I like to consider myself a pretty well-versed comics reader. My collection is mighty, with deluxe hardcovers and rows of longboxes, hand-stapled zines and ‘key’ issues that pre-date my own birth. I’m a voracious reader who does not draw lines or distinctions between the types of comics I consume, only concerning myself with the merit of its pages. “Is this for me?” “Is it good?” “How’s the art?” These are the most important questions I can ask about a comic. And yet, despite my best efforts, I can’t quite seem to read it all.
By ‘all,’ I don’t mean ‘all the comics.’ It’s more like ‘all the stuff I’ll like.’ There are plenty of comics in the world that I know I’ll enjoy. I see them every day, in the comic shop and on tumblr. They’re re-solicited every month in Previews and populate my Amazon recommendations. My mental checklist of comics I intend to read is mountainous and, in all honesty, more than a lifetime’s worth of effort. But, with the odds against me, I soldier on, consuming what I can where I can. Chipping away at that ever present list.
Today marks another moment in why-haven’t-I-read-this-sooner history, as I embarked upon my first ever reading of “The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot.” But I’m not beginning this adventure as any normal person would. Instead, I’m starting with the second issue in the run and letting my first real dive into the series be one that is out of order, and lacking in any sort of real context. Now, with most modern comics series, this would be an awful move, but this doesn’t seem to be like most series. I can’t say whether it’s my good instinct or just luck of the draw, but this is a comic that feels like it was created with an eye towards the adventure-of-the-week storytelling sensibilities of the silver age.
“The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot” #2 was published in August of ’95 by Dark Horse Comics. Part of the publisher’s Legend imprint, the series reunited artist Geof Darrow with writer Frank Miller, who had worked together a few years earlier on the series “Hard Boiled.” The saddle-stitched issue is oversized, probably the same dimensions as the Franco-Belgian comics albums Darrow clearly draws so much of his inspiration from. The issue is ad-free, with thirty three pages of comics that run right up to the back inside cover.
The first thing that struck me about “The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot” is Darrow’s art. I’ve been a fan of his for a while now, so I sort of knew what to expect from these pages, though I must admit to being caught off guard by their sheer jubilance. The pages are a succession of hyper-detailed, meticulously planned masterpieces that are packed with the sort of perspective, architecture and mechanical design that’d make just about any other cartoonist faint. The thing that’s most striking about this aspect of the Darrow’s art is that, no matter how many pages he’s got behind him, the guy simply will not slow down. Every street sign, billboard, pedestrian and vending machine are unique little projects in and of themselves. His cityscapes don’t look like one person came in and designed everything from top to bottom. Instead, there’s a very real, cobbled-together look to Darrow’s environments that I don’t think anyone else could accomplish. And all of this effort is for the stuff most people won’t even pay attention to! When it comes to the main attraction of the issue, The Big Guy, Darrow seems to have unleashed every one of his robot design ideas at once. The Big Guy is part classic Caddilac, part art deco skyscraper, and all technology that seems to have been built for an 80s future-action movie. He’s got all of these hatches and compartments that open up all over his body, revealing tangled nests of wires and electronics that are packed with everything needed for any situation. They seem to open from nowhere, as there are no visible seams or hinges, in exactly the location that they’d need to be in. The Big Guy is truly a marvel of modern robotics! A break through in tactical technology!
Continued belowBut my absolute favorite part about The Big Guy’s design? He’s got a god damn holster with a pistol. For all of his bombs, ammunition and secret-compartment lasers, he’s still strapped at the hip like the good American he is. The absurdity of it all is perfect and overwhelming.
On the writing side of things, we’ve got the man himself: Mr. Frank Miller, who came to this series after doing a string of ‘serious’ comics in the preceding years. He’d recently spent his time on stuff like “Martha Washington,” “Sin City” and “Daredevil,” and this comic reads a lot like a reaction to all of that. Not in a direct way, mind you. This isn’t a pastiche or satire on anything he’d previously done, but instead reads like a love letter to the silver age comics of his youth. Like he needed to do something that reminded him why it is he loves the medium. There’s an obvious humor here that I feel is usually a bit more buried in Miller’s work. He plays with dialogue in a way that’s evocative of whatever campy Superman story you’d like to cite, but uses it in a way that runs counter to so much of what Darrow is putting on the page. It’s like he’s penning a superhero story for kids while Darrow is doing everything he can to fly in the face of that.
Now, I don’t intent for any of that to sound like these two are working discordantly, because that’s a notion that couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, this issue reads as if the pair are creating an intentional juxtaposition between the intentionally overwrought dialogue and the all-out chaos of the art. There’s a sequence where The Big Guy realizes that the dino-monsters he’s battling are actually transformed humans, which means that he cannot bring himself to kill any of them. His heroic dialogue makes reference to the ‘anesthobullets’ and ‘non-toxic tranquility grenades’ he’s using against them, while the art paints a different picture entirely. As Darrow interprets the events of the day, it’s mass carnage and destruction. It’s clearly live ammo, which is evidenced by the panel after panel smattering of dino brains and guts. At one point, The Big Guy tears a building off of it’s foundation to drop on the marauding horde of mutants. All the while, he’s telling himself that not only have those inside jumped to safety, but that he’s also, “judged the exact angle and force of the impact [so] that not a single citizen-turned-miscreant suffers serious injury.” Now, let me tell you, no one jumped safely out of that building, and the angle and force of that impact left our robotic hero hip-deep in the dead bodies of the aforementioned miscreants.
So what does all of that mean? Is this an homage to the thinly-veiled, comics code friendly stories that sere so prevalent in the silver age? Or are we supposed to read this story as the tale of a delusional killing machine who’s unleashed on the world as a last-ditch defense against giant monsters and space aliens? Or, digging even deeper, is this an indictment of all of those quick-to-violence heroes of yesterday? Is this an homage that slyly crosses over into satire? Or maybe the satire is less about comics and more of a comment on how police brutality is beamed in the media? These are the sorts of questions that make this comic so fascinating to me. It reads to me as support for the accounts that Frank Miller is (or at least was) actually a pretty funny guy. It calls into question everything from “The Dark Knight Strikes Again” forward, making me want to reconsider these works with an eye towards the writer’s true intentions. But, that’s going to have to be a much larger topic for another day.
If it seems like this discussion is all Big Guy and no Rusty, it’s because that’s pretty much how this issue played out. Despite being the second issue of the series, this is a Big Guy solo adventure that predates the ‘and’ in “The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot.” Rusty makes a small appearance at the very end of the issue, as a part of the set up for the adventure to come in #3.
This is a comic that I’ve been aware of for a long while, despite my never having read it. Now, with just a piece of the adventure under my belt, I cannot wait to dive into this story in full. I knew that this was one of those comics that’d be up my alley, but it’s safe to say that what I read far exceeded my already high expectations. I really loved every page of this comic, and cannot recommend it enough. I’m certain that you can track this story down in a few different iterations, but the easiest to acquire would probably be the big ol’ hardcover Dark Horse released last year.
