Atomic Robo Offering Its First Volume For Free This Week

Atomic Robo is one of the best long-running indie comics you’ve never read — unless you have been reading it, in which case you don’t need me to vouch for it.

Creators Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener have completed nine volumes of Atomic Robo so far, chronicling the adventures of the titular robot as he’s faced off against Nazis, monsters, a talking dinosaur and the ghost of Thomas Edison. I didn’t make any of that up.

In his recent “State of the Robo” blog post, Clevinger elaborated on the plans to take Atomic Robo digital first, which will begin with the tenth volume due later this year. In the meantime, the duo is giving all comics fans a pretty amazing present, making all of the previous volumes available for free online. It isn’t happening all at one, but it is kicking off this week, as Volume 1: Atomic Robo and the Fightin’ Scientists of Tesladyne will be downloaded to atomic-robo.com on January 21. After that the remaining eight volumes will hit the site, with another issue added every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Going forward, every brand new issue of Atomic Robo will debut on the web. As Clevinger puts it, ” The webcomic is the new issue and it’s free.”

How will Clevinger and Wegener afford things like food and shelter? The comic will still be available in trades directly from the creators and (probably) from comic shops as well. New issues are also being supported by a Patreon campaign, where backers will get stuff like sneak peeks at concept art, access to an exclusive livestream and other goodies. They’ll also continue selling digital comics the old-fashioned way, if Comixology can be called old-fashioned, and offer more Robo merchandise.

So you might want to think about throwing a few dollars their way via one of those methods, but trust me when I say that getting the first nine volumes online for free is an amazing value that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere in comics. Wednesdays are always big for us comics fans, but Mondays and Fridays are about to get good too.

(via Comics Alliance)

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