2000 AD: The Ultimate Collection #131. Originally serialised in 2000 AD Progs 98-101, 103-115 & 144, 2000 AD Annuals 1980-1982 & 1984, and Starlord Annuals 1980-1981.
It’s February 1979. Ro-Busters, we hardly knew ye. This collection wraps up the last couple of arcs in the ongoing series (some more from this time were gathered earlier on in ABC Warriors: Volume Four), before delving into some deep cuts from the Annuals and Specials. Hammerstein and Ro-Jaws will return… earlier… in the future… but how do their final missions with the disaster squad of distinction hold up?
In many ways The Terra-Meks (1979) and The Fall and Rise of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein (1979) are barely Ro-Busters stories at all. The first only features Howard Quartz and Mek-Quake in supporting roles, and the second literally blows up the disaster squad format to have the bots on the run and falling in with robot revolutionaries. It’s typical Pat Mills, who takes over the main series again following a string of different writers – he loves to radically redirect a series at the drop of a hot.
It’s still great stuff though. The Terra-Meks is a surprisngly heartfelt and tragic short story of a lovable giant robot protecting its town from ruthless profiteers, and is a bit of a masterclass in packed comic storytelling across four episodes. It’s helped massively by Dave Gibbons being on art droid duties, as he’s rarely bettered with combining over-the-top sci-fi tech with character. Howard Quartz has always been basically a bad guy throughout the Ro-Busters run, but that’s put front and centre here as a nice set up for the big finale.
The Fall and Rise of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein lets Mills finally make the series what he wants, and properly set up future series ABC Warriors. Quartz goes full very-bad-boss and tries to blow up the bots for the insurance cash, so Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein go on the run and join up with robo-revolutionaries heading for a planet of safety away from the humes. Fighting authority and prejudice is always Mills’s go-to, and the brief moments of revolutionary tendancies across the series have always been fun, but here it becomes the point of the whole thing as the human treatment of robots is put front and centre. It’s a rollocking adventure that must have been pretty thrilling to read week-to-week at the time, and the art from Kevin O’Neill, Mick McMahon, and Mike Dorey works effectively as classic 2000 AD action comedy.
And with that Ro-Busters as a series is over – and far too early for my liking! While ABC Warriors has its moments and I like plenty of it, I actually wonder if Ro-Busters could have had a similar longevity? But that’s for a parallel universe, while here we get a bunch of one-shots from various Annuals and Specials. As with all of this type of material, it doesn’t hold up to a huge amount of scrutinty, although it was fun to have two from Alan Moore that are step above the usual fare!
A lot of my enjoyment of this series was covered in my post on Volume One, so I’ll wrap up this shorter post with a fond farewell to Ro-Jaws, Hammerstein, Mek-Quake and Co. They’d return in a variety of entertaining forms over subsequent decades, but as I turned the page on the final scene of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein literally walking (or rolling) into the sunset, I did wonder for a moment if they were ever better than in this classic pages?
Next time: The vampire bon vivant is back in Devlin Waugh: A Very Large Splash.
THRILLSHOTS! 
Well, I’d disagree about Alan Moore’s Annual stories being good- I feel like he missed the point of the series. I also apparently had a radically different interpretation of The Terra-Meks (I still loved it, the art especially, but I thought it was more about self-determination than corporate greed). I do agree that the series didn’t get enough time in 2000 AD though, even counting the stories from the fourth Warriors volume.
From what I hear, Pat got tired of the story and that’s why he closed things up. That’s partially what happened with the original series of the ABC Warriors, and why it took nearly 10 years before they got a new series (not counting the Nemesis appearances).
Thankfully, this wasn’t the end for them though. There have been a few new Ro-Busters stories in specials and FCBD issues within the last 10 years (I think this year’s Sci-Fi special is going to have a mashup with them)- always a positive. You know about the more recent Warriors stories with the Ro-Busters elements and the stuff in Savage, which is nice too. Ro-Jaws also was apparently a semi-regular part of the editorial pages in the 80’s (yay), and you probably know Mek-Quake is still a threat for malfunctioning art and script droids even today. Clearly the series had quite the impact.
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