4 out of 5

Atomic Robo has messed with time travel before, but it’s been within the scope of Robo’s life.  Further fussing with the dimension certainly seems within the realm of the title’s sci-fi shenanigans, but because the AR timeline was already so insanely awesomely broad, I never thought of it as a necessary thread to explore.  I certainly never thought, specifically, that we needed Robo in the Wild West.  Now I’m ashamed I wasn’t thirsting for this because it’s exactly what we needed.  …Alas, once we’ve had this taste, it’s given to us in typical AR abbreviated fashion, meaning there’s so, so much frustratingly tossed between and before panels that we’ll probably never get to see, and this time that compression adds a note of disappointment to things.

So as you know from previous adventures (yes?), Robo now has to question Dr. Dinosaur’s time-traveling-crystal claims legitimacy as a crystal-related explosion has seemingly sent AR back to 1872.  As we pick things up, Robo’s in a hideout in Chicago in 1884, ignoring a sign that he’s written stating ‘Do nothing unless you’re supposed to’ to go help some locals under the ‘guise’ of the presumably-named-by-the-public moniker Ironhide.  Unfortunately, Robo runs afoul of the wrong gang and puts too many innocents in the way of danger, necessitating a team-up with Doc Holliday and Marshal Bass Reeves, who’d been chasing Holliday until this mightiest of team-ups had to happen.  …Now… fortunately, the ‘wrong gang’ actually turn out to be involved with a surprising foe from Robo’s future… who is somehow also here in the past…  While this development allows Clevinger to give Wegener some big action sequences to play around with, it’s the plot-thread-too-many that demands more answers than we’ll probably allotted, and sort of takes us out of the sci-fi / Wild West mash-up to something more closely resembling current Robo, just with dudes in cowboy hats.

But let’s dismiss that.  Perhaps we’ll get some of this explored in the Science Adventures mag, if that comes back, or we’ll fiddle with it at a later date.  Clevinger has proven capable of stringing long-running bits together in the background, this is just the first time that something is so flagrantly waved in our face and then ignored.  Elsewise, this is prime Robo.  The smart snips, the sped-through logic, and the insane compression (the opening of issue 4 takes 3 panels to establish a setup that other books would milk for pages); initially I was a little offput by Clev mentioning only in the opening blurb and nowhere directly in the book that Robo was close to running out of fuel (putting a time crunch on solving the bad guy problem), but as we went along, I felt it was definitely fitting with the series’ style, which doesn’t rely on 11th hour twists.  And in this case, dropping that after the fact probably would have taken away from the mash-up even more, as it would’ve had to have been presented as more serious than it is.

Anthony Clark delivers a nice range of colors for the dusty Western setting that ages the future aspects appreciably, and Jeff Powell’s letters are as smartly and unobstructively placed as always.  Wegener has continued to reign in his bombastic tendencies for more readable panels and consistent figures; occasionally there’s an action sequence that will drop a panel or two that would’ve cleared up what happened just before or after, but there’s so much Oomph in the panels we do get that you always get the point.

9 volumes deep.  Still excited to see what happens next.