2000 AD: The Ultimate Collection #130. Originally serialised in Starlord #1-22, 2000 AD Progs 86-87 & Starlord Summer Special 1978.

It’s May 1978. I’ve covered most of the decades-long run of ABC Warriors now, and with the best will in the world towards the end it lost a lot of the anarchic fun it started out with. But going back to Ro-Busters, the series that started it all off, is best summed up with that single word – fun.

Ro-Busters started off life in Starlord, the 2000 AD spin-off that made it 22 issues before being folded back into its parent publication. It’s an obvious standout from that brief title, taking the basic premise of Gerry Anderson’s puppet action series Thunderbirds and adding a chaotic energy, rampant capitalism, and a very cheeky sense of humour. Both International Rescue and Ro-Busters might be saving the unfortunate from large-scale disasters, but only Ro-Busters are mercilessly following up the invoice while its robot crew consider revolution against the whole blasted human race.

These early years for 2000 AD (including Starlord) are bold and brash, and a delight to return to after more subdued and polished (but still great) modern approaches to comics storytelling. Robots were a handy go-to, and writer Pat Mills and artist Kevin O’Neill do a brilliant job creating instantly engaging and hilarious mechanical characters (O’Neill gets the design credit, but no actual artwork in this collection). Ro-Jaws, the sewage bot with the malfunctioning obedience circuit, and Mek-Quake, a barely intelligent giant eager to do the “big jobs” on his robot brethren, are immediate standouts. Ex-war droid Hammerstein also makes his debut here, but he’s very much the straight man to Ro-Jaws’s comedy stylings.

It’s Pat Mills on creator duties (with writing also from Chris Lowder and V. Gross, a pseudonym I assume), so there’s still plenty of anti-authoritarian attitudes to play around with. Underlying each rescue mission is the appalling treatment of robots by humans, and barely disguised revolutionary tendencies from many of the robots (Ro-Jaws in particular). Stories like The Ritz Space Hotel (1978) bring this to the fore as rebellion is fomented and the Ro-Busters robots are given plenty of good reasons to join in! Mills will make the questioning of authority his raison d’etre across decades of 2000 AD, but I wonder if it’s most effective here in the early days when it’s an edgy undercurrent beneath humourous action adventure. It’s early days for the Prog, which means there are some parts that are unfortunate to look back on today. The lack of any decent roles for women, and some blatant racial stereotyping, are all present and correct.

Starlord was able to draw on some great 2000 AD talent in the art department, so we get some classic 70s black and white linework (as well as some outstandingly garish colour spreads!). Carlos Pino does the bulk of the stories collected here, and nails the disaster set pieces as well as the over-the-top robotic characters. Dave Gibbons is probably the standout with a handful of episodes to his name, as he’s really the go-to for this kind of comedy action atmosphere. Old-school great Ian Kennedy is also featured, so really it’s hard to find a page here that isn’t entertaining and well done.

Ro-busters is a real success story for the 2000 AD stable, and we even get the first two-parter in the Prog itself to demonstrate the series was able to make it past the merger barrier. It would lead to a much longer-running series, ABC Warriors, and lived beyond it’s relatively short early run. But we still have a Volume Two to go, so back here in a few weeks or you’ll need to report to Mek-Quake for destruction!

Next time: Post-apocalyptic magical shenanigans with Revere.