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Complete Ro-Busters, The
 
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Complete Ro-Busters, The (Paperback)

by Pat Mills (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £14.99
Price: £10.49 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Product details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: REBELLION/2000AD (13 Nov 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 190543782X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1905437825
  • Product Dimensions: 25.6 x 18.6 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 105,296 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description
For the first time, complete in paperback comes Pat Mills' and Dave Gibbons' series of Robot Madness. This must-have book includes rare material from the pages of Star Lord.

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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Where have all the robots gone...?, 16 Dec 2008
By G. A. Kester "gk_uk" (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
RoBusters started life in the short-lived Starlord comic of 1978 - a luxury sister-comic to the more rough and ready 2000ad, it was printed largely in colour on quality paper. While most of Starlord's original strips would fall by the wayside when it was amalgamated into 2000ad only months after launch, two would survive and flourish. Strontium Dog would be the most successful and long-lived of the pair, while RoBusters became a beloved cult item, now at last available again.

RoBusters was initially a mechanical take on Thunderbirds, a disaster squad handling all manner of spectacular incidents but with the central conceit that unlike the Tracy brothers robots are so cheap and hated within normal society that they are completely expendable.

The initial half of the book covers these stories, with rockets filled with nuclear waste hitting skyscrapers and toxic gas making convicts and alligators go on the rampage in the swamps of the American south. These stories are nice in themselves and often beautifully drawn (and sometimes painted, though sadly only reproduced here in shades of grey and not colour as per the originals) and they seem to extend the Thunderbirds parody by having a very 1960s stiff-upper-lip Britishness about them. But, to be honest, they just aren't that special.

What stopped the format from wearing too thin was the characters - the sublimely named pairing of Ro-Jaws (a sewer robot with a sarcastic attitude) and Hammerstein (an ex-war robot) made for some great comedy moments (especially an investigation into murders on an orbital nightclub that leads to a bizarre song-and-dance routine in drag...)

RoBusters' boss, Howard Quartz (nicknamed Mr Ten Percent because his fear of death has seen him have nearly all his organic parts replaced) is the ultimate capitalist, and it is his greed and self-satisfaction that would eventually lead RoBusters, after its move to 2000ad, to reach true greatness.

After a brief dabble with the old disaster-of-the-week format (a train wreck, but with the twist that RoJaws has to decide which humans live or die as they don't have enough oxygen), the second half of this book then offers the stories that made RoBusters so well remembered. After filling in the histories of RoJaws and Hammerstein (including a priceless scene that ends up with RoJaws and a tramp in the bed of an MP!) and carefully reinforcing the bigotry felt toward robots in the RoBusters universe, two epic stories lift the whole volume into the realm of the unmissable.

The TerraMeks, heavily based on War of the Worlds, only features Mr Ten Percent and brainless bulldozer Mek Quake from the regular cast, and has the RoBusters owner contracted to demolish a town to make way for a road using giant demolition robots. They run amok and are faced down by kindly giant robot Charlie (one of comicdom's most sympathetic characters), and RoBusters loses so much money during the whole debacle that Quartz decides to destroy all of his disaster squad assets for the insurance. The book even points out that his other companies are all doing well and that the act would be unnecessary, but multi-billionare Quartz doesn't like to lose a single penny.

This takes us to the last tale, the Fall and Rise of RoJaws and Hammerstein, as the duo escape his black-minded plan for their destruction and lead the remnants of the disaster squad to hopeful freedom on a mythical robot planet. The artwork of Mike McMahon and Kevin o'Neill is excellent, and this story also marks the first appearance of the Terror Tubes that would find fame in Nemesis. It also introduces a robot medic, Doctor Feely-Good and his human-like "test subject" Casey, one of the darkly funniest sub-plots of any comic.

RoBusters is a book of two halves, the second being the better one, but the opening stories make me think fondly of the ten year old who used to wait all week for the arrival of 2000ad on a Saturday teatime, along with his Findus crispy pancakes and Buck Rogers or Battlestar Galactica on ITV. The forty year old me can't help but be a little cynical and amused by revisiting these stories, but their charm still persists.

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