Today, September 19th, is Talk Like A Pirate Day. Everyone loves pirates. And robots. And aliens. And breakdancing. You get all this and more with Here There Be Robots.

It begins with two aliens; Oscar is in command and Rob is his security officer. They are on a diplomatic mission (of sorts) to earth. As they settle into a stationary orbit, they play a human trivia boardgame. Suddenly, their ship is attacked by earth creatures. Sort of.

They crash into the building where the robots are planning their world takeover. There’s a little, tiny mishap with the landing gear and the earth is destroyed. Conveniently, they turn up hundreds of years earlier onboard a pirate ship - in the brig. Rob and Oscar explain it nicely in this comic. Thanks to Rob, they manage to escape the brig and the ship in full piratical disguise. And so their adventures begin.

Perhaps it’s the cartoon style, but the figures are not always drawn consistently in proportion and silhouette. However, after a second glance, you can usually tell who is who due to their costumes and other details. I mention that because it’s clear that someone on the Gregory & Gregory team can draw.

Also, aside from cover pieces, Here There Be Robots is done purely in black and white until you get to this comic. And then it goes back to black and white. The color helps the clarity of the comic significantly.

The black and white linework does fit the concept of Here There Be Robots nicely, though. There is also a tremendous amount of period detail to look at, which contributes to the historical/literary elements we expect from pirate stories. The spot blacks and gritty looking ink effects also add a filthy, filthy vibe to the comic. It’s a nice effect.

It complements the lightness of the comic. The dialog is funny and there is a theme of chaos with sudden plunges into doom. Fortunately, the aliens and robots are pretty hardy and they seem to find a way to keep going and entertain us.

I’m using a new way to assign rating stars. Here There Be Robots is a good example of a four star comic; it’s good and fine for what it does but not quite over the top. I’ve read it a number of times and I was entertained each time. Rating:

Here There Be Robots
http://randompiratecomics.net/webpages/herethereberobots/issue01_01.htm
by Jonah & Jeremy Gregory

Review by Delos Woodruff

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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You know, I like aliens as the protagonists of stories. And I like robots as the protagonists. And I even like pirates most of the time (I mean, really, what’s not to like about Johnny Depp and Errol Flynn? But I digress.). I also like all three categories as the antagonists of stories. I’m also a fan of time travel stories and we all know how much I love random pop culture references. What bothers me is when two or more of these things are thrown together just to be able to say “hey, kids, look! Robots! Pirates! Aliens! Time Travel! Random Family Guy-like pop culture references! All in one place!”

I hate to try to figure out the intentions of a creator – unless they tell you themselves in an interview why they did something a certain way, you can never really know (and don’t get me started on the whole sub-genre of literary analysis that says you can’t actually understand a work of fiction until you’ve ferreted out every possible worldly thing that influenced the author during the writing of the work. Bleh.). However, to me “Robots” feels like a mish-mosh of anything that could possibly lure a reader in, including more than one reference to the classic TV Show What’s Happening!!! (The answer, by the way, is Dwayne Nelson, not Rerun. Perhaps Oscar is reading a mis-printed Trivial Pursuit card.) The comic really does include everything but the kitchen sink. And given time, I’m sure that will turn up as a robot alongside the chest of drawers and pop machine.

There are some very nice pages, art-wise, like this doomsday scenario. And the art does seem to get smoother, less rushed, as the story progresses. The more recent pages seem to feature heavier, more defining, inkwork.

Overall, while the creators may be having fun tossing everything they can think of into each page, I wasn’t having fun reading along. To paraphrase The Doctor, your mileage may vary. For my own part, I’m going to have to give this two stars. It just didn’t pull me along. Rating:

Jonah and Jeremy Gregory’s “Here There Be Robots”
http://randompiratecomics.net/webpages/robots.htm
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno

(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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Grumpy warning Red is in effect. You might or might not be aware that sometimes I hardly review the actual comic at all. Sometimes I just grumble. You have been warned.

Jeremy and Jonah Gregory have a big idea contained within their comic strip Here There Be Robots. It is that if pirates can be hilariously funny and aliens can be cute and stupid and that evil robots could be even slightly amusing, then slapping all three together in the same strip is going to be a sure fire winner. After all, it’s three times the fun! Isn’t it?

I put a finger and thumb to my temples and squeeze gently. It’s not really that I don’t like it. It’s just that I’ve seen so much of it’s type. Quite enough to last me a lifetime. Part of me is reminded of some of the great underground comics of the sixties, seventies and even eighties (but no later) with all their wacky violence and irreverent humour, while another part is reminded of that time in the nineties when literally anything seemed able to get published with no more than a nod at common sense. I’d like to think more about Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, R Crumb and the rest, but here unfortunately I’m tending to drift off toward the vast number of Viz knockoffs in Britain at the end of the last century. They were trying so hard to be funny there was never much of a chance of even a chuckle surviving the pressure to sell.

Some of the reasons I’m prompted to think back to those awful awful days of badly drawn, badly written, black and white print comics are right here in front of you with the format of Here There Be Robots - the lack of colour, the complexity and compactness of the layouts, the tradional portrait page dimensions, the sheer determination to make ‘a comic’ whatever the cost and the desperate whackiness for whackiness’ sake. It’s that grim anti-nostalgia that is giving me a pain. There seems to be little or no attempt to adapt to the web, to the way the web works, the way it displays images, the way that colour is not a cost factor – it’s just another ‘old’ comic clumsily shoe-horned into a computer. Has nothing changed in the past twenty years? I could dig from my collection any small press anthology from 1990 onwards and this is precisely what you’d see. It wasn’t exactly cutting edge then, but it’s sheer boredom now. For me at any rate. I think I qualify as an adult now.

As you might imagine, all that really takes the shine off of this particular reading experience, but I still have to say that for what it is … it’s quite good! I have to admit that I really appreciated the photocopier / bomb gag in the first issue – perhaps because I’m sat just across the office from of the things all day at work. It’s ability to stretch time out in the way described is perfectly realised in the pay-off that results in our criminally whacky heroes and villains being plunged back through time to the days of ‘Yar’!

I could even appreciate the art, but really it’s the type of detailed madness that requires you to press your nose up to the paper to enjoy it – sadly there is no paper and the effect of all that detail is just glowing radioactive confusion. Bah, humbug!

After issue one, if you’re still reading, good luck to you. I simply haven’t got the time to waste. If you’ve never read this kind of thing before you’ll love it. If you have read this kind of thing before, please find something better to do with your time.

After that you’ll be surprised to learn I give it three stars. One for the good writing, one for the appropriately stylised and detailed art and the last one for being just what it is. If only the creators would take a step into the present and drop that dirty ‘print comic’ attitude they might have had a great webcomic on their hands. Webcomic? What’s one of those? I’m still not sure myself, but it ain’t as simple as a comic that’s on the web tha’s for sure!!

Rating:

Here There Be Robots
http://randompiratecomics.net/webpages/robots.htm
by Jeremy and Jonas Gregory
review by Mike Perridge
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)

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