They’ll Fix You. They Fix Everything: Robocop: Last Stand #1 Review

Robocop is awesome. Sure, there are a lot of questionable moments in the franchise, like parts of Robocop 2… and all of Robocop 3… plus the entirety of the Robocop animated series… not to mention every instant of the live-action Robocop TV series that was created to keep Orion Pictures from being sold for corporate parts in the mid 90s… but that original Paul Verhoeven flick? I can watch that all day.

Frank Miller, too, is awesome… or at least he was once. Sure, there have been a lot of questionable moments, like Holy Terror… and his film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit… and whenever he goes anywhere near a device that has an Ethernet port… but all those stories like The Dark Knight Returns, and Give Me Liberty, and Batman: Year One? Miller in the late 80s, early 90s, I can read all day.

Now, Miller famously wrote the original screenplays for Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 in the late 80s, before various studio executives and directors ripped the things apart to turn them into the respective okay and awful movies they became. And for a long time through the 90s, those screenplays were kind of legends in the comics world: Miller, working when he was at the top of his game, on a genre franchise that exploded into a classic right out of the gate.

Almost ten years ago, Avatar Press released an adaptation of Miller’s Robocop 2 screenplay, with a comic script by Two Guns writer Steven Grant, that was pretty solid as I recall, and was a hell of a lot darker than the actual movie. But that still left Miller’s Robocop 3 screenplay floating around out there. And in the meantime, Dynamite Comics got their hands on the Robocop license and put out some books that, frankly, made Robocop 2 look like Godfather 2.

However, the license has now moved to Boom Studios, who has put the band back together with Robocop: Last Stand, an adaptation of Miller’s Robocop 3 screenplay again adapted to comics by Steven Grant. So we’ve got an 80s Robocop story based on an 80s story by Frank Miller. On paper, it’s everything I ever wanted when I was 20 years old… but the question is: is it a classic like I always hoped? Or is it another wretchedly disappointing Robocop comic like every one I’ve read since we started this Web site?

The answer is… neither, really. But it is pretty damn good

Robocop has gone rogue from Omni Consumer Products, so OCP has started painting him as a loose cannon killer in the news (which they own). In the meantime, OCP has liquidated the Detroit police department and replaced it with a corps of heavily-armed hired thugs, who are terrorizing the populace and trying to soften them up for the demolition of old neighborhoods in favor of exclusive, gentrified tower homes. Problem is that the locals aren’t budging, which is costing OCP millions per day and threatening to bankrupt the company and their Japanese backers. So OCP turns up the heat, only to discover that Robocop takes his First Directive seriously… while Robocop himself discovers that someone implacable has been trying to find him for reasons yet unknown.

So let’s start with the first positive thing, and it’s something that I haven’t been able to say about a Robocop comic in almost two years: the Robocop in this comic book is recognizable as the classic original movie Robocop. There’s no weird profanity or misplaced aggression here, just a guy who has lost his family, his only friend (we see former partner Officer Lewis killed in a flashback), and even himself. He works, he shuts down, he dreams of his former humanity, and he gets up and works again, following his Prime Directives as best he can, speaking in a stiltedly and robotically polite manner while engaging in excessive and graphic (yet emotionless) violence. So whereas in the Dynamite comics of the past couple of years where we got a guy in a Robocop suit with a penchant for anger issues and explosive outbursts, this is Robocop. And I have missed Robocop.

Further, the overall story just feels like Robocop should, and an appropriate extension to the original movie. Whereas the original Robocop gave us a Detroit just beginning to succumb to bankruptcy and corporate incursion, this comic gives us a logical next step: the magic sci-fi robo-police personified by Robocop and the ED-209’s has failed, leading to a cheaper privatized police force of hired goons and mercenaries. This makes a lot of sense. Further, in the face of the failure of the public relations onslaught personified by Robocop in the first movie, this story give us an OCP looking at a loss for its shareholders, and acting as any corporation in a similar position would: by performing a human resources adjustment. Of course, being a science fiction story, that adjustment is personified by blowing people out of their homes with rockets, but still, it makes sense within the world created in Verhoeven’s original movie. And it feels right as the theoretical final part of a trilogy; the “bad guy” – OCP – is desperate and on the ropes. And the situation presented here feels like a logical extrapolation of that original concept.

And then there are the classic 80s Millerisms: street punks with a homemade patois. Hoodlums in nice coats and the veneer of respectability, only carrying machine guns. A citizen army of vigilantes following an iconic hero into battle against insurmountable odds. There is more of The Dark Knight Returns flavor in this issue than there was in Holy Terror, which was a fucking Batman story by Frank Miller.

But still, this is not a perfect execution of a Robocop story. One of the most iconic parts of the original Robocop was the fake TV advertisements, which helped to establish the overall sense of satire in the story – and the fact that Robocop was, in fact, a satire, was part of what made it awesome. That sense of humor isn’t really out front in this story. Sure, the story opens with a couple of panels of fake commercial, but in general this story feels deadly serious. Part of what made Robocop work was that it was standard hostile corporate takeover policy writ large: after a buyout, you rebrand everything, have a big product rollout, and tell everyone that there will be a bright future for everyone while you’re already planning the layoffs. And while I will reiterate that what we’re seeing here makes sense as the final stage of a failed buyout as shown in the movie, the tone is less humorous and more desperate. And while that is appropriate for what amounts to the final stages of a layoff, it makes things less fun than I would have liked.

Korkut Oztekin’s art really worked for me in a future dystopian story, partially because it really reminded me of Kevin O’Neill’s work on Marshall Law. Oztekin uses similar angular faces with exaggerated expressions and big eyes as O’Neill does, and he does it with a medium to thick line – look at the faces and expressions on pages three, four and five, and then look at any page of Marshall Law or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and tell me you can’t see the similarities. In addition, Oztekin alternates between detailed, rich backgrounds and more abstract patterns like speed lines or simple line patterns, which ground the images in the grime of Detroit when needed, and alternately give a sense of action when it makes sense. And Jesus wept: the big panel on page nine that is the first full reveal of Robocop, all dented and beat on and determined? If Oztekin had included Robocop’s big pistol in his hand in that panel, I’d pay $500 for that original page, regardless if the asking price was lower. Bottom line is that it is a really good style for a dark future tale, and I am really looking forward to seeing more from this artist.

Look, there is only one perfect Robocop story, and it starred Peter Weller, was directed by Paul Verhoeven, and came out in theaters in 1987. But considering there has been a wealth of bad to truly shitty Robocop stories in the intervening 26 years, the first issue of Robocop: Last Stand is one hell of an opening salvo for a long-time Robocop fan like myself. Sure, it’s lacking in the humor department so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing more happening in the boardroom to bring that satire feel back to the property… but it feels more true to the property than any comic book of the past several years. And frankly, it feels more true to being a Frank Miller comic than any comic in about ten years… including the ones written by Frank Miller.

If you’re a Robocop fan, this one’s worth a look. Your move, creep.