In Excerpt

Here’s what I can’t figure out–there’s this interspecies kiss between Robocop and Lewis in this one and then Robocop goes rogue, like some kind of vigilante–why the hell do Frank Miller and Steven Grant and the boys at Avatar think someone without nuts–without sex organs of any kind–is going to be getting all passionate on… 📖

Once again we have the almost naked Officer Lewis bossing everyone around and it’s better than usual. The entire issue would have probably taken about four minutes on film, which is about how long it takes to read. One has to wonder what the Robocop producers thought when they read this script–and how long it… 📖

So there’s that scene in Unforgiven where Clint Eastwood shoots the unarmed man and comments he should have armed himself, which is something like what happened about twenty-five years earlier in Hombre, but whatever. This issue has Robocop killing a bad guy in a torturous manner. Apparently, Miller thought having government employees torture people was… 📖

I can’t even tell anymore. Is this issue better than the last or is it the same or is it worse? I mean, there’s a lot of television stuff, a lot of stupid future post-nuclear war stuff–and a big fight scene between Robocop and Robocop 2 I couldn’t follow (Ryp is not given to comprehendible… 📖

And, almost magically, it goes to crap again. Not total crap–even though Ryp has got Lewis sexualized to the point she’s got less content than a swimsuit model (there’s nothing like realizing mainstream action movie misogyny has absolutely nothing on comic book misogyny, whether in Miller’s late eighties movie script or Grant’s early 2000s comic… 📖

You know what, this issue isn’t terrible. I mean, it’s bad, but not in comparison to the rest of the series. Robocop is in it, more than usual, and as comic relief instead of the protagonist, but whatever, at least he’s in the comic book. And some of the ideas–presumably Miller’s–are actually somewhat entertaining here.… 📖

Here’s where the comic sort of jumps off the deep end. I do want to point out how poorly Grant uses the commercial breaks, which are funny, in this issue. He doesn’t do them with any related news program, so there’s just story, commercial, story. He certainly hasn’t set up a comic book where he… 📖

And here Robocop is even less of a character. Grant (or Miller?) has found a character he wants to follow, a voluptuous female version of Dr. Phil who can guide the story. The supporting cast here is really thin; since Ryp doesn’t exactly do likenesses (at all), the familiar movie cast is identifiable only by… 📖

There’s technically twenty-two pages of story here, but so much of it is wasted–five pages alone, at the front, go to showing clips of television shows of the future (Grant adds, presumably, the material about TV being safe for all kids, since when Miller wrote his Robocop 2 script it was 1988 or whatever)–it doesn’t… 📖