One of my hobbies is comic strips, and I’m delighted to note just how many are available on the Web now.
For several years I’ve been reading a strip called ROBOTMAN. Okay, gradually the strip has come to focus more and more on the human characters, Monty and Moondog. I can understand this, strips evolve. Robotman has been pushed from center stage and has spent the last several months on another planet. Now he’s decided not to return because he’s fallen in love with a “female” robot. Yeesh. How hokey can you get?
But the nasty part is this: the strip has been renamed MONTY. The Web site has been rewritten so that (in spite of the “robotman” still found in the URL) the strip has always been named MONTY. Robotman has never existed. Oceania is at war with Eastasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. What the fuck?
Did something happen and I miss it, or is this just another sign that the comics pages are going straight to the darkest pit of Hell?
I’m still trying to find out what happened to that family Robotman lived with. I remember when I was a kid, he lived with these people. When I went away to school, I stopped reading the comic, and the people disappeared.
Perhaps the creator ran low on Robotman jokes. Personally, I prefer it when comic strip authors move on to new topics rather than beat the same dead lasagna over and over again. If that means changing the entire premise of the strip, fine.
I’m guessing the author is trying to make it appeal to more people. I’ve never seen ROBOTMAN in any paper, I never knew it existed until I saw a collection of strips in a science fiction bookstore.
Probably, the author or syndicate felt having a robot would make it only appeal to “geeks”, and getting rid of the robot would give it a chance of being more successful.
I guess I didn’t make myself clear: I can understand dropping the robot, although I think it’s a mistake. What I don’t understand is the Orwellian game of rewriting history to make it look like Robotman never existed. If you go to the website for the comic strip formerly known as Robotman and click on “About Monty”, it says “Monty landed on comic pages around the world in 1985.” But the strip wasn’t called Monty then, in fact the character Monty was introduced years later.
ROBOTMAN is like my favourite strip. I mean the storys really wacky…LONELY GEEK MAKES HIMSELF A ROBOT SO HE CAN HAVE A FRIEND…now the alien has fucked things up…i mean its not the same anymore!
I miss robotman
The New York Daily News dropped “Robotman” over a year ago and I can’t say I miss it. It started sucking when they introduced that stupid furless cat.
No, wait, the sequence where Patrick Stewart (an admirer of its sleek baldness) tried to kidnap it and Monty chased them in his “power walker” togs and Stewart couldn’t run because he was in a “No Running” zone…THAT was pretty funny.
The guy who draws Robotman got id of the family some time ago, and even tried to produce a strip that explained how they left and Monty came in. It’s been clear for sme time that he wanted to get ri of R’Man and move Monty center stage. God knows why – there are lready plenty of strips out there featuring loser guys and their goofy friends. The only thing that made Robotman worth while were the science fction gags and in-jokes. (I liked the one about the Brains-cum-spinal cords a la “Fiend Without a Face” playing “Mind Games”) Maybe he disliked that fact that nly SF geeks like me appreciated the strip.
I get the impression that Robotman started out as a licensing arrangement with the folks who made the “Robotman” video I occasionally see i the kids’ section of the videostores. The character looks the same, only (ewwww…) CUTER. I strongly suspect he was given a free hand to take the strip in entirely different directions.
So now it looks like he wants to pull a “Thimble Theater to Popeye” transformation. Back in the 1920s and 1930s E.C. Segar had a strip called “Thimble Theater” that starred the Oyl family – Cole, Castor, Nana (nmed MUCH ater) and …Olive Oyl. On day they introduced a wizened one-eyed sailor named “Popeye”, and he took over the strip, he was so popular.
Monty, I knew Popeye, I loved Popeye. You, sir, are no Popeye.
So YOU say. For my money, that strip was taken over by the sublime J. Wellington Wimpy. Popeye was only in it to be outwitted in paying the hamburger tab.
“I believe I will have pickle, lettuce, and onion BOTH on my next hamburger.”
BTW: Popeye’s first words were something very close to “What does ya think I yam? A cowboy 'r som’thing?”. This is in response to Castor asking Popeye “Are YOU a sailor?”
Fenris (who has waaaay too many braincells devoted to this stuff)
To quote Popeye, “Sez You!” Did they change the name of the strip to “Wimpy”? Are the animated cartoons called “Wimpy”? Have hamburger-makers erected three statues to Wimpy the wat spinach-growers have erected statues to Popeye (see http://www.roadsideamerica.com )? Is “Popeye” a synonym for overcautious underachievement?
To tell the truth, even though the great E.C. Segar himself said that Wimpy was the outsmarting Intellectual of the series, I never really got that sense. Nero Wolfe he is not.
