4 out of 5

It’s hard to up the ante when your hero has tackled pyramid monsters and creatures from beyond space and has been blow to various configurations of pieces and stitched back together.  Robo is, for all intents and purposes, unkillable.  And thus Clevinger has smartly shifted the focus from “can the robot survive?” to the last-minute crisis aversions or Tesla-incited oddities (like attacks from Ghost Edison) that’ve stocked AR vol’s 1-5.  It’s all tons of fun, and will / would continue to be so.  But allowing us to settle into the relative comfort of Robo punning about the end of the world while blasting mad robots with one hand and giving a thumbs up with the other makes the impact of a story like ‘Station X’ – where suddenly we get some scope on what the death of Robo may cause and the potential destruction of the world is presented with contextually believable lead-up steps – all the more effective.  But what’s at the core of vol. 6 that makes it awesome?  Conspiracy!  We love ’em.  In the bright and flashy world of science villains, there’s often not a secret agenda or man-in-the-shadows, but Station X opens with a rescue mission that’s tellingly given a more serious tone than the set-ups in previous books and it ends in perplexing disaster, with AR knocked out of commission and no one to rescue.  After a daring rescue (when the action science team ALSO gets to prove its collective awesomeness and not just act as a Jenkins support crew) and a nice bit where we’re told that the core that powers Robo – which is still years ahead of current tech – would likely annihilate a good percentage of the population if it were to go kablooey – giving us, finally, an understandable reason to avoid just tossing the robot into any given situation without some preparation.  After spending however many issues solidifying the world around Robo, it was time for Clevinger to open a bit about Tesladyne and the ‘bot, and Station X does it perfectly in just a few pages.

Once we’re back in action, the games recommence, AR and crew sent on another wild goose chase that almost ends in calamity, and meanwhile the current day Sparrow is working with some Tesladyne ne’er-do-wells (sent to an Antarctic research station after ushering in the space-time monster to present day in vol. 3) to figure out how and why a whole building disappeared, and sure enough the storylines end up meeting nicely right before the conclusion.  The plotting is smoother than anything Brian has written up to this point; instead of a few issues of fun delaying tactics before a big battle, we’re actually required to read some panels between here and there to understand what’s going on.

It is, honestly, the best overall story out of the the first six volumes, combining legit narrative techniques with that pseudo-science you so love.  But why 4 out of 5?  Well, they’re minor nits, but nits nonetheless.  Though well plotted, this is still an incredibly condensed tale (as usual), and some details are shoved in such that a few pages go by and you realize that something that seemed mentioned in passing was actually a plot point.  It’s part of Clevinger’s jokey, offhand dialoguing, but sometimes readers need some clarification to catch a comic fact over character flippancy.  Next: The path to the reveal is, as mentioned, a lot of fun, but there’s a sense we’ve been here before.  It’s more a combination of a couple elements Brian’s touched on before, and I can understand other reasons for couching the mastermind as he did, keeping a somewhat more varied cache of ‘villains’ in tow, but there’s so much coolness and then it’s just a tad of a letdown.  Inevitable, you say, and I supposed I’d agree, but though I couldn’t tell you what to tweak, I sense there were just some minor tunings to make that would’ve twisted this into something a bit more fresh.

Lastly – vol. 6 finally exposed some of Wegener’s limitations.  Prior to this, it seemed like he was getting used to certain aspects of the Robo world, but the characters are style are, by this point, rather fully formed.  However, the action in ‘Ghost’ is a bit more – hm – dynamic? than previous books, in the sense that we need to be able to interpret specific movements from the panels (changes in direction, intended actions) as opposed to just ‘implied’ action of an explosion or punch.  A lot of what Wegener has had to do is reaction panels or ‘static’ moments, like a photograph on a front page.  These images contain an awesome sense of movement, but its generally uni-directional, if that follows.  There are some pretty intense moments in ‘Station X’ where the balance of power in action scenes quickly flip-flops, and those moments are rather confusing and don’t communicate what’s happening as effectively as desired.

Yeah, nits.  Regardless, ‘The Ghost of Station X’ totally upped the stakes, and established that Robo could be edge-of-your-seat and serious without sacrificing the inherent awesomeness and fun.