4 out of 5

Seven volumes deep – how do you keep your nigh-invincible robot interesting?  By keeping their Robo timeline flexible and bouncing around chronologically, Clevinger has left himself plenty of space to fill in details, but that could always mean random (and fun) antics.  However, Brian has chosen to pop up with character relevant stories or moments here and there, making it worthwhile to stay invested in his tales and to read them as they’re released.  ‘She-Devils’ seems, at first, to be one of those random entries, though with a well-written hook to keep the ante up for Robo: post WWII (1951), AR is still working for the government, testing a military ‘aerospike’ prototype somewhere over the Pacific when he’s attacked by several drones which force his ship (and its pilot) into a crash landing.  As the prototype is weaponless, the drones are shooed away by a group of blaster-totin’ jet-pack wearin’ sky pirates, who turn out to be a band of females dubbed the She-Devils – women from the war effort who decided to not go back home to drudgery, instead scouting for dangerous leftover war materials to put to better use.  Which they of course do from an uncharted island with a resident mechanical genius and eye-patch wearin’ captain.  Supposing that this is decades before Robo could have constant robot uplink with someone and his ship trashed, Clevinger effectively depowers the robot and keeps him at the ladies’ mercy.  They just want to see him on his way, but for better or worse, those drones were harbingers of a secret Japanese plot (by a group of country-lovin’ warriors who stand by their country’s superiority despite the war being over) to destroy America with a devastating ‘earthquake bomb’… and thus must the She-Devils and Robo get involved and stop such destroyin’ from happening.  The action is still pretty frequent and the story-telling style still compressed, but Brian makes this a valuable footnote in our thinking robot’s history: after all, why exactly did he stop working for the government?  We can understand it in principle, but this volume adds some further insight without directly epiloguing in our face: “and thus did Robo form his own company…” blah blah blah.  We can piece it together, but it’s only relevant for those following the timeline.  Otherwise it can work perfectly fine as a standalone story.

Structure-wise, the intro is a bit sudden – the story has difficulty building up a sense of import until we’re into the second issue – but Clevinger spaces out the fight effectively that we don’t feel front-loaded with story or back-loaded with action.  He also keeps the humor at an appropriate level so we never feel that the She-Devils are jokes.  The larger cast of characters if a bit of a juggle; we get who are principles are, but there are a couple names tossed around that confuse matters when it seems like we should know more about who’s who than we do.

On the art side, Wegener tones down his blockiness (perhaps to balance out dealing with a mostly female cast…?) and it’s absolutely to the book’s credit – action sequences, almost all taking place in the air, don’t have the static, confusing look that had been creeping up, and indeed have a staggering sense of fluidity and motion, Weg pretty perfectly capturing the sense of ‘drift’ action has when planes and people are zipping all around one another.  Some of the directional cues / framing seems a bit confusing at first until you realize that Weg will always point us in the logical direction and move time forward panel to panel, meaning that if I point off-panel, the next panel will, sensibly show what I’m pointing at, but at the state it would be in if time passed from panel 1 to 2.  Thus with high octane action, it takes a couple beats to catch up with the pace, but once you do, it reads really well.  And I could be making this up, but the change in colorists (from Rhoda Patterson to Nick Filardi) makes a hugely subtle, positive difference, Filardi’s shading giving the characters a bit more weight by using better, thinner applications of shading (not as flat as Pattison’s) but also keeping the colors complimentary with a nicely graded blend of grays for shadows and a pleasant mixture of browns and blues for most of our settings and characters.  Again, totally making it up without a side by side comparison, but it definitely struck me in the outdoor scenes even in the first issue.

A bit more of a sober entry in the series (less wacky robots and monsters, more people) and probably not a great jumping on point, but a wonderfully rewarding read – showing growth for our writer, artist, and their creation – for series’ followers.