Tag: critical analysis

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From robot servant to acid house: the fantastical life of Robot Archie

Robot Archie is one of British comics’ most singular and loved characters. In his regular look at classic British comics and the Treasury archive, David McDonald explores the life and exploits of the world’s most powerful mechanical man…

Content advisory: some of the images on this post contain offensive and outdated stereotypes, and are included for the purposes of historical interest.

What character has appeared in Lion, 2000 AD, in original adventures in America’s ‘DC’ Comics and in the Netherlands ‘Sjors’ comic too? 

It’s none other than one of British comics most successful and well remembered characters, Robot Archie! 

 My first introduction to the character was in my older brother’s 1979 Lion annual. The cover with Archie battling a giant Octopus fascinated me, however, the accompanying text story inside disappointed me. I always felt a little short-changed with text stories in annuals, it was supposedly a comic!!

During the early eighties, Archie cropped up in various annuals and specials, including the 1980 Lion special with an amazing Garry Leach cover. That special was edited by Richard Burton- who would later edit 2000 AD. It’s well worth tracking down for the Archie v Spider story, which is probably the last new story featuring the characters for nearly a decade.  It also has some Steve Dillon illustrations on the Captain Condor text story too which was possibly his first work for IPC.… but I digress, back to Archie!  

From reading his adventures in the annuals and specials, I was hooked.  A great character, sometimes in search of an equally great story. That great story landed in a surprising place in 2000 AD prog 627 in 1989. I’m getting ahead of myself a bit though, what of Archie’s origin and his ‘comic life’?

While Archie may have been one of Fleetways more popular characters, it took him a while to evolve into the swaggering and brash character that helped him become so well remembered.  The character appeared in the first issue of Lion back in 1952 as the ‘Jungle Robot’ created by writer Ted Cowan and artist Alan Philpott.  Archie, having been built by Professor CR Richie, was in the possession of the Professor’s nephew Ted Richie and his friend Ken Dale.

Archie was no more than a remote-controlled toy, operated by Ted Richie via a control pad he had in his possession. His first adventure only lasted six months, and it would be another five years before Archie returned to Lion in 1957, this time as Archie – The Robot Explorer.  The new series continued much the same as the first tale, jungle adventures, on the trail of some lost treasure or villainous native. The next evolution in Archie was the addition of artist Ted Kearnon in 1958 who would become the character’s main artist until the end of the series. 

Kearnon was an excellent draughtsman, who could draw literally anything the script threw at him.  His depiction of Archie is the definitive one that we all now associate with the character.

Re-titled ‘Robot Archie’ in 1959, the final stage of Archie’s evolution happened in early 1966 when the Professor fitted him with a ‘mechanical brain’ and a voice box. Why this wasn’t thought of before is a mystery, but it was the final piece in the character, and with a masterstroke.  Over the following year his personality emerged. He was brave, but also impulsive, vain, boastful and full of his own importance, which made for some great stories and interactions with his ‘owners’ Ken and Ted. 

The post 1966 stories are the character’s golden age.  The jungle settings were less frequent, and Archie had lengthy time travel adventures along with battling various monsters, both mechanical and traditional! 

The addition of personality and a voice completely changed the stories from having Ken and Ted being in control of Archie and their adventures, to trailing behind Archie with his newfound bravado and overconfidence.

Archie continued in Lion until the title was cancelled in 1974. The seventies were tough on older comics.  Lion and its stablemate Valiant were cancelled giving way to newer and brasher titles like Action and 2000AD. This wasn’t the end of the character though.  In 1975 IPC in conjunction with Swiss publisher Gevacur published ‘Vulcan’ (titled Kobra in German). Vulcan was smaller than the traditional Fleetway size comic and reprinted some of Fleetway and IPC’s best-known characters. While the format and paper were quite flimsy, the  printing was far superior than the newsprint that was used on most IPC comics.  So stories like The Spider and The Steel Claw looked their best.

Archie appeared in Vulcan in full colour in what could be termed new material.  It had been published previously, but in Dutch in the Netherlands!  Archie was reprinted extensively in the sixties in the Netherlands, and when material from the UK ran out, Dutch artist Bert Bus produced new strips, some of it based on the original British material. It was these strips drawn by Bus that were reprinted in Vulcan, and while Vulcan only lasted 60 issues (the first thirty were only distributed in Scotland as a market test), the German language version Kobra lasted over 160 issues.

From 1976 onward, Archie was limited to his yearly outings in the Lion annuals and specials.  He does make an early appearance in 2000 AD as one of Tharg’s droids in the story Tharg and the Intruder in Prog 24, drawn by Kevin O’Neill. His appearances finally came to an end in Lion Annual 1983, the last Lion annual.

Back to 2000 AD Prog 627 in 1989, Archie crash-landed into one of 2000 AD‘s most popular series, Morrison and Yeowells Zenith!  Zenith was a uniquely 2000 AD take on the superhero genre.  Zenith was a spoilt selfish popstar, and a reluctant superhero. Archie appears in the third series of Zenith, and his transformation is so out there it works brilliantly. He is now a member of a supergroup, Black Flag, an aficionado of ‘Acid House’ music, self-styling himself as ‘Acid Archie’. His character essentially stayed the same as he appeared in the late sixties, and the new characteristics could be seen as an extrapolation of his personality growth in the sixties and seventies.

Archie played a central part in Zenith Phase Three and continued to crop up in later Zenith stories. One of his most memorable scenes is when he appears riding a flower adorned Tyrannosaurus Rex in Zenith! It was inspired by the cover of Lion (3rd December 1966) in the story Robot Archie and the Jungle Menace.  A back cover poster of Archie that appeared in Prog 647 by Steve Yeowell raised my hopes that Archie was getting his own series in the Prog, but alas it never materialised. 

During this time Archie also appeared in a new story in the Classic Action Holiday Special in 1990. This is a new story, but Archie is firmly in his 1960’s character, with some great art by Sandy James. 

Due to the break-up of IPC’s comic assets in the mid-eighties into Fleetway and IPC Media, it turned out that when Archie was appearing in Zenith and the Action Special, Fleetway didn’t actually own the character!  This break up in the mid-eighties meant that IPC Media owned Archie.  Through various mergers and acquisitions, DC Comics in the US and IPC Media were part of the same company. Due to this association, DC published some of IPC Media’s assets in the US in the 00’s under the ‘Wildstorm‘ imprint.  The titles they published were Battler Britton, Thunderbolt Jackson and Albion. 

Albion was written by Alan Moore, Leah Moore and John Reppion, with art by Shane Oakley.  It featured Archie on the front cover of issue one!  Albion told the tale of how all of the various IPC, Fleetway and Odham’s characters had been incarcerated by the government in Cursitors Doom’s Castle and of Penny Dolmann’s efforts, with the help of a reconstructed Robot Archie to release them.

Art by Shane Oakley. © DC Comics

Since Albion, appearances of Archie have been few, although he continues in print in India. It’s also worth pointing out that Archie has inspired other Robots, Android Andy in Captain Britain and Tom Tom in Jack Staff are good examples.  A broken-up Android Andy appeared in the first issue of Albion! 

Rebellion’s acquisition of the old IPC/Fleetway comic assets now means Archie is back in the House of Tharg.  He has been in comic wilderness now for a while, is it time for a return of Acid Archie? 

 C’mon Tharg you know it makes sense!

David McDonald is the publisher of Hibernia Comics and editor of Hibernia’s collections of classic British comics, titles include The Tower King, Doomlord, The Angry Planet and The Indestructible Man. He is also the author of the Comic Archive series exploring British comics through interviews and articles. Hibernia’s titles can be bought here www.comicsy.co.uk/hibernia. Follow him on Twitter @hiberniabooks and Facebook @HiberniaComics

All opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Rebellion, its owners, or its employees.

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From terrifying toddlers to channeling Robert Crumb: the mad, mad world of Tom Paterson

Celebrating one of the finest talents in comics, The Tom Paterson Collection is a gorgeous hardcover bringing together strips from Tom Paterson, artist on titles such as Buster, Whizzer and Chips, and many more. 

Continuing our series of short essays commissioned from selected comics critics that explore 2000 AD and the Treasury of British Comics’ latest graphic novel collections, Doris V. Sutherland takes a look at the mad, mad worlds of one of Britain’s best cartoonists…

Generations of children (and not a few adults) have loved the comic strips of Tom Paterson. His bizarre characters and their exploits always did stand out in British comics; and with the range of styles he mastered, many will doubtless be surprised that all of these strips were drawn by one man. Now, with The Tom Paterson Collection, a selection of his best work has at long last been reissued.

Inside, readers will find the likes of Jake’s Seven, an early-eighties Jackpot strip about schoolkids travelling to the future and meeting a Dick Dastardly-esque villain. From 1987 comes Kipper‘s ‘Felix the Pussycat’, a superhero spoof about a boy who fights crime dressed as a cat — not a cat-themed superhero, just a cat. Come the nineties. Paterson was drawing ‘Lucy Lastic’ for Buster: a girl whose lengthy, rubbery limbs prove both blessing and curse.

One of the book’s biggest draws is Paterson’s 1984-7 work on ‘Sweeny Toddler’ in Whoopee and Whizzer and Chips. Here, we see one of Paterson’s most readily-evident gifts: his uncanny ability to emulate Sweeny’s creator, Leo Baxendale. Many cartoonists may be able to cobble together an outward imitation of Baxendale’s style, but to produce anything more than just a soulless copy would require the artist to share Baxendale’s oddball sense of visual humour. The bulk of Paterson’s ‘Sweeny’ strips are practically indistinguishable from Baxendale’s own work.

If there is a significant difference between the Baxendale and Paterson ‘Sweeny Toddler’, it would be the additional layer of rubbery grotesqueness that occasionally appears on Paterson’s work. The strip where Sweeny takes part in a face-pulling contest with Frankenstein, for example, recalls more the inspired cartoon ugliness of Ken Reid.

Paterson perfects this half-Baxendale, half-Reid style with ‘Fiends and Neighbours’ (from the 1976 Cor!! Annual) and its spiritual successor, the early-eighties Whizzer and Chips strip ‘Strange Hill’. These feature lovable grotesques who range from harmless cartoon spooks to genuine oddities. The latter are put on display when the Strange Hill teacher takes his class on a trip to Stonehenge, and encounters a band of hooded, faceless figures: “Nyaargh! Ghostly druids!!”

In Paterson’s world even pretty girls can be pretty odd-looking. Witness the ‘School Belle’, who debuted in 1983 and migrated from School Fun to Buster. Far from being generically attractive (like the Dolly Parton parody who turned up in Jackpot‘s The Park, drawn by Paterson two years earlier) she is a comically lumpy, lanky portrait of adolescence.

Another clear influence on Paterson is Robert Crumb. This shows up in some of Paterson’s later work, particularly Whizzer and Chips’ rap-themed ‘Watford Gapp’ from the late eighties and Buster‘s cool-dude superhero Captain Crucial from the nineties. The rubbery line-shading, Mr. Natural pickle-noses, borderline psychedelic starscapes and exaggerated-perspective “keep on truckin'” gaits found throughout these strips all speak of Crumb.

The Crumb-influenced strips also show a distinct touch of Reid. ‘Sportsfright’, ‘Thingummy-Blob’, ‘Coronation Stream’, ‘Teenage Mutant Turnips’, ‘Goon Moon’ and ‘Cosmo Zocket and his Insterstellar Rocket’ – all Buster strips from 1990 – depict worlds of monsters, aliens and strange animals that exist on a slider-scale with Crumb at one end and Reid at the other. The Buster of 1990 was clearly fertile ground for Peterson, as he also drew the bizarre ‘Monty’s Mutant’ and ‘Stupid Street’.

The book contains a selection of Paterson’s earlier work from the seventies, including such forgotten strips as Buster‘s ‘Crowjak’ (a bald-headed corvid sleuth), Cor‘s ‘Dial “T” for Twitt!’ (about an uncle-and-nephew team of detectives) and Jackpot‘s ‘Scooper’ (about a father-and-son team of reporters). These afford a clear look at how he developed as a cartoonist.

Consider ‘Full o’ Beans’, a 1979-debuting Jackpot strip about a boy who develops super-strength after eating a tin of beans, Popeye-fashion. Although generic in both premise and character design are generic, the strip allowed Paterson some grotesque fun, as when a baby eats the beans and grows into a bloated hulk. Compare this to ‘Guy Gorilla’, a Whizzer & Chips strip from 1983 about a scruffy-headed boy who becomes a huge, jelly-jowled ape after eating peanuts: the idea is essentially the same, but there is far more visual fun.

Another example of Paterson’s development is his work on Shiver & Shake‘s ‘Grimly Feendish’ – like ‘Sweeny Toddler’, a character inherited from Leo Baxendale. Early strips from 1973 show a bulgy-eyed Grimly distinct from Baxendale’s version: the spirit is similar, but the technique is very different. Come 1974, however, Paterson has mastered the faux-Baxendale style that so many know and love.

The book shows how Paterson juggled multiple aesthetics at the same time. Even after establishing his madcap style, he was still drawing relatively sedate fare typified by the unrequited-love comedy of ‘Horace and Doris’, debuting in Whizzer & Chips in 1978; or the boy-and-his-android-double strip ‘Robert’s Robot’, running in the same comic five years later. Tamest of all is the football-themed ‘Team Mates’ from the short-lived Wow!

The book opens with Paterson’s work on the title character of Buster, drawn between 1985 and 1989. Introduced back in 1960, Buster is a rather generic character (his main selling point being that he wears the same hat as Andy Capp) but Paterson does much to enliven the stories, cramming scenes with sight gags. The Baxendale influence is still evident; but this is the earlier, more elaborate Baxendale of the ‘Bash Street Kids’.

A few odds and ends sit alongside the longer-running strips, including some one-off Oink! tales from 1986. Rounding off the volume is six pages of Blerp, an unpublished comic about various  Crumb-esque aliens.

As well as celebrating the cartoonist’s career, The Tom Paterson Collection is offers snapshots of British humour comics as they existed in the seventies, eighties and early nineties. The topics of parody (Kojack, Judge Dredd, He-Man and rap music) are a time capsule themselves. Those who were around at the time will have plenty to gaze at with warm nostalgia — and newcomers to Tom Paterson’s strange world are also in for a treat.

Doris V. Sutherland is the UK-based author behind the independent comic series Midnight Widows and official tie-ins for television series including Doctor Who and The Omega Factor. She has contributed articles to Women Write About Comics, Amazing Stories, Killer Horror Critic, Belladonna Magazine and other outlets.

The Tom Paterson Collection is available now from all good book and comic book stores and online retailers, the Treasury of British Comics webshop in exclusive hardcover, paperback, and digital, and in digital from the 2000 AD app.

All opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Rebellion, its owners, or its employees.

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“But don’t just take my word”: Power and Surveillance in ‘The Thirteenth Floor’

The third and final collection of The Thirteenth Floor is out now, bringing to a close the deliciously devious deviations of mad Max, the murderous AI caretaker of Maxwell Towers.

Continuing our series of short essays commissioned from selected comics critics that explore 2000 AD and the Treasury of British Comics’ latest graphic novel collections, Tiffany Babb examines ideas of power and surveillance in John Wagner, Alan Grant, and José Ortiz’s comic horror masterpiece…

The third collection of The Thirteenth Floor, from John Wagner, Alan Grant, and José Ortiz, continues the terrifying adventures of Max, an all-seeing computerized apartment custodian who traps anyone who bothers his tenants in his terrifying thirteenth floor where “anything can happen.” On this floor (which technically isn’t supposed to exist in Max’s building due to the old superstition), Max creates computerized realities that play on his victim’s fears until they swear off their bad behavior forever. 

The surface level horror of the strip lies in the horrific punishments that Max dreams up for his victims, but the deeper horror lies in the concept of an unsupervised computer serving as violent disciplinarian. Max doesn’t seem to have much human feeling, beyond the fact that it makes him happy to protect his tenants’ wellbeing. We can’t even really see him, though he can very clearly see us. He exists where no one can reach him, yet he makes decisions about who must be punished and how. Plus, no one really knows what Max gets up to except for his terrified victims, which means that he can’t really be stopped.

Clearly, The Thirteenth Floor leans into the “crime doesn’t pay” brand of horror— but only in a certain way and only for certain crimes. While it’s true that Max makes sure the criminals he brings to his thirteenth floor are frightened badly enough to never commit a crime again, Max never sees any punishment for essentially kidnapping and terrorizing people. In fact, his power and his daring only seem to grow over time. In this collection, due to some foreign interference, one of Max’s victims ends up dead. Unsettlingly, instead of being transparent about the death (which was not his fault), Max quickly arranges for the body to be disposed of. 

Max can easily justify any action, no matter how grotesque, because he’s only justifying his actions to himself. This issue is heightened when Max’s programming becomes faulty, and the cheery helpfulness he regularly directs towards his tenants is replaced with malice and cruelty. He even nearly kills his friend Gwyn by causing him to fall off the side of the building.

Meanwhile, the other tenants have been meeting secretly to discuss Max’s new behavior. They’ve turned off the cameras in their apartments, but Max, with the help of a neighbor, is still able to listen in on their plans. When they see Gwyn fall off the building and rush to check on him, Max traps them on his thirteenth floor, declaring, “Treason, I call it! But don’t just take my word— we’ll let the court decide.” Of course, this court, like all of Max’s courts, features only Max as the judge, jury, and executioner, and he brutally forces confessions out of each innocent tenant. 

Of course, the day is saved when Max is fixed right before he actually kills anyone. Yet Max, instead of making amends, immediately uses his technological power to wipe everyone’s memories, declaring, “Of course, I can’t allow them to retain the knowledge of what has happened”. Max knows that if he’s held accountable for what he’s done, he’d likely be shut down forever, and so he must remain unaccountable. 

What the third collection of The Thirteenth Floor reveals is that Max’s concept of what is right or wrong can change drastically and at any time, and that fact worries at the pattern of his punishments being doled out solely by him. Max is the perfect example of the dangers of a surveillance state and of a police state. He is all-seeing and all-powerful, but he cannot be seen nor acted upon. And most of all, he has situated himself as seemingly necessary for the happiness and safety of the tenants that he controls. He’s acting, not out of sadism, but on behalf of regular people who are being mistreated— the salt of the earth. 

Perhaps the story that most sums up this manipulated dependency is one that breaks the mold of the regular Thirteenth Floor plot. When a young tenant named Kelvin is bullied by other children, Max brings the boy (as opposed to his bullies) to the thirteenth floor to teach him the art of “Max Fu.” After training, Kelvin is able to defeat his attackers in the simulation without much trouble, but when he sets off for school, he’s unable to defeat the real bullies, having forgotten all of his training in fear.

So, Max must step in again, this time applying his ingenuity more directly to the situation. Max convinces Kelvin to return to the thirteenth floor to train one last time, while, without Kelvin’s knowledge, Max draws in the real boys. Kelvin, believing he’s fighting a simulation, beats them easily and returns to school triumphant.

In Max’s ideal world, Kelvin can only succeed in overcoming his bullies with Max’s continued help. Kelvin alone, even with Max’s training, simply isn’t enough, because Max can only protect his tenants if they need his help. The story that Max has presented serves as a direct contrast to the “if you teach a man to fish” maxim. Teaching a boy to fight isn’t enough. Max must be involved every step of the way.

He wants to be all-powerful, and to do so, he must be relied upon. He must be trusted. He must, at least a little, be feared. And if the circumstances don’t fit his narrative, he will go out of his way to change them so that they do. Because, of course, the all-seeing, all-powerful computer who is only here to serve and protect knows best, and everyone knows that he only has his tenants’ interests at heart. 

Tiffany Babb is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. You can find her cultural criticism in PanelxPanel Magazine, The AV Club, Paste Magazine, and The Comics Journal and her poetry in Third Wednesday Magazine, Rust + Moth, and Cardiff Review.  Her first book of poetry A list of things I’ve lost is forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press Dec 2021. You can follow her on twitter @explodingarrow and sign up for her monthly newsletter at tiffanybabb.com/puttingittogether

The Thirteenth Floor Vol.3 is available now from all good book and comic book stores and online retailers, the Treasury of British Comics webshop in exclusive hardcover, paperback, and digital, and in digital from the 2000 AD app.

All opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Rebellion, its owners, or its employees.