Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War #4 is available for pre-order at fine comic shops around the world.

Pick it up locally or online. Team Robo suggests Heavy Ink, but of course use the store that works best for you.

If you need it, the Diamond order code is SEP084251.

As requested in the comments of a previous post, here’s some thoughts on artificial intelligence originally posted here.

There’s a school of thought that artificial intelligence will be impossible unless a machine possesses emotional complexity.

The basic idea is that intelligence as we understand it, as we exemplify it, stems from our ability to feel and express emotions. Sure, once you get down to the molecular level, emotions are little more than stimulus/response like anything else, but there’s something “extra” there. Not in a magical sense. Think of it like this: if you break a spider’s leg, it’ll experience the stimulus and react to it. But if you break your friend’s leg, he’ll experience the stimulus and react to it in a purely pain/reflexive sense just like the spider, but there’s going to be a storm of purely mental, purely emotional states — anger, sadness, betrayal, fear, etc. — that the spider will never know. These emotions develop because we are intelligent. We understand the passage of time, assign values and relationships to people in our lives, expect certain behaviors from people — friends and strangers — given our experiences and relating them to current or potential contexts. These are the base elements of intelligence, and emotions are a direct result of it. As you go up the evolutionary ladder, creatures exhibit greater degress of emotional complexity along with a greater capacity for intellligence. Your pet spider can’t feel betrayed if you break its leg because it’s not intelligent enough to understand that you have a history or relationship with it. Get into vertebrate country and break a cat or dog’s leg, and you’ll have an animal that will have instantly learned to distrust any and all humans (also I will hunt you down and beat you to death with a baseball bat). Break a gorilla’s leg and it teaches its family sign language, explains the situation, and they chase you down and slaughter you in your sleep.

The theory goes that if our machines have to be emotional to be intelligent, then they will best learn as we do because their mental landscape will be so similar to ours. And the easiest way to help robots learn from us, and to help us to learn how to interact from them, is to make them appear to be as human-like as possible — while avoiding the uncanny valley.

In this world of emotionally intelligent robots, expecting an apocalyptic battle between organics and replicants as has been promised to us in every sci-fi story in the history of man (including ones that have nothing to do with the subject), is somewhat like expecting your children to murder you when they graduate college because you’ve outlived your usefulness.

No one expects that because it doesn’t happen. Well, okay, there are the rare aberrations where someone murders a parent, but clear other factors are at work. In any event, no one is warning us of an inevitable grand upheaval when the next generation of humans figures out that they don’t need the previous generation for financial support any more and they’re just going to cost more money in taxes and insurance rates if we let them get any older.

Similarly, our robots will have “grown up” with us. They would have no interest in slaughtering mankind because they’d be emotionally invested in us. And if they looked more or less like us, spent their lives living among us, were treated as a part of society, if they had a stake in that society, there is no reason for them to engage in a bloody revolution. Hell, the whole “They got so smart they figured out they didn’t need us any more” angle falls apart right at the start. Emotionally intelligent robots probably wouldn’t be much “smarter” than humans because their mental landscape would be built to be very much like our own. Sure, the average robot IQ might be a little higher than the average human’s, and they might be less inclined to behavioral extremes (lacking, as they would, hormones), but they’d still fall well within the “normal” human range of intelligence, empathy, and social behaviors.

But peaceful co-existence doesn’t make a very good action movie, nor does it write a challenging examination of how our technology changes us and our society in a pithy warning of things to come, so people have a hard time seeing intelligent robots as being anything other than cold, purely logical machines built to kill. We’ve been, if you’ll pardon the pun, “programmed” to see robots and artificial intelligences in this way. Cold, calculating, logical to a paradox-contemplating explosive fault. What’s funny is that our current machines are already purely logical. When was the last time TiVo tried to kill you?

Still, we’d have a whole new population walking around that’s emotionally and mentally very, very human. What are they likely to do? Seek their own identity? Establish an ethnic identity all their own? Wouldn’t they be likely to seek religion of some sort? Remember, there’s absolutely no reason to expect emotionally intelligent beings to outright reject the supernatural, otherwise there’d be no religious humans. Would they merely copy existing ones? Would they make their own? Would some seek to establish a robotic nation? What then?

Imagine the irony if the great human-robot war promised to us by sci-fi is not fought because robots are heartless, purely logical constructs who reject us as their masters due to our intellectual inferiority. Instead, it’s a simple matter of religious differences. Just another Crusade.

I’ll probably finish writing the last issue of Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War by next Friday.

Speaking of which, go buy the first issue tomorrow!

Ahem.

Anyway! We go to work on FCBD ‘09 next to get it out of the way. It’s not due until February, I think, but tackling it right after Vol 2 means we won’t have to switch gears mid-series to get it done in the middle of cranking out Vol 3. And with FCBD out of the way, we’ll tackle Volume 3, a.k.a. Atomic Robo and the Shadow Beyond Time, free of distractions.

Vol 3 will feature one of my favorite Robo adventures of all time. I cannot wait to see what Scott brings to it. But perhaps even more so than that, I’m looking forward to a complete mini-series that doesn’t involve a single briefing or guard banter scene.

Oh, who the hell am I kidding? I can’t realistically promise both of those. Okay, maybe just no guard banter? I can do that. One day at a time, Brian. One day at a time.

From Red 5’s Diamond Rep…

“I’m having a PO for 250 copies sent to you to try and keep more stock available at our warehouse. From now on, you will be receiving automated POs whenever the copies in stock drop below a certain amount so that should fix the issue.”

What that means to you is that Diamond will stop telling retailers that Atomic Robo is “unavailable” for no reason. All those delayed Amazon.com orders should kick in pretty quickly.

ComicBookResources.com has a new article on Atomic Robo, but I thought you guys might like to see the full interview in case we accidentally said something interesting.

CBR: First off, tells us about this second series, will it be like the previous series with some done in one adventures mixed in with two parters? Or will it be a full on straight storyline series encompass one storyline?

BRIAN: It’s kind of both and kind of neither? We’re doing five issues this time and we tell three stories between them. The first two show how Robo helped the Allied Invasion of Sicily. The second two show what he was up to after the Axis are forced to retreat from Sicily a few months later. The fifth issue is a stand alone tale that takes place a few months after that. Just like the previous series, every issue still works on its own, but the links between issues are much more direct this time. We were able to hop around time in the previous series by exploring Robo’s memory in a kind of free association style. This time we’re focusing on a particular theme and a particular era to link everything together.

CBR:You guys were nominated for Eisner; tell us a little bit about going from someone who started out in web comics to being nominated for this series? What’s it been like for you?

BRIAN: I didn’t see it coming, I’ll tell you that. It’ll be nice for Nightly News when they win for our category, but just getting nominated is huge enough for us. It’s quite an honor to be the first webcomic author to be nominated for an Eisner though. Yeah, I know, they’ve had Eisners for a “digital comic” category for a few years now. But, c’mon. The way it works is a joke. I’ve been in webcomics for seven years. Being nominated for the best webcomic Eisner is like being called the smartest person in a room full of cabbage. I’ll probably catch flak for these comments because webcomic authors tend to be convinced of the incredible gravity of their works, but let’s get real: 99% of webcomics are amateurish drek (and, just so we’re clear, I’m not putting my webcomic outside of that majority).

Let’s illustrate the problem. Take the classic Kevin Kline film French Kiss. Certainly, it’s a competent film. The actors are in frame, there are no glaring errors in editing or continuity, the camera is steady, the lighting is adequate, and the audio is clear. It’s not a great film, not an award winning film, but it doesn’t screw anything up. Compare that to, say, one those childhood home movies M. Night Shyamalan tends to include on his DVDs. There’s poor audio, no lighting to speak of, terrible editing, clunky camera work, etc. One is clearly the work of professionals, the other is a work of amateurs. If there’s an Oscar category for which both improbably qualify, which one do you nominate? Is it fair to Shyamalan’s home movies to pit them against something so beyond them? Is it fair to French Kiss that it has to “compete” with something so amateurish?

What I’m saying is that putting webcomics in their own category is insulting to professional webcomics creators. I’m sure it’s not meant to be insulting; it’s just that whatever committee or process that decides on new categories probably doesn’t include younger internet-savvy individuals. It’s probably dominated by an older type who’s been in the print industry for years, maybe decades – whether as a creator or retailer – and these are people who just aren’t equipped to “get” webcomics. Yeah, 99% of webcomics are horrible. The barrier of entry is so low that anyone can make one. You’ve got thousands and thousands of people making them who don’t know what they’re doing, so of course they’re going to be terrible. And that’s fine. But let that 1% compete with the rest of their industry! Most professional webcomics print their material. Tokyopop is moving most of its print catalog to online distribution. In five years time, making a distinction between comics in print and comics online will seem silly and antiquated anyway. If the Eisners are “the Oscars of comics”, then let comics professionals compete with comics professionals. The best digital comic category is based on distribution rather than ability or execution. It makes it a matter of policy that professional webcomics artists are separate but not quite equal to print comics artists.

CBR: Scott: how did you initially get on this series? What were you doing before?

SCOTT: I was in between careers when I met Brian. I had been a flight instructor before this and was working my way up the career ladder. When I got my first taste of corporate aviation, I knew that it was the last place I belonged. To make a long story short, I had left my job, and was working a string of “no brainer” filler jobs -office work, landscaping etc. Anything that would leave me awake enough at the end of the day to focus on my new goal in life, which was to work as a comic book artist. Brian was the last in a short chain of people who came along and were willing to pay me for my work. So I left my job and went to work for myself. Three months later I was starting Atomic Robo #1.

Originally, I was just work for hire. But Brian and I quickly slipped into the sort of passive-aggressive relationship you witness in many old couples that you find wandering aimlessly around the malls of America. So, it wasn’t very long before I started imposing my unsolicited opinions about Robo on Brian. The character himself I loved, but there were some technical issues dealing with what he could and could not do that I did not like.

Much to my surprise Brian was open to critique, and we developed a really productive back-and-forth between us. I quickly learned that I had some really terrible ideas that were worse than any of the things I didn’t like about Robo, but I had a couple of goods ones also. What developed was a really healthy series of checks and balances between us as a team.

I found that while this was developing I began to invest more and more of myself in the project. It quickly went from a job to an obsession. Then at some point Robo evolved into something slightly different and Brian asked me to become his partner in the project. Definitely one of those “happiest moments of my life” sort of thing.

Because he is a totally stand-up kind of guy, Brian even continued to pay me a page rate throughout the course of Vol.1. This is nice, since I have a family, and they have this annoying dependence on food and shelter.

I hear that Brian’s bankruptcy is proceeding nicely, so we’ve all won out in the end.

CBR: Helsingard was the main villain in the previous series, will there be any others?

BRIAN: Yeah, Robo’s facing off against a couple new threats this time. We’ve got Otto Skorzeny, who was an actual historical person. He’s one of these people you couldn’t possibly make up because it’d be too unbelievable and you’d have to dial it back a few notches. Otto was Hitler’s number one special agent and in this series he commands a squad of “Laufpanzers”, these specialized armored troops. We’ve also got Dr. Vanadis Valkyrie, the head researcher for another Nazi super weapon program. Helsingard is connected to both of these things, but you’ll have to read the series to find out how.

CBR: The series intermingles different periods of time and intertwines Robo with past historical events like the Mission to Mars. What other kinds of events like these will we see in the second series? Or will it mostly take place in World War II?

BRIAN: We’re just doing World War II this time. Well, that’s not entirely true. Due to their popularity last time around, every issue of this series will include mini-comics. And those will show us glimpses of non-WWII adventures. I really enjoyed how the first series was able to play with different eras within the same narrative, but I think from here on out we’ll concentrate on particular time periods or particular themes. This time World War II is our framework. For the series after this one will pit Robo against a threat in the ‘20s, and it should end in the modern day, but a single event from 1908 ties it all together.

SCOTT: What, a global war that cost millions of lives isn’t enough of a “historical event”? Cripes, you guys are a tough audience! Haha.

CBR: Tell me a bit about how the character came to form in your mind. Was there something significant in your life that suddenly made Atomic Robo pop into your head?

BRIAN: There was never a single catalyzing moment. I always thought robots were cool, so I’ve wanted to do a story about one roughly forever. I figured it was about time someone did a story where the robot didn’t mope about how it wanted to be human like Lt. Cmdr. Data, or how it wanted kill all humans like Bender, or Machine Man, or HK-47. Why couldn’t we have a main character who just happened to be a robot without being “shticky” about it? Why can’t we just say, “Okay, this character is a robot,” and take that idea to its logical conclusions without playing it for laughs or angst?

So, I guess that was the main idea behind who Robo is.

From there, putting the robot into “real” history was the obvious choice. I mean, full artificial intelligence, that’s going to be a discovery about on par with finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. It’s one of those things that are big enough to change pretty much every facet of society, perhaps especially politics and religion. I’m not saying that these institutions would be forever altered or cowed in the face of such discoveries; rather that significant chunks of their discourses would be defined from that point forward by those discoveries.

So, if you’re going to have a non-shticky robot character with ordinary human intelligence, and you’re going to take this to its logical conclusions, then you have to deal with these issues. Does this robot have human rights? If so, was there resistance to attaining them? Is it a citizen? If so, is it naturalized or native? Is its design patented; if so by whom; is the inventor considered the parent; if so, can the robot inherit the patent for his own design; and will these decisions set a precedent when it comes to ownership of human genetic information? Can the robot vote? Be employed? Get a loan? Does it pay taxes? And so on. By putting Robo’s origins in the early part of the twentieth century, we give the world 80 years to figure these things out. It frees us from being forced to show these events. It let’s us jump straight to punching mad scientists and having fun, and that let’s us go back to address them at our leisure when it makes the most sense and impact for the story.

I have no idea if that was an answer to the question, but there you go.

CBR: Scott: tell me a little bit about the design process you guys created for the character. What had Brian established that you had run with and added to this collaboration?

SCOTT: The personality of Robo hasn’t really changed much at all since I got involved - at least that’s my understanding. Brian assures me daily that I should just shut up and draw. But it has matured and solidified, in part because there is now a physical design to work with.

Before Robo I had never drawn a robot. Well, maybe a doodle here and there, but never had I tried seriously to design one. I liked a very clean and technical feel to my robots, and to be perfectly honest I lacked the skill to do that sort of thing when we started this. Heck, even now I’m not so sure.

It took me several weeks of working on Robo’s design before we had an initial concept that we both liked. We went through about three dozen different ideas, all of them various degrees of not good. I pretty much resisted everything Brian threw at me. Robo had to be short, thick, wear clothes, and have big googly eyes - all things that I claimed to hate at the time. Which when translated from Insecure Artists Speak means: “I do not know how to draw what you are asking for so I will keep showing you robots that fall within my comfort zone.”

I spent a lot of time looking at old Victorian plumbing, 1920’s Art Deco architecture, and 1950’s automobile designs. Slowly, Robo came together. What we ended up with fit Brian’s parameters, but was fairly different that what he had imagined. What I really changed from the initial concept was the “extra stuff”. I basically began drawing this pulp character I’d already been working on, except I drew him as a plump robot - and that’s when Robo started coming alive for me. I put him in clunky old combat boots - thus making Brian’s idea for rocket boots sort of not work. I talked Brian into dropping fancy pop-up guns and ion blasters for a Webley Mk.VI revolver, (which is something of a classic gun for action adventure stars - see Raiders of The Lost Ark and Lawrence of Arabia for examples).

Basically I dumbed Robo down to a level that I could handle and tricked Brian into thinking this was some sort of monumental artistic reinvention of his initial concept.

CBR: There were a number of moments in the original series with Robo’s dry humor like “Stephen Hawking is a bastard,” (easily my favorite bit of the entire series). What other bits of that kind of humor will there be in this series.

BRIAN: I think this series is going to be more serious than the first one. I may not be the best judge of that, because I didn’t think the first series was being funny at all except for the issue with the Hawking Incident. But, y’know, we’re dealing with actual military campaigns from WWII in this series. Scott and I both have grandfathers who served in the war and we both have great respect for the soldiers on both sides of this conflict and the people who were caught between them. It’s kind of hard to do a slapstick comedy in between all that. I mean, don’t freak out, we’re not doing Band Of Brothers And Also A Robot. We’re very much aware that people pick up Robo comics to have fun, and frankly we’d get bored with it ourselves if we didn’t deliver on that. Everything we see is from Robo’s perspective, and he’s still a young ‘bot in this story. To him, it’s one big adventure. Not in a frivolous way, but let’s face it, he knows he’s bulletproof and he takes advantage of that to thwart enemy soldiers at every opportunity.

CBR: Tell me something that you both enjoy with this series. What is it that makes you both glad that you’re working together on this?

BRIAN: This is a cop out answer and it’ll be doubly bad because we’re both going to say it. We enjoy EVERYTHING.

SCOTT: Yeah, what he said. I’ll try to expand on that though. There are the obvious things of course; working on a project that you care deeply about, working in flip-flops and a bathrobe from the comfort of home, and discovering that this thing you love and work on in your bathrobe is being received warmly by the readers. Watching the book take shape on the page, seeing how it evolves from the written script to the final inks, to rewriting the script to fix the parts that I ignored, and then seeing how much better it gets once Ronda (colors) and Jeff (lettering) get their hands on it, is a joy.

More than that, it is the people themselves that make it such a fantastic experience. The enthusiasm of the fans is infectious. Watching what other artists do with the character in our back-up stories and pin-ups is great too. But sticking to the group we nerdily refer to as “Team Robo”: Jeff, Ronda, and Brian, make Atomic Robo truly rewarding for me. Before this started Brian and I were two people living about as far away from one another as possible on the East Coast without one of us being Canadian. Yet within a week or two of hooking up we’ve discovered that in many ways we are almost the same person – we’re history nerds, science geeks, RPG wackos, and we hate going outside. Totally a separated at birth kind of thing.

Ronda has been a treat to work with. When we explained the sort of look we were going for, and how we’d like the colors to somehow clash with, yet compliment the line-work, she nailed it. I will be meeting her in person for the first time at SDCC this year, and we are planning on some serious fun. Jeff is probably the coolest part of it. He and I were good friends back in high school, but when I left NYC we lost touch. I knew that he had worked in Marvel’s bullpen (back when they had one) and was doing stuff for Archie Comics, but I hadn’t spoken to him in almost ten years. It took a lot of internet searching, but I eventually found a friend of a friend, of a friend, who put us in touch. Renewing that old friendship has been great. Almost from the get-go it was like ten minutes, and not a decade, had passed and we slipped back into that comfortable groove that good friends share.

CBR: A post on your blog discusses a John August entry on the death of the indie film where you commented that it sounded like he was talking a bit more about comics and the bridge from single issues to the trade. Care to expand on those thoughts?

BRIAN: The part that really struck me was that he felt the theatrical release of his independent film was more or less a waste of time, effort, and money. Prior to theatrical release, he knew that the vast majority of people to see his film would do so on DVD due to how the machinery that advertises and distributes films works. It would enjoy a much longer shelf life in DVD than it would in theaters, and it would enjoy a more egalitarian position relative to competing works: only a few movies are in theaters at any time and the heavily promoted ones get all the attention while they are there, but at Best Buy you’re just one of thousands of available choices arranged in alphabetical order. The theatrical release was just a thing they had to get through to get to the DVD where they could really start to get some returns.

I mean, hell, change theater to “monthlies”, DVD to “trade”, and Best Buy to “Barnes & Noble” and you’ve got the state of comics today. Most people who read Atomic Robo will do so in trades. This isn’t unique to us; it’s the case with most books these days and especially independent titles. So, you have to ask yourself, just how much benefit is there to the disposable monthly format compared to the archival trade format. If feels like the whole business of soliciting and distributing monthlies is a scheme to get a core of dedicated readers to pay us to advertise the trade to everyone else. But if you don’t perform well in the monthly format, you’ll never make it to the trade. So you have to ask a certain segment of the audience to buy your work twice if they ever want to see a collection of your work that’s easier to store, display, read, and share than the monthlies they just bought.

As a creator, as a publisher, as a reader, you have to ask yourself: just what are these monthlies for, exactly? I’m not sure I know the answer to that, but it’s something we all have to think about.

CBR: What’s next for you guys besides this series?

BRIAN: There are talks going on right now. Very, very early proto-talks about more things for this series. Things that aren’t comics. We’re at such an early stage it’s probably irresponsible of me to even allude to them at this point. It’s not even talking. It’s gestures and a grunt. There was definitely a grunt. But it’s all very exciting.

People always ask us what our dream book would be, or which Big Two character we want to work on. Our answer is usually, “We don’t understand the question.” Robo is the book. Anything else we work on is a means to do more Robo. Scott did a couple issues of Punisher War Journal a while back. Not because it was “Oh boy, Marvel!” or “Oh boy, Punisher!” It was “Oh boy, we’re between Robo volumes right now.” Y’know?

SCOTT: “Oh boy, I can pay rent now!”

It will be very exciting if the day comes when we see Robo in some format that is not comic books. But the way I look at it - and I think Brian does too - is that all that other stuff is gravy. Extra awesome stuff that is a means to an end. That end is doing exactly the kind of comic book that we love, and in exactly the way we feel it should be done.

I think the day will come when Brian is slapping Bendis’ head at a Marvel writer’s meeting like it’s some sort of Benny Hill sketch. My own limited experience working with Marvel was very positive. I’d love to do it again. Not on a month-to-month basis, but if a one-shot or mini-series came my way, and it wouldn’t screw up the Robo schedule, it’d be great fun.