Written and drawn by Neill Cameron

Power Up

In the London of the near future, Alex and Freddy are two brothers who love messing with each other almost as much as they love each other. Oh also they’re robots. And fight crime.

The Phoenix is a fantastic weekly comic collecting stories for 7 to 14 year olds and Mega Robo Bros is one of the all-time greats. Neill Cameron’s epic has now been collected in a series of pleasingly chunky and very affordable collections and this is the first one. We’ll be looking at all of them but the series hits the ground running here with a glorious collection of all out-pulp action.

In the eight chapters collected here we meet Alex and Freddy, their mum and dad and the world they live in. It’s a cheerful place, one full of flying buses and taxis and where robots live and work side by side with humans. The boys’ parents are humans, and Cameron cleverly uses this to touch on the idea of blended families and adoption. Alex, the older boy, is a gentle, kind, sad kid who has memories of something he’s rather not. Freddy is younger, entirely without impulse control and loves everyone purely and completely. They’re accepted in the same way all kids are accepted, which is not at all, and Cameron does his best work here colliding Freddy’s good nature with the growing sense that robots aren’t quite as accepted as he thinks. An early story has him rescue three defective funfair robots and that’s how the boys get a triceratops that barks like a dog, a monkey that only speaks French and a penguin philosopher. It’s a really, really fun series.

The more dramatic elements come to the fore later, as the boys begin to encounter Robot 23, a tuxedo-wearing super criminal who may be part of the family. That leads to both a wonderful clash with enormous robotic Scots Guards and an ending which sets up a new status quo, explores the boy’s friendship and sets up a major new status quo.

This is a great start to a great series. Action packed, big hearted and enormous fun. 10/10

 

Double Threat

The boys settle in a school, and work, make friends and cause trouble.

After the pedal to the metal first volume, this shifts gear into what plays like a series of almost slice of life stories. They work in that context too, with Alex and Freddy having time to become a double act as brothers as well as heroes. Freddy is a single synapse personality, someone who has no impulse control and none of the care weighing his older brother down. Cameron writes him perfectly, simultaneously a massively annoying younger brother and an adorable little guy.

The clash between his elemental childhood and his responsibilities is a big part of this issue, as the brothers are confronted with both sides of how robots are treated in their world. An early story has them and Susie Nichols, their handler, work a case in the sewers. They follow a drillbot (one of the first of Cameron’s many glorious big robots doing big things) and find someone who’s lived in the sewers, hoarding what they think are robots that are alive. Susie telling her, as gently as possible, that they aren’t is one of the kindest moments in the series. I love too that Cameron doesn’t have them bring the hoarder in from the cold. It makes the world feel more untidy and well realised and human. Doubly so given the reveal at the end of this plot that the hoarder has found a large, badly damaged robot who reacts very badly to the RAID logo…

His name is Wolfram and he becomes a major part of the closing story. The boys, their celebrity starting to rise, attend the London Robot Expo. Cameron does family comedy very well and the two of them and their parents navigating the show is very sweet. But Cameron’s best work is mixing sweet and darkness, and the story closes with Wolfram arriving and attacking RAID intent on revenge. The fight escalates past the knockabout fun of the first volume into something more heated very quickly, and Cameron uses that to push the characters and plot forward. As the book closes, the boys have levelled up in power, Wolfram has been fought to a standstill, everyone has questions and it’s clear the boys’ mum isn’t telling them everything.

It’s a great hook and you’ll want to go straight onto the next volume. I did. 8/10

 

Robot Revenge

Alex and Freddy face an old foe with an upgrade and the most terrifying thing they could imagine: sides in team sports at school.

I’m being a little facetious here, but it’s to highlight the genius of what Cameron does in these books. Alex and Freddy are essentially unkillable robots with incredible powers who work as part time spies. But they’re also teenagers, and the genius of this volume is the way Cameron explores both.

The robot side is where all the action is and Cameron has done something very clever this volume, which builds on everything before it. The fights are starting to have an edge to them. Not one of performative brutality or any of the other mistakes a thousand ‘edgy’ superhero comics have made but rather, stakes. The boys are just that, boys, and there’s a growing sense of not just peril but consequence. Alex especially is becoming painfully aware of wide the split is between the upbringing they’ve been given and the nature of their physical forms. The robot plot here embodies and explores that, with the boys clashing once again with mysterious larger robot, Wolfram. Wolfram is scarred, eloquent, furious, the Magneto to their X-Men. He’s also family, and the volume finishes with those two elements combining to set up that rare beast: a flashback next volume that moves the plot along.

But the story I can’t stop thinking about this time is the smaller scale one. A clash with bigoted classmates about whether Alex should be ‘allowed’ to play football starts as an exploration of bigotry and turns into one of identity. Alex experiments with identifying as a girl, complete with brilliant new pink paint scheme. There’s no definite conclusion to their exploration, because Cameron is way too clever a writer for that. Instead, Alex finds something in that gap between upbringing and creation, identity, and self. Empowerment of a sort they don’t need a chest reactor for. It’s a great story in a great volume and it sets up a very humane lens to view the next few volumes through.

It’s subtle, clever, kind and funny and the rest of the series is just as good. 10/10

 

Meltdown

We discover Wolfram’s past, as it crashes into the present.

The fourth volume of the series gives us a neatly paced reveal on Wolfram that changes everything we know so far and does so through the lens of the boys’ parents. In the long-awaited flashback, we meet Doctor Nita Sharma and Michael Mokeme, the future mum and dad of Alex and Freddy. Nita works with the splendidly named Doctor Roboticus as part of a team pushing the edge of robotic technology while Michael is a freelance science journalist sent to cover their work. But the seeds of tragedy are here too, in the clash between the robots’ need for empathy and Roboticus’ refusal to accept that the world is anything other than logical. A hopeful future is set up, explored and then, in one remarkable beat, damaged forever. Wolfram is faced with an impossible choice, and does something very human. There’s no right answer and as the genre of the story shifts forever we understand why Nita and Michael have been so cautious about telling the boys the truth. This is where the Magneto comparison comes in; Wolfram isn’t right. But he’s not wrong either.

There’s a real Gerry Anderson feel to Wolfram’s team, brightly coloured, reassuring robots doing the best they can, and it makes their failure all the more heartbreaking. It also parallels Alex and Freddy’s differing attitudes towards their powers and responsibilities in the present day. In turn that drops an escalating division in place between the siblings. Freddy is young, sweet, completely irresponsible. Alex is older, sadder, angrier and prepared to pay any cost for his family. This volume, he does and the lasting consequence of violence and Wolfram’s terrible dilemma unfold in the present as Nita and Michael are again dragged into the consequences of Roboticus’ choices.

This is as big as the series has been to date, Wolfram attacking a global warming repair facility, threatening Michael and leaving Alex with no choice but one as awful as the one that changed him forever. It’s a heavy moment played from the characters up, and it works fantastically well. The boys, their parents, Susie and Wolfram all pay a heavy price and one that will define future volumes even as, just, the day is saved again.

Subtle and kind, action packed and complex this volume feels like the heart of the series and a step change into the second act. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

Find Neill here:

https://www.neillcameron.com/

and The Phoenix here:

https://thephoenixcomic.co.uk/