Publisher: 2000 AD
Writers: Pat Mills, Chris Lowder, Bill Henry, V Gross
Artists: Carlos Pino, Jose Luis Ferrer, Dave Gibbons, Kevin O’Neil, Ian Kennedy, Mike Dorey
Release date: 8 October 2015
Price: £25.00

Long before Matt Groening’s Futurama stalwart, Bender was offering up chunks of tiny metal derrière, there was Ro-Jaws, Hammerstein, the homicidal but simple minded Mek-Quake, working together as the organisation known as Ro-Busters. Not quite an interplanetary delivery service but not necessarily a million miles away either.

Ro-Busters will shortly be returning to its second home, 2000 AD, and this first volume is a timely reminder of those early adventures of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein and co. A hardback treatment too, suggesting a product of devotion and appreciation from a publisher not intent on anything but the best for this more than worthy strip; to gild this particular lily, the original colour pages are reproduced too.

Along with Strontium Dog, Ro-Busters was, the only other strip from IPC’s second foray into science fiction anthology – the short-lived, prestige format comic book, Starlord – to survive and flourish in the pages of 2000 AD. Those Starlord stories are collected in this volume and sit well against the 2000 AD ones.

For some, it would be easy to dismiss Ro-Busters as Thunderbirds with robots, as opposed to puppets. But the similarities end there. No strings attached to the Ro-Busters. And there was always going to be a lot more than just ‘international rescue’ going on with Ro-Busters. Writers like Pat Mills (Judge Dredd, Slaine) were never going to be confined by audience expectations.

Back in 1978, flipping through the first Issue of Starlord, the scope and size of Carlos Pino’s artwork stopped me in my tracks and pulled me in. Re-reading the stories now, that feeling comes back. Not nostalgia, which I hate anyway and it’s nowhere near as good as it used to be. Someone once told me it does not matter if something is new or old, all that matters, in the end, is whether it is good enough. Ro-Busters fits that bill then.

Later Ro-Busters stories would see Carlos Pino teaming up with Watchman artist Dave Gibbons, for added impact. Ro-Busters would never be short of attention-grabbing artwork; the expertly rendered lines of Ian Kennedy would transform the page for Ro-Busters yet again.

Kevin O’Neil, (Nemesis the Warlock, Marshall Law and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) as, Pat Mill’s points out in his introduction to Ro-Busters: The Complete Nuts and Bolts Vol.1, designed and developed the characters for Ro-Busters and appears in volume one teamed up for art duties with Mike Dorey and Dave Gibbons.

O’Neil’s eventual return to helm the artwork on Ro-Busters, would be, in many, many ways, seismic. But that is the stuff a much hoped for Ro-Busters Vol. 2, would most certainly be made of.

But for now relish in Ro-Busters: The Complete Nuts and Bolts Vol.1. Robotics doesn’t get better than this. And if you want to argue that point, my overly Star Wars focused fanboy/girl, meet my little friend, Mek-Quake.

 

Reviewer: Steve Hooker