Shmobots

Boom! Studios burst onto the scene in 2005, offering an independent venue for veteran writers and a launching pad for potential franchises. Recently, the company announced a licensing deal with Disney to publish comics based on Pixar movies. Sadly, Shmobots ($14.99), the first original graphic novel published by the company, is more of a bust than a boom.

The titular robots were supposed to serve as revolutionary manual labor for an unnamed city. But thanks to bureaucracy and cutting of corners, the end result is a class of “Shmobots,” who are incompetent embarrassments. Three of these Shmobots take center stage (four if you count Clanky the mechanized mutt): surly Rusty, nebbishy 69.5, and Eyeballs, a robot with a chest covered in eyeballs, who begins and ends each sentence with “Eyeballs.” They room with Miles, a Shmobot in his own right, even if he’s made up of flesh and blood. Together, these Shmobots and Miles wander through life, scrounging for money, working on their band, and generally slacking through the book.

It’s not as if underachieving robots make for a bad story idea. As a comedy, a lot of the water has already been drained from the pool, so there isn’t much of an emphasis on having an underclass despised by humans. However, there are few real laughs courtesy of writer Adam Rifkin. Subplots include a wife cheating on her husband with a Shmobot and an unknown assailant hunting down Shmobots; while they do divert readers from the main characters, they don’t converge until near the end. If there’s a saving grace, it’s the commercials and advertisements that pop up throughout the story for stuff like “Weaselroni” and “Egg Salad King.” Also in this particular world, there’s an entire channel devoted to kittens. Watching the little furballs “act” in sci-fi and epics is fun to read. With that and the slight retro feel of the city, Les Toil does perk up the book a little bit, even if it’s not enough.

While Shmobots isn’t as ill-conceived as 69.5's movie ideas – “The Diary Of Anne Frankenstein,” for instance – the actual product leaves much to be desired.

-Jason Borelli