MEGA ROBO BROS Q+A: PART 2

You had (more) questions! I have (some)(more) answers!

It’s time for another Mega Robo Bros Q&A! Because despite my previous best attempts to answer all your questions, you… HAD MORE? But before we start, I just wanted to offer the following quick Philosophical Disclaimer.

Several of the questions this time kind of take the form of asking for more information about Alex and Freddy, and while I will happily attempt to answer them I think it’s important to remember that any comic is an act of collaboration between the creator and the reader. I do my best on the page to get across my idea of who these characters are. But, equally important as what I put on the page is what the person reading it takes and interprets from it. As such, anything I haven’t put on the page is entirely fair game for the reader to fill in and speculate and make up their own version around. If there’s something I never got round to exploring about Alex and Freddy in the comic, or chose not to explore, or deliberately withheld, then the answers to those questions exist in a state of narrative quantum indeterminacy and are absolutely yours to answer as much as mine.

Now admittedly I have spent a lot of time thinking about these characters over the years - so much so in fact that I am SLIGHTLY worried about how much my answers here will reveal about the workings of my brain - and I’m happy to share my ‘in MY head’ thoughts about them here if people are interested. But please remember that they are only that, my thoughts, and you are entirely free to ignore or replace them with your own versions as you please.

Okay! Enough hedging, let’s A some Qs!

audennix5 on Instagram ASKS: what genres of music do Alex and Freddy like? and who are their fav artists?

So bearing in mind my Philosophical Disclaimer above: well firstly, a lot of what they like and listen to, you or I probably wouldn’t have heard of, because it is Future Music from The Future. But I think Alex in particular probably has a taste for the classics and somehow, possibly through their Dad’s collection of THEIR dad’s old LPs, has turned into a bit of a nerd for jazz. Specifically like 50s / 60s, Blue Note records - Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, that kind of stuff. I think he’s just kind of fascinated by it, plus it has the bonus that no-one else at school has ever heard of or would remotely be caught dead listening to this kind of thing, which makes it kind of private and safe world, which for Alex is Very Important.

Freddy likes whatever insanely catchy annoying pop song everyone in his class is currently obsessed with, and tends to sing them at Alex over and over and over until VIOLENCE ENSUES.

Yiwoon Neoh ASKS: Are either Nita or Michael only children in their families? Because it would've been fun to see Alex and Freddy have human relatives asides from their parents or grandparents

Yes! I never got round to it in the story but in my head Nita has a brother and a sister, who each have a couple of kids of their own. They live all over the place though, it’s a whole family of super over-achievers having absurdly high-powered careers in different parts of the globe. So while Alex and Freddy have cousins - I think there’s one boy in particular who’s close to Alex’s age who they get on with well - they just don’t see each other very often. It WOULD have been fun to see though! I’m sorry we never got to it!

abbyjss ASKS: Toby wants to know if Alex is autistic because he thinks he's very like Alex. Although maybe that's edging towards realms of robotics philosophy!

Excellent question, and I hope it is clear by this point that as a general rule I have no problem edging towards realms of robotic philosophy. I just want to refer one more time to my load-bearing Philosophical Disclaimer above before diving into trying to answer this one.

I personally hesitate to describe Alex as autistic - partly because I am a pedantic nerd and not sure the word technically applies (Alex is a robot, robot brains are built out of different stuff), and partly because I am in no way qualified to offer diagnoses, but mostly because I am not trying to trivialise anything, to claim experiences that are not my own, to tell anyone else’s story for them.

I DO know that Alex has traits and behaviours that may be very familiar to a lot of readers with experience of autism, and I know how much Alex resonates as a character for some autistic readers. That means a huge amount to me, in ways I struggle to adequately express.

I also think that because of the way Alex’s behaviours are directed, and because of the sheer exhausting amount of effort they put into masking and controlling those behaviours while at school, Alex is exactly the kind of kid where an autism diagnosis might be missed until a lot later in life.

Sorry, was a long and hedge-y answer, and I don’t know how satisfying it will be to Toby who asked it. Toby: yes. If you think so, then yes.

Yiwoon Neoh also ASKS: What are the references/inspiration behind/for Alex and Freddy's new R.A.I.D. uniforms as seen in Mega Robo Revolution/Books 6 and 7?

I just felt like a change! It was always VERY EXCITING to me when the X-Men got new uniforms, it felt like a moment in the story to give it that refresh, and I wanted to give them a slightly more ‘superhero—y feel. The original uniforms had very police / military vibes and I wanted to change it up a bit for a look which is… well, still militaristic, but with a slightly different flavour.

Simon K Jones ASKS: How many of the books have appeared in the Phoenix as individual issues? Do the stories always debut in the magazine before going into the books?

Yep, all the stories appear in the Phoenix before becoming books; the only exception being some new scenes here and there which I add at the book stage to help the material work better in the book format - linking scenes, recaps, and a bunch of new short strips etc to go in the back of the books. But the bulk of the stories have all appeared in the Phoenix originally.

Not all stories from the Phoenix make it to book form though! There are lots of stories, from various ‘phases’ of the comic, that we just haven’t been able to find room for when putting the books together. These range from fun little 1-pagers from the early days of the strip to a great long 30-odd page story where they went to the seaside and fought an Evil Robot Circus which I absolutely loved but which we just can’t seem to find a place for in the books.

Myself and my editor on the books, Anthony Hinton, both put a lot of thought and effort into sequencing and curation and the overall reading experience of the books. There are places where we’ll have material we really love but if it isn’t going to work quite right for the overall flow of the books, sadly sometimes we have to lose it. It’s not much overall though. I’d say… 80-90% of all the Mega Robo Bros stories I’ve ever drawn will exist in these books by the time we’re done?

With Book 6 - CARNIVAL CRISIS, out this summer - we move to stuff that was much more written and conceived for the graphic novel format, and then serialised in the comic, rather than the other way round. Actually, it’s slightly before that - one of the chapters of NEXT LEVEL marks the point we switched from making comics that would be converted into graphic novels to graphic novels that would be serialised as comics. FUN GAME, see if you can tell which one!

Katherine ASKS: so my next Mega Robo Question - if you hugged either of them would they be hard and metallic or would they be made of special squishy material?

You know what, I always just figured they were made of regular hard metallic metal, but in a world of Cellular Robotic Nanotechnology, who knows? Maybe ‘squishy metal’ is a thing? I’ll let this one live in the grey area of Reader Interpretation.

For what it’s worth, in my head, it would be like hugging a kid who is all skinny and bony and has incredibly sharp elbows and is always jerking around and accidentally headbutting you in the face… and yet somehow gives the best hugs in the universe anyway.

Okay! That is enough questions and answers for now! I hope that was of interest. If people have YET MORE questions maybe we’ll do another someday!

WHILE I’M HERE

MEGA ROBO BROS: NEXT LEVEL is out now - if you haven’t got a copy yet, it is available from all good bookshops! And if you HAVE, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads or one of those kind of places, I am assured it helps a lot!

Also I am FAR TOO BUSY playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to even consider drawing any comics about it (it is INCREDIBLE, oh my GOD). But if you would like to read some comics I drew about it’s predecessor Breath of the Wild, you can do so here!