AlphaBots: K is for K-9

This week's AlphaBots drawing is sure to tug at the nostalgic sentiments of some. And he is a faithful, charming, and useful robot by anyone's estimate.

As I have mentioned before, I was never a huge devotee of Doctor Who myself, though I did watch it when I could for a little while when I was in junior high. I even read one paperback novelization of a story arc on a trip to my grandmother's house.

The local PBS station was broadcasting episodes with the Tom Baker incarnation of the Doctor, and I had a hand-me-down TV in my bedroom that barely picked the station up. I consequently think of Doctor Who as a secret, almost underground show, half-masked in the snow of bad reception. I know that's not the way most people received it.

On reflection, though, I realize that those weird, low-budget shows were one of the first cultural products that I found entirely on my own. I don't know whether I even talked to people about it. If someone told me I'd dreamed or hallucinated the whole business, I'd almost believe it.

So, anyway, I remember K-9 with a sort of cobwebbed fondness, but he's not a major part of my contemporary situation like some robots.


(P.S. I actually considered, briefly, doing this other robot, and I'm glad someone else did it better than I could have.)

Alphabots: J is for Jimmy the Robot

I'm not wild about my drawing for this week's Alphabots, but I know I don't really have time to try again. And it's a shame, because I really had wanted to do a nice tribute this time around.

There's been a lot of watching The Aquabats! Supershow in our house lately, because my little son really loves it. And to tell the truth, I like it a lot, too. We sing the theme song to each other at least once a day. (Watch that theme song, and tell me you're not glad that you can watch the Supershow on Netflix streaming.)

I think I've seen every episode a dozen or more times—enough that I can tell you when to look for the secret guy in a fox suit in most of the episodes. So this week's Alphabots choice was sort of a no-brainer.

Jimmy the Robot, the Aquabats' keyboardist with the laser fingers and computer brain, is definitely in my son's top two favorite robots these days. (You'll see the other of his favorites in six weeks or so.)

The text in this panel comes from Paul Muldoon's poem "The Mudroom," which I'm teaching on Tuesday. (I rolled "phrase from your reading.") It's a lot weirder than this sentence makes it seem, I tell you what.

AlphaBots: I is for IG-88

I think this week's AlphaBots selection will turn out to be pretty popular. There aren't a lot of robots that start with I, and this one is pretty fun to draw.

As far as I knew before I started work on this, IG-88 was just one of a lineup of bounty hunters, like Zuckuss or Bossk, who looked cool but never got a line in Empire Strikes Back: set dressing in the movies; awesome extras in my action-figure collection.

Actually, I never had the Zuckuss figure, and the IG-88 figure was especially lame — I've drawn him with much more bendable arms than the ones I remember. But what a strange sight he was, with that pope-chapeau head and those pipey limbs.

I should have known that, like so many elements in the extended Star Wars universe, IG-88 has a complicated backstory available only to the cognoscenti. He also, apparently, has a night life:


Give that video a couple of minutes. It starts slowly, but around 2:00 it starts to get pretty fun.

As for the dialogue this week, well, I rolled "dark whisper," and that's all I need to say.

AlphaBots: H is for HAL 9000

I went back and forth a little bit about which robot to draw for this week's AlphaBots. In fact, I may still cook up another drawing, but probably not today.

My original idea started to seem daunting to me when I thought about how much geometry would be involved in any decent drawing of HAL 9000 (from 2001: a Space Odyssey): either a bunch of perspective for the memory-core room or a bunch of concentric circles in HAL's iconic camera eye. 

And then I found my drawing compass, tucked away in a box under a few months' worth of books.

Have I mentioned that I find cross-hatching sort of therapeutic?

As for the text in the caption: well, marmoreal was the word of the day for my dictionary app today. I've used it in a poem before, describing the "horned / marmoreal scorn" of Michelangelo's Moses — the poem's in this issue of Hayden's Ferry Review, but it's not the poem you can read for free on their site — but I decided to go in a different direction when pairing marmoreal with some contrasting words. I was sort of thinking about HAL's lack of a humanoid body.

Alphabots: G is for Godbot

In a moment of inspiration I picked up The Nao of Brown, which impressed me mightily when I read it last year. "There are giant robots in Ichi, right? There are robots somewhere in that book." Indeed, they're in there, though they really only appear on one page.

Of course they fell in an awkward spot in the Alphabot alphabet, as I've already drawn one robot for G.

But the design of these robots is so interesting—fluid and blocky, impressive and fragile, deliberate and doodly—that I thought I'd take a quick crack at it after everyone else in the house was asleep.

So, yeah, G is for godbot.

The dialogue comes from a recent tweet by Nick Abadzis, for no reason other than chance.

Transcendental Geology

Did you think I'd given up on "Draw Two Panels"?

Oh, I'm still doing the project. Or is it a process, not a project, since I don't have a terminus in mind?

Anyway, I got stymied, because of a bad first attempt at this strip (I mean, a worse attempt; this set of results is still pretty bad) and because a note that Winter left on one of the other posts made me self-conscious about my plans for this strip.

Well, after much deliberation and a bit of clunky drawering, here it is.

Hopefully I'll be back in the saddle in a few days.

AlphaBots: G is for Gort

This week's AlphaBots drawing is not some old sentimental favorite.

In fact, although I am sure I will lose some nerd cred by admitting this, I've never watched The Day the Earth Stood Still. I'd like to one day, but it's not at the top of my queue.

I've borrowed this drawing of Gort, the massive robot that accompanies Klaatu on his mission to Earth, from the movie poster, which in turn I've taken from a cool book of Classic Science-Fiction Movie Poster postcards that Dover publishes.

I've said before that I think robots are always fun to draw, but Gort (who was mostly a mask on a fairly featureless foam-rubber suit) lacks a lot of the gears and widgets that make technology (and robots) doodleable. Still, I'm sure the past century of science fiction would have looked and felt different without him.

As for the dialogue? Well, I rolled "dark whisper" again, and I know the main anxiety I'm having today is still fallout from the SPX uncertainty yesterday.