The Mega Robo Weekly #1
Drawings By Children, Real And Imaginary
Hello, dear readers! I shared the first of these little Mega Robo Bros mini-comics in last week’s newsletter, and I thought we could make it a weekly thing!
This first batch of strips are from Power Up, the first of the new-format MRB books, where they sit in the back of the book as part of our suite of Awesome Fun Bonus Stuff (and, honestly, putting these bits together has been one of the great joys of these books for me).
These first few actually appeared before, a while back, in the Phoenix and in a slightly different form. See if you can spot the difference…
…yes, in those original versions I thought it would be fun to achieve the ‘drawn by a child’ effect by enlisting an ACTUAL CHILD as collaborator, and got my then-young son to draw them with felt tips from my roughs.
Honestly I really like those original versions; they have a lot of character, and definitely feel more Authentically Kid-Made. However, I am prepared to concede that in terms of clarity and legibility, they were perhaps a little TOO authentic? Hence my re-working them to appear in the books.
The main problem with using child labour to draw your comics, though (apart from, y’know, legality, and I feel I should point out I DID pay him) is that of consistency. As it became clear that Freddy’s drawings were going to be an ongoing part of the strip, I realised that I needed to find a way of drawing in ‘Freddy Mode’ that I could produce on demand and keep vaguely consistent, and also that wouldn’t start complaining about the workload and go off to play Minecraft instead.
One of the wild things about Mega Robo Bros, looking back, is that in the time I’ve been working on it my son has gone pretty much from a toddler to a teenager and, basically, Freddy has not. (I can’t draw as fast as real life moves, what can I say.) So his drawing style needed to stay pretty much consistent - not least because it kind of ended up being the basis for an entire series of spin-off novels…
…about which, more next time!
HEAR ME TALK ABOUT STUFF
On the subject of Mega Robo Bros, and kids drawings, I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Lucy Starbuck Braidley for her new podcast Comic Boom, and we talked about THOSE VERY THINGS. There’s stuff about using comics in education and all that kind of thing, plus a whole lot of SURPRISINGLY REVEALING MEGA ROBO BROS CHAT, if that is your kind of thing! Do go have a listen, and indeed subscribe to the podcast as it sounds like Lucy is going to have all kinds of fun comics stuff coming up on there!
VOTE FOR ME IN STUFF
OH HEY, I believe voting in the Laugh Out Loud Book Awards 2023 is still open, so you there is literally nothing stopping you from going and voting for me and Freddy VS School in the Best Funny Book For Ages 9-12 category! From voting RIGHT NOW!
Ahem. Thank you.
ROBOT OF THE WEEK
I thought one extra thing I could do here was share a weekly look into my character design files, sharing a different robot every week! Or maybe even, occasionally, character who AREN’T robots? LOL AS IF THAT EVER EVEN HAPPENS.
This guy is one of the HOST of new robots I had to design for MRB Book 6 - which I am just in the midst of putting the book version of together; I wanted a couple of imposing and military-looking robots to serve as [SPOILERS]’ guards / henchmen when Alex and Freddy discover him in the [SPOILERS SPOILERS] of [SPOILERS].
(Sorry, I know this has all been in the Phoenix already, but I know some people read at book pace and I don’t want to ruin any of the fun surprises.)
Anyway, there’s not too much to say about this guy other than that I thought he LOOKED COOL and frankly wish I’d given him a bit more stuff to do. Increasingly, ‘actually fitting in all the cool robots’ is one of the big challenges of Mega Robo Bros.
Okay, enjoy! See you back here next week for, guess what, MORE ROBOTS.