“Yesterday’s” Trade> Robotman: Primary Crullers

Great, now I’m hungry for crullers.

Primary Crullers: A Robotman Book

Andrew McMeel Publishing (1997)

collecting the newspaper strip published by United Feature Syndicate

WRITER/ARTIST: Jim Meddick

It’s the nature of a comic to change over the years. Art styles change or the artist simply gets better. I hope to say that myself someday with it comes to my comics. At some point between the strips published in my friend’s book and this one Meddick’s style really changed, and so did the look and tone of Robotman. I want to stress this going in: I at no point am saying the comic strip at this point was bad. It was good and I will be holding on to this collection. That said, I’m not into all of the changes because frankly I liked it the way it was.

By this point Robotman had since left the Milde family and moved in with Monty Montahue, an out of work scientist trying to find work and making comics. This is where the similarities between me and him end, wise guys! Monty gets his name from Monty Python’s Flying Circus according to at least one source and it shows in the changes to the comic. Wacky stuff goes on in a style that is still saner than in Flying Circus but the influence is obvious. Meddick’s love of sci-fi still pops up now and then but the crazier side is now more present and the fourth wall is put together with duct tape only to be torn apart again, while in the book I reviewed last week it’s more like a peephole to the other side of the fourth wall.

Then there is the change to Robotman himself. I’ll get into his retconned origin in a moment but there are two big changes, his look and his personality. I’m guessing Meddick found this new design (compare to the cover in the other book) easier to draw than trying to emulate a no-longer-existing toy, but if he hated the beanie propeller so much why not drop it when he changed the eyes, body type, and limbs while replacing the heart with a lightening bolt? The eyes are the odd part because when he’s surprised he gets these big round eyes.

As a reminder.

The tone also became less family-friendly, with sex humor, loser humor, and even the occasional mild drug humor. I’ve seen interviews where Meddick said he wasn’t the right person to do a family strip (remember, he only did this comic originally to get some work in his resume) and it shows here. In fact, the reason Monty fully took over the strip was that United Feature Syndicate weren’t comfortable with a supposedly main character that appealed to kids (remember his roots) in a comic with adult humor. So Robotman was written out of the comic and Monty took over. Of course if you think about the comic it may have been Meddick’s plan from the start. The rest of the supporting cast save two in this book have no real connection to Robotman. You have Robotman’s evil twin, Bruce, and Giggles the Bear, a cute character added when Robotman dealt with acute Cute-a-phobia, a condition that nearly drove him from the strip. Robotman also picked up a few other quirks on the neurotic side but look who he moved in with.

The rest of the supporting cast are Monty’s friend Moondog and in this book three girlfriends–Lilly and Loco Ohno (yes, a Yoko Ono parody in the late 1990s), his ex-girlfriends by the time this collection ends, and his current girlfriend, the bodybuilder turned sex therapist Olga. Other characters came along but they were all connected to Monty, with no ties for Robotman outside of the two I mentioned. The Mildes were written out but not forgotten when the retcon came. In this new version Robotman isn’t a space robot or from a robot dimension but a failed attempt to create warrior robots for the government. (Bruce is also a failure but he replaced warrior with being evil while Robotman because a pacifist.) Robotman was reprogrammed to think he was an extraterrestrial while Monty was brainwashed to forget his trying to create the robots. But Robotman soon bumped into Monty and not realizing who they were ended up rooming together anyway. That’s the info Mulder found out.

Yes, Mulder and Scully of The X-Files make two appearances in this strip, including finding the evidence of Robotman and Monty’s secret past. During the book our two main characters also meet Quai Chang Caine from Kung-Fu (or possibly the 90s sequel, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, where Carridine played his previous characters namesake grandson and team with his son, played by his real-life son) and Martha Stewart. This in addition to Monty trying to find his place in the world and ending up being everything from a sheepherder to an ice cream man to a poor-man’s Tarzan. As the Comic Strip Critic noted in the Monty review (I’ll post it below as a refresher and to break the text wall–my Twitter has a cameo), sometimes the stories just end with no explanation to press the reset button and restore the status quo. Sometimes it’s even worse than in the review. What convinced Monty to get on a plane and return home? No answer but the fact that we’re even show he goes home was nice. Some stories end abruptly without explanation, not even the fourth wall-breaking kind. I would have even accepted that in a few storylines that just end.

I have one final criticism and it’s directed not at Meddick but at the publisher of this collection. There are times when the Sunday strip is not in the right spot, and it’s common to find two Sunday strips in a row. The previous book I reviewed didn’t have Sunday strips, so maybe they didn’t have them at the time. However there will often be two pages of Sunday strips back to back. It’s not to keep a storyline intact. Some stories don’t last six strips (Monday-Saturday) while even the occasional story that took more than one week (like the retcon) wasn’t interrupted by a Sunday strip. It’s an odd thing on the publisher’s part.

Again I stress that Robotman And Monty was a good strip, but I liked the strip the way it was during my friend’s book and Robotman Takes Off so while I’ll keep this book I probably won’t get any more from this time period, but would like to get the ones from when he was still with the Milde family. The sci-fi humor still came out and they were good stories. If I were to do a Robotman comic strip (divorcing it from Monty in a reboot) I would put him back with the Mildes, have Stella and Oops from the original toys living with the grandfather and his grandson from the cartoon, and alternate between wacky sitcom and science fiction hi-jinks with larger adventures, bringing in Roberon and Sound Off from the toys and Bruce from the comic strip if Monty is no longer using him since having the evil twin of a character written out seems silly to me. If I thought I could make a decent pitch (I don’t know if United Feature Syndicate owns the character or if Meddick does) I’d whip up some sample strips (and I still might if I have an opening in my projects just for funzees) and see what happens. As it stands I would still like to get the Milde-period strips and bypass further Monty-period collections because I did enjoy the strip as it used to be, no matter how well-made the current strip is.