ORIGINALLY POSTED ON COMICZONEAZ.com (website no longer active)
When I was a kid, ROBOCOP AND THE ULTRA POLICE was one of my favorite cartoons.
Granted, I had a LOT of favorite cartoons – Growing up in the mid-to-late 80s, the youngest part of my life basically consisted of cartoons and their toy tie-ins; I had dozens of action figures based on Transformers, Thundercats, Centurions, Silverhawks, The Real Ghostbusters, C.O.P.S., and more. But one of my favorite toys, amongst them all, was RoboCop.
ROBOCOP 2 came out in theatres shortly after ULTRA POLICE ended, and I remember watching it on TV several times. And, for a 1990 movie, it was about as badass as a movie was going to get – Far more hardcore than BATMAN had been in 1989, and way darker than the first TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. Robocop was the epitome of badass in my house, (at least, until TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY came out a year later).
And then ROBOCOP 3 happened, in 1993, followed by the ROBOCOP television series. And it was basically all downhill from there. A few years back, Dark Horse released FRANK MILLER’S ROBOCOP series, which was Miller’s version of the ROBOCOP 2 script (little-known fact: Frank Miller of Sin City and 300 fame penned the scripts for the first two Robocop films. Seriously!). And, if you didn’t have ROBOCOP 2 memorized, you’d have no idea what was going on in that comic. To say that it was bad would be giving bad comics a poor name.
So, I went into this version of Robocop, hopeful. I didn’t expect it to be great, but I think there’s still some potential to be had with Robocop and his world.
To start off, Dynamite’s comic takes place after the events of the first movie – You can tell, because there’s a small parenthetical comment inside the front cover that tells you so.
The art is serviceable. The characters all look like the actors who played them in the first film, but is otherwise kind of standard comic art from 12 years ago. The coloring is a bit too high-contrast for my tastes. But there’s nothing WRONG with it. It just doesn’t jive with me. And it’s extremely bloody, for no reason other than just because. Like it’s supposed to be shocking, which would’ve been great for a pre-1992 comic.
And the story… is ROBOCOP 2 without Cain or the “Nuke” drug. Everybody swears all over the place (Even Robocop curses), and it’s just… not original.
So what we’re left with is a comic that’s supposed to take place between the first two movies, that’s basically the same plot as the second movie that’s unnecessarily gory and has vulgarities thrown in for the sake of throwing in vulgarities.
It’s like Dynamite got the Robocop license and handed it to some random creators and said, “go.” There’s nothing original, here, and the people working on it clearly don’t have the same care for the characters that any of its fans do.
I can’t really recommend this comic to anybody, save Robocop’s blind loyalists. Which is unfortunate, because I was really looking forward to this being good. And now I’m not sure Robocop can be good, ever again.