3 out of 5

Released through his Patreon, this printed-on-yellow / green-paper mini-comic features a battered and bruised boxer, a swearing kid, and a sci-fi bent, with the boxer – Lee – squaring off against a foe who hints at maybe time travel, maybe some cyborg action.  Getting in to Chuck with Revenger, I’ve not unenjoyed his other ventures into more typical indie, slice-of-emotional-life fare, but even when he sleazes that formula up (see Slasher), I can’t help but wish he’d dump the subtext and go back to comics where people just punch each other.  So Automa got me pretty excited.  The zine feel to it is fun, and the sense that Forsman had an idea where it was going, but was also letting it sort of organically sprawl out from certain images – like, let’s start with a boxer who doesn’t seem to feel pain – was fun.

But somewhere along the way, Charles teamed up with Max de Radigués –  whose Bastard I accepted but did not particularly like – and that sort of kicked my brain into accepting that Forsman is more ought to write the stuff I’m kind of meh on versus fighting comix.  Around this time, Automa leaps forward in its timeline to focus on the swearing kid, and his now overweight surrogate mum, and it started reading a whole lot more like slice-of-life stuff with the flashes of punk rock culture and trailer park culture Chuck likes to toss in there.  Considering it kismet, I’ve stopped reading.

The art is definitely more of the ‘realistic’ bent of Revenger / Slasher, though Charles’ action is forever stiff, requiring guiding sound effects like ‘dodge’ to clue us in.  But as that was always the case, the appeal is more in the effected grit of the fighting, and the initial issues’ beat-downs have that for sure, smartly paneled to give us punch-by-punch choreography.  The sparse narration helps to make the tip-toe into sci-fi interesting – no over-expositing here – but, as mentioned, it never quite fully takes over as the focus, making Automa generally cool, but maybe not overall too compelling.