There Will Be Trouble: Robocop: Road Trip #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review’s Prime Directives: Serve the public trust. Protect the innocent. Spoil the book.

Dear Marvel Comics: please hire Rob Williams back. His work on Daken: Dark Wolverine was compelling and entertaining. Amanda liked his Ghost Rider a lot. Hell, I think his Classwar is a damn fine book, and that was his first time writing comics. He needs you to give him work. We need you to do it. Because if you don’t give him something to do, he might write some more Robocop for Dynamite Comics, and I don’t think I can bear that.

I’ll start with the positive: this isn’t as bad as Williams’s last run on Terminator / Robocop: Kill Human a few months back. That, however, is not an endorsement; a massive concussion isn’t as bad as an impacted skull fracture, but ain’t nobody lining up for either of them.

The inside cover of this book notes that the story takes place “following the events of the first Robocop film.” In the book, Robocop’s partner Lewis is dead before page one, Detroit is under total “martial” law by OCP, and the cops that remain are in an underground resistance movement. So by “following the events of the first Robocop film,” I guess they mean, “But before the events of Robocop 2, in which Lewis was still alive and Detroit had a working police force. So… Robocop 2? Didn’t happen. Plus, you missed some other Dynamite Robocop story where all that stuff happened. Which one? Well, I guess you’ll have to buy them all! Moo-hah-hah-h – wait! Where you going? Don’t put me back on the shelf! Please! We have gore on page 11! Don’t go!”

The book starts with Robocop hallicinating that he’s having a discussion with Clarence Boddicker and what’s-his-face who melted in toxic waste in the first movie. They are clearly hallucinations. Williams makes it a point to have other characters say that Boddicker and Dick-Clark-Stroke-Face aren’t there… and then Robocop is attacked by a golden Robocop who looks just like him. So… is the golden Robocop a hallucination? If he is, why is Robocop being actually hurt? What the fuck is going on here? Sure, Williams makes it clear that the doppelganger is actually a robot being controlled by the CEO of OCP… eventually. But I’m not sure it’s a good editorial choice in a first issue to completely and utterly baffle the reader on page four.

I know that in its DNA, Robocop is meant to be a dark social satire, but that’s no excuse to include internal logical errors that boggle the mind. Boddicker and Old-Man-Scrote-Head are hallucinations… but they cast shadows. The head of OCP is after Robocop so he can take over his body to preserve his brain… but he’s the head of the company that built Robocop; you can’t just build another one and stick your own brain in it? Your manufacturing sucks, dude. No wonder Detroit is a violent, burned-out wasteland of unemployment… and is an even worse hellhole in the comic.

Williams makes it a point that OCP has cut off Detroit’s Internet, radio and TV… and on the next page, he gives us a Media Break Detroit local news broadcast. On television. But I am willing to at least forgive this, because the parody TV broadcast is the best part of this book. A smart, funny parody of the demands of rabid sports fans and the embattled nature of losing coaches; this is the one place where Williams hits the tone of old-school Robocop. It actually made me laugh out loud. It’s a shame that, in order to fit it in, Williams had to completely ignore the internal logic of his own story.

The artwork by Unai De Zarate is solid, if nothing particularly special to my eye. He draws a clean line, does good work with shadows, and his storytelling is generally clear – admittedly, while I was confused by the nature of the golden Robocop, I have to admit that De Zarate did his job and visually distinguished that figure from the hallucinations seen previously. The characters resemble their real-life movie counterparts… except for Lewis, who for some reason looks like Scarlett Johansson with a 1991 Winona Ryder pixie cut. All in all, it’s a solid, workmanlike effort… its biggest problem is that whenever I open a Robocop book, my first thought on seeing the art is, “Huh. They still don’t know enough to hire Geof Darrow for a Robocop book?” But I can’t exactly hold that against De Zarate.

Look, I generally like Rob Williams’s writing. But the man simply cannot seem to write Robocop. There are so many flaws in this story, the only thing making it hang together are the staples in the book’s spine. And in future issues, we’re looking forward to Robocop leaving Detroit. Remember when Superman walked across America? Yeah, same bad idea. If you’re a Robocop fetishist, you should pick this up… just don’t offer to shake my hand. Otherwise? Skip it.