Atomic Robo: The Hell and Lightning Collection by Brian Clevinger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Everyone's favorite robot tech. tycoon and adventurer extraordinaire is back in three Atomic Robo stories in this collection. My thoughts on each of the three stories:


The Flying She-Devils of the Pacific: While flying an experimental plane in the early 1950s Atomic Robo encounters women who've continued to live and fight in the Pacific and live on their own island. They'll need to team up to fight a die-hard mad scientist determined to restore the glory of Japan. This story is fine. It works on its awesome high concept ideas, but it's probably the least funny of any Robo story and the characters outside of Robo are very generic. The "Strong Independent Woman" archetype has rarely been used so often. Still, the coolness of the plots makes it a decent read even if it's the weakest in the volume.

The Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur: Doctor Dinosaur is back and he has a plan to use his army of rockmen and atom bombs to restore dinosaurs to ruling the Earth. To be honest, I was nervous about this one because Dr. Dinosaur is a great villain, but it could be really hard for him to carry a whole story. No worries. He doesn't have to. We have a seperate plot of a government siege of Tesladyne while Robo's away. While this is more often than not, just an "okay" B-plot, it does avoid Doctor Dinosaur overload. This story has some great humor with Doctor Dinosaur stealing every scene he's and superb action.

The Knights of the Golden Circle: Picking up where the last book ended (believe it or not), this story finds Robo in the Old West as he fights an outlaw badman whose actually working for a nobleman bent on world domination. To stop them, Robo teams up with Doc Holiday and the awesome Bass Reeves (who is not enough fiction.) There's some great Steampunk elements in this, but more than anything I appreciated how Clevinger managed to capture the spirit of the Old Westerns in Robo who is facing the end of his life. A very fun read.

The book also includes the three Free Comic Book day offerings for 2013-2015. The 2013 is pretty good and has a nice twist that does set the stage for later events. 2014's is okay. 2015 features Doctor Dinosaur and while not as good as the previous Doctor Dinosaur FCBD offering, this is still pretty fun.

Overall, a solid enjoyable collection of Atomic Robo stories.




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