4 out of 5

Can you REALLY dislike Dr. Dinosaur?  Really?  I’m pretty sure its impossible.  I’m pretty sure this FCBD was when Robo started to fully capitalize on the genius balance between pop comic sensibilities and silly science that twists into Is It Real? science with a few flippant words from our hero.  On a remote island somewheres the good doctor shoots out Robo and explains how rays from the future shot back through time and made him super intelligent and how these crystals are the key to everything…  Or something like that.  Doc D would become a fixture of the Robo free books for several years and serves/d as an outlet for Clevinger at his most ridiculously awesome.  I also think this was the start of Wegener going a bit more widescreen – a technique which thankfully fits the book – and drawing AR a bit more blocky.  The personality given to Dinosaur through every posture and doofy look is nothing short of hilarious just to look at, not to mention the dialogue.

An ideal few pages of comic goodness, now required reading as Volume 8 or Robo is totally a full-on Doc Dinosaur story.

Alas, this FCBD must be brought down a notch because both of the other stories are pretty tragically dumb.  ‘Drone’ is, alas, by one of the Red 5 head honchos, about a near future where robotic drones are used in the battlefield and some hacker kids figure out how to tap into their video feeds.  Wow, we haven’t seen a sci-fi pitch like that before except a billion times.  Something will go wrong where the kids will get in over their heads.  Tropes are re-used constantly, but the strip suffers more from trying to obnoxiously tap into modern teen talk and coming across as… an adult writing teen talk, as well as the sketchy art style being all sorts of wrong for the story.

Then “We Kill Monsters,” which has a ridiculous pitch on paper – two guys kill a monster, one gets infected by monster juice and grows a monster arm – and, again, fine, comics have been built on sillier concepts than that, but the writing is just by-the-books, nothing fresh at all.  The art looks like Churilla (the cover certainly is), which is a highlight I guess, but it shares the same lack of real definition Churilla brings to things, so maybe not.

Most of the FCBD’s have at least one good second read besides Robo.  2009, not so much.  Thankfully the Robo story is 2x awesome to balance it out.