Greetings Loyal Airmen. Let’s start with a question this week. Who doesn’t love robots? The Air Chief honestly doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t love those mechanical beings that have fired our imagination from the earliest science fiction stories to wonders of the first silent films.

From the weirdly garbed actor in the silent film above to Republic’s clunky threatening metal monster that appeared in several of their serials to include King of the Rocketmen and The Mysterious Doctor Satan, we’ve all been wowed by these artificial beings. It didn’t matter if they were good or bad, they were just cool. So you can imagine our delight when asked to be a guest at this years Comic Fest in Denver: April 20th to 22nd. The theme of the show this year is ROBOTS IN COMICS. Wanting to do our home work, we went on-line to find a few oldies in this vein.

BOZO THE ROBOT was pretty much the Iron Man of his day, i.e. his inventor creator rode along inside his metal chassis controlling his movements. One can only imagine all the other such bizarre heroes populated these golden age classics.

The Air Chief personally recalls with much fondness the 60s DOOM PATROL from DC Comics with Cliff Steele, the man whose brain was transplanted into a robot body thus becoming ROBOTMAN.  Then while doing this search, we tripped over a much earlier version of the exact same character and realized “our” ROBOTMAN was an actual reboot of this earlier version. Wow.

In one form or another, all with insanely odd origins, robots have proliferated comics pages. Who could ever forget the Transformers, those “heroes in disguise” from another world. From a hot toy-line to Marvel popularity and then ultimately scores of blockbuster movies.

And speaking of such, one of our earliest career gigs was writing the TERMINATOR series for Now Comics, based on yet another Hollywood sci-fi cinematic winner. It is for this series that we were invited to the con. We wasted no time in saying, “Yes.”  Thank you Rio Herrera. Then very recently we discovered that on the Saturday, April 21st, we will be moderating the GUESTS PANEL, sharing the table with three other very established comics creators, they being artists…and all having dealt with one form of robots or another.

Bob Hall worked on one of our favorite comics, ROM – SPACEKNIGHT, another big selling toy turned into a fun Marvel Comic.

Gordon Purcell who drew many DC Star Trek titles including Next Generation where he got to draw everyone’s favorite android officer, DATA.

And finally we have Arizona based Tone Rodriguez who, while drawing the comic adaptation of the cartoon series FUTURAMA, has gotten to draw perhaps the sassiest, wise-cracking robot of them all, BENDER.

As you can see, with this line up and amount of experience, this is going to shape up to be one hell of a fun panel discussion. We truly hope any of you Loyal Airmen in the Denver area on those dates, will make plans to come to this great show and join us. We’re going to have tons of robotic fun.

Ron – Over & Out!