5 out of 5

Praise be to our boys behind Atomic Robo, for giving us, in a few pages, one of the most hilarious and exciting additions to the world of Robo yet, with our lead facing a legion of ecstatic young chitlins who are desirous of a place at Tesladyne that they hope to earn from positive approval of… their science fair projects.  It’s a great misleading opening of Robo and team prepping themselves for a warzone, which Wegener illustrates with a tone that flips between boring (science fairs) and insane (Dr. Dinosaur) within panels, both depictions believably existing in the same convention hall.  What was that parenthetical mention?  Dr. Dinosaur?  That’s right, another FCBD appearance of the best character ever, and if Doc’s last meet-up (vol. 4?) had Weg experimenting a little bit with his proportions,  DD’s attempts to blend in by wearing a hat, smoking a pipe, and strapping a suitcase to his back results in one of the god damned funniest images ever committed to paper.  Everything you need to know about the character is within these panels, his boggly-eyed proclamations whilst stealing a device from of the fair participants that’s probably a reference to Back to the Future.  And then a treat at story’s end, when we jump forward past present day, which is pretty cool and rapaciously titillating as it causes thoughts of all the Robo stories to come…

Just a perfect nugget of action and adventure and a how-to on telling a tale in a couple pages.

The same can’t be said for the other two FCBD additions this time – Foster Broussard and Moon Girl.  The former is drawn with a solid, real-world confidence by Dan Glasl, but the coloring (Adam Guzowski) is somewhat murky and gives the pages an amateur look.  I get the appeal of the rogue character – the thief Broussard, about to be hanged, bartering his way out with information on the 1800s California gold rush – but the snippet of story here isn’t well selected to build momentum at all.  Sometimes fractured storytelling happens when you have a separate cretor (Trevor Pryce) billed from your writer (David Ziebart).  ‘Moon Girl’ does the Clayton Crain computer-painted look (by, uh, The Rahzzah) thing that always seems cool but never moves very well on a comic page, and is too overt of an attempt by writers Tony Trov and Johnny Zito to be a pulp tribute of… something something… a superhero girl… from the moon…?  See, I didn’t really care.

BUT, I appreciate Red 5 giving me a glimpse of these titles, as I was curious what they were about.  The 5 stars, though, is completely due to how overwhelmingly awesome the Robo part of the book is.