Atomic Robo goes Webcomic

Looks like they thought three pages a week was too slow and four pages a week would overload them.

Dr Dinosaur is a great science communicator.◊

Yeah, I get the reasoning, but I think that maybe it'd have been better to do 3 pages one week, 4 pages the next. This half page stuff is... not great.

He's not wrong tho

Well. Bernard...

I think the Dr. Dinosaur Science Facts may well be the best part about Atomic Robo going webcomic.

Little confused as to what's going on here. I thought the pink-haired girl was one of the Tesladyne scientists who were with Robo before he got tossed back in time. But this seems to imply otherwise. And now someone is downloading all the Tesladyne data through them. I'm just a little lost.

I figure she's a junior scientist at the local field station who just looks a bit like her. And its probably Robo's Field Team thats downloading the data, with Majestic 12 knocking at the door.

The other three on the cover were the ones who were with Robo during the last mission. I think the confusion might be because the two women have a similar hairstyle.

One of the newsposts said that that was Elizabeth from "The Centralia Job". It's not particularly clear in-story, partially because she didn't seem to have dyed hair in "The Centralia Job", partially because nobody has referred to her by name yet.

I would assume they're getting all Tesladyne's data because they're in the middle of a city in Brazil and Majestic 12 is a US-based agency, meaning that MJ12 cannot simply turn up with tanks and expect everything to go fine - their leader presumably doesn't want his greatest success to be followed by starting a war through open military action in another country.

Or at least that's Tesladyne's theory. I suspect the knocking at the door is going to disprove it.

edited 29th May '15 2:30:50 PM by CountDorku

Well, there are only three of them. Four, if this girl is one of them. Majestic doesn't need tanks and Power Armor. A dozen guys in black camo would do the job while maintaining plausible deniability for the US. Especially since they're not going against Jenkins this time.

<shrug> Just because your plan is bad doesn't mean you don't have a plan.

A dozen guys in black camo it is!

That actually feels to aggressive (or wasteful?) for Majestic 12.

Maybe more Project Daedalus?

Unless Majestic is sharing notes with Daedalus, it's probably Majestic. We can probably infer from the fact that Elizabeth and Dead Boss Guy are not several miles out of town and travelling under assumed names or bunkered up with a cache of lightning guns that the raid on Tesladyne isn't really common knowledge. What this means is that Majestic has the means, the motive, and the opportunity.

You mean beside the fact that MJ 12 did a *huge* PR Offensive before attacking outright?

I just figure its probably either Daedalus or the MPSD (Chinas MJ 12) being opportunistic and hacking into Tesladyne while they are busy with MJ 12

The raid probably only took a few hours tops, and I guess both Daedalus and MPSD have at least some eyes on Tesladyne.

edited 30th May '15 2:52:13 PM by 3of4

Most of the PR offensive we saw was to the effect of "DOD investigators are being dispatched to investigate Tesladyne". Given that even Tesladyne employees are unaware of the fate of their HQ, I doubt "Tesladyne has been stomped into the mud and everyone in it is a Public Enemy" has hit the airwaves yet.

Which is on top of the whole event from "Ghost of Space Station X" which has been a long-term PR hit, in addition to whatever else they've tried to pin on Robo in the intervening years in relation to it.

Let me try this again from the basics.

Majestic's plan so far has had the following stages.

1. Make Tesladyne an object of fear and suspicion
2. Launch a covert raid on its HQ, under the guise of a DOD investigation
3. Mop-up

Stage 3 can be done in one of two ways. They can either 1) continue in a covert fashion, or 2) declare that the investigation turned up clear evidence that Tesladyne is behind staged terrorist actions X, Y and Z and thus it's open season on Tesladyne employees for anyone with a badge and a set of handcuffs.

Option 1) is the best for Majestic in every way. It fits their typical stealthy and deceptive MO. It prevents other agencies from acquiring Teslatech themselves, because the only people acting to capture Tesladyne employees will work for Majestic. It allows them to operate with minimal oversight. It means that Tesladyne employees are easy to locate because they'll continue coming in to work.

Now, given this, and the fact that Tesladyne employees are continuing to come in to work rather than changing their names, moving to Sweden, or bunkering up with the biggest superscience weapons they can build, we can infer that Majestic has not made the results of their fake investigation available to the public yet. The Venezuela field office, as Robo's last known location, was presumably a priority contact for Jenkins, Ananth, George, or any other Tesladyne employee who wasn't killed or captured in the raid; Brazil didn't have that.

Hmm Yeah. But I still say that

I. Shooting the scientist feels wrong for MJ 12's MO so far. They want to secure Tesladyne for their own use, not destroy it.

II. Tesladynes various enemies probably have some surveillance on them and are thus aware of whats going on.

III. Seeing that I consider it possible that they simply opportunistically went after a tertiary location in order to get everything they can grab.

It's possible, yeah, but I don't think it's likely. Clevinger doesn't like diluting his villains in Robo - apart from Dr Dinosaur and Majestic operating independently in vol 8, all of the Arc Villains have been either a single player (the Nazis, Chokaiten, Edison) or the pawns of another actor (Helsingard behind the Knights of the Golden Circle, ALAN manipulating Majestic in "Ghost of Station X"). If it's another player, I would expect Majestic to be pulling their strings, not the other way around. Then again, maybe Clevinger's just going against that inclination for this one.

I guess there's always one more possibility: Dead Boss Guy was simply Tesladyne's most rock-stupid employee, who managed to not notice his own position on the Most Wanted list, and the guy at the door is Charles Darwin and gunned him down to limit the human gene pool's exposure to him.

That being said, MJ 12 is probably not going to be the villain of this volume. This is still the prologue.

And according to the timeline on the page, it looks more like we are heading into a Pacific Rim homage by way of Biomega. Which actually, if only due to geographics, makes me suspect the MPSD

My theory as of now is MPSD is stealing Tesladyne data and tampers around with Biomega science they shared with the Japanese leading to a rise of Biomega and Robo and MJ 12 have to team up to stop it.

edited 31st May '15 3:09:22 AM by 3of4

And with that reminder, I have a feeling that by the end of this, Majestic ULTRA is going to be feeling all of my hate. ALL OF IT!

At least we know things turn out more or less alright by the time it's all said and done, given the preview we've gotten of the future.

I hate the entire idea of an anti-Robo faction. Oh, villains like Helsingard or ALAN are fine, I mean Majestic 12 is supposed to be this Well-Intentioned Extremist faction, and they think that killing the world's leading scientist/philanthropist/superhero is a good idea. He's been doing everything in his considerable power to help the world for his entire life, and yet all they care about is stealing from him. The Hero with Bad Publicity plot just pisses me off more.

Don't get me wrong, plot-wise it's going fine, I just don't like this sort of story in general. Have we ever been given a specific reason why Majestic 12 is after Robo, besides the whole stealing his atomic core thing?

Robo sabotaged parts of Operation Paperclip, essentially putting what he considered right over what his government wanted. That, combined with the fact that with Tesla dead Robo was most likely the scientifically most well versed when it comes to Teslatech (and I figure the ones where Robo sabotaged Paperclip where german scientists who used the stolen Teslatech during the war).

If you are a semi-paranoid soldier thats probably justification enough to be...sceptical of Robo. And that was essentially FD Rs reasoning for establishing MJ 12, a faction to analyse Teslatech independent of Robo.

I figure 6 decades of "Robo does it better" made him veeeeeery disliked by the MJ 12 higher ups.

There's also probably some resentment about Robo being unique and that no one's ever been allowed to take him apart and figure out how he works in order to build more of him, and that he's more than capable of operating more or less independently as he sees fit. I wouldn't doubt there are a lot of people who resent the fact that if they give him an order that he thinks is stupid or disagrees with, he's full capable of telling them no, if he's feeling polite enough not to just go ahead and tell them where to stick it.

In a lot of areas he's been a controversial figure since he was first revealed, when you get right down to it.