in newspaper through United Feature Syndicate in 1985

WRITER/ARTIST: Jim Meddick

(note this is not connected to DC Comics’ “Doom Patrol” member)

Robotman And Friends is an oddity in media presentations. While we’ve seen other media adapt comic strips and the rare comic strips based on other media, this was always intended as a multimedia licensing project, including toys. There were plush dolls made of the characters…which might have been a mistake. Yes, kids love to hug plush things and kids like robots but hugging a robot is rare above 5 years old. Maybe if they made action figures? There were also Little Golden Books and coloring books that I either haven’t seen in year or haven’t seen at all so I can’t really judge them. There was also a three-episode miniseries that aired on television and was released in the newly created home video market on VHS. I plan to do a video review on this someday but while I liked parts of the concept and feel there’s a really good idea here, the final product was lacking in too many areas even considering the target age group, pretty much the Care Bears crowd for kids who preferred robots to teddy bears.

Then there’s the odd duck in this presentation, namely Jim Meddick’s Robotman comic strip. During research I found out (and our old pal the Comic Strip Critic will find this one fascinating) that originally United Feature Syndicate approached Bill Waterson to add Robotman to Calvin & Hobbes but he refused, and rightly so as it really doesn’t fit with that comic strip’s concept. Meddick was then offered the part, who only did it for the exposure, assuming the entire project was going to fall flat. He was right…except for the comic strip. It went for years and next week when we look at the other Robotman collection I have I’ll go into why that changed, but he lasted until the early 2000s.

Here’s a brief plot: Robotman, his companion Stellar, her little brother Oops, and for some reason a non-robot named Lint who looks like he escaped the sprites from Rainbow Brite (speaking of cross-media breakouts) have come to Earth from Robotland to help people. I don’t know how close the cartoons are to the other books, but there’s also a villain named Roberon and his flunky Sound Off (who is surprisingly competent for a kids show henchman) who want to turn all of Robotland’s robots into bad robots instead of superhelpful robots. By the way, I just wasted a paragraph since none of this is in the comic strip.

Instead Robotman appears out of nowhere and runs into a boy named Oscar Milde (not named for over a week, by the way), who invites him to stay with his father and mother (you were allowed to have both parents happily married in the 1980s) and slacker, girl-chasing brother Gary. Wacky hi-jinks ensued, usually the normal two friends stuff like starting a club, dreading a new school year, or going to the dentist, but occasionally seeds of his being a robot snuck in. For example, a love triangle between him, the washing machine, and the vacuum cleaner. Or the time his extra-terrestrial friends stopped by, or “show-and-tell”. I first heard of the comic strip of this franchise when a friend of mine showed me a collection from later in the run, when he was still living with the Milde family, and Meddick added more sci-fi based humor since the cartoonist is a big a sci-fi fan. There are elements that he was trying to incorporate even this far back but seemed to be playing it safer, probably due to concerns about the marketing aspect of the creation but I don’t know for sure.

And yet, most of the elements from the rest of the campaign are gone from the strip, even the good ones. We get mention of a “robot dimension” later in this collection, a possible connection to Robotland (which is in another direction, which is why Roberon kept tormenting our heroes so he could get back there and reprogram everyone) but that’s it. Meddick also takes a few popshots at Robotman’s design in these early strips, including the heart he would later drop in favor of the lightning bolt some of you may know if you read the strip prior to the title character’s departure, but I’ll get to that next week. There is no Stellar and no Oops, which I would have liked to have seen, even as recurring characters. Lint even I don’t miss, in part because he doesn’t fit the brand. Robotman would later get an evil twin named Bruce (in keeping with the later strips using more science fiction parody, which means of course Bruce has a goatee) so why not have Roberon and Sound Off as a bit more incompetent than their cartoon counterparts for comedy. I could see something like David Willis‘ webcomic It’s Walky (but more family and newspaper friendly) that jumps between fights with the villains and wacky hi-jinks of a robot (or robots) from another dimension living with humans. They already beat ALF by about a year, why not It’s Walky by around a decade? Gasoline Alley bounced between somewhat serious and fully comical (whether or not you find it funny is another matter) so there is a small precedent.

Don’t get me wrong. I like this as a start but it does get better as the other properties failed and Meddick would get more and more control, which again I’ll get into next week. I just see more potential and the lack of the other robots in the comic strip that was part of a marketing campaign (I’m not sure if the toys were the main focus or if they even had one) that I actually found interesting is a bit disappointing. That said, I think I like the Mildes better than Michael and his grandfather from the cartoon. Sure, living with a crazy old inventor who just wants to bring some fun into the world (something we could probably use today) has some potential but I think the Mildes are more interesting for a comic strip and Michael never had much of a personality in the show, certainly when compared to Oscar. There is a reason the comic strip continued long after the rest of the concepts ended. This book is way out of print but I found one is slightly beat up condition on Amazon, and you might find it on eBay as well. I don’t know. Next week we’ll zoom ahead to the “Robotman and Monty” years with Primary Crullers but I do hope someone reprints all the Robotman strips someday.