Word: robots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Television programs of the 80s touched the heart. From Vicki, everyone's favorite daughter-robot from "Small Wonder," to the dim but lovable Rose Nylon from "Golden Girls," to the naive yet shrewd Balki Bartokomous from "Perfect Strangers," the characters of touchy-feely 80s sitcoms were remarkably diverse. But were their shows as versatile? Pairings of several of the decade's television masterpieces may force American cultural scholars and historians to dub the period the "Imitation...
Instead, the idiosyncratic universe of "Scud" is generated out of a bizarre fusion of selected elements of the popular culture of the last decade or so: action movies, popular music, noir films, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, Japanese robot cartoons. The resonances evoke the increasingly trendy ideas of a sort of "geek chic," based on the artifacts of mainstream male teenage culture of the 1980s and early 90s, overlaid with a technophilic edge: it's a world born out of John Woo movies, computer hacking and the fandom of comic books themselves. It's a universe in which attitude is everything...
...premise of the "Scud" series itself is typical of the comic: delightfully simple yet utterly absurd. In the hyper-violent, super-capitalistic universe of the future, a corporation called ScudCo manufactures "disposable assassins": three coins deposited in a vending machine will get you a robot designed to be the perfect killer, which will demolish your enemy and then self-destruct as soon as it's accomplished its mission (planned obsolescence, after all, is what makes consumer culture go). Our hero is a typical Scud robot assassin, bought by a middle manager who needs to get rid of a hideous mutant...
...things don't work out the way they're supposed to: When our Scud robot takes a break from the first issue's cinematically staged chase-and-shoot sequence to wash monster blood off his hands in the men's john...well, he happens to catch a glimpse in the mirror of his own back--complete with a label warning that he'll blow up the moment his assigned target is destroyed. Our Scud has an epiphany, realizes that he doesn't want to die and settles for merely damaging Jeff and stowing her safely in the emergency facilities...
Because when it's taken on its own terms, of course, Schrab's ridiculous fusion of machismo, humor and popular culture works. And it certainly does generate a lot of attitude. Scud himself realizes this in one of his profounder moments. Meditating that he's one robot protagonist who's never wanted to be a human being, he comes to the conclusion that he should enjoy being what he is. Summing up the central aesthetic of the comic, Scud proclaims, "It's cool to be a robot...