'We The Robots': A Webcomic Review

Back in my high school days, I was a competitive forensic speaker. And I wasn't half-bad, mind you; I got a decent number of trophies in the years I participated. But nothing I did in that time could ever trump my first Original Oratory speech: An arguement for the fair and equal treatment of artificial intelligence. For this, I was forever know among my forensic peers as "The Robot Guy."

I thought I was the shit.

Enter Chris Harding's webcomic We the Robots. Here's the jist of how this ridicuously honest comic relates to my four-year-young oration: Take all possible defending arguements for the ethical acknowledgement of a new senitent being, have a 3 year-old squish them between his palms, and watch him smile and exclaim, "Robots is people too!"

Well, sort-of. We the Robots is by no means a social commentary concerning the theory of mechanical sentience, or how such an "organism" would correlate to the idea of humans as machines (though it does beg the reader to wonder about our true distinction). Instead, it's a world with as much simplicity and depth as our toddler's cry.

Robots, acting in their "natural" way.

That "way" is often times a drool, ceaselessly mundane existance for our main bolt-box, Bob, an orange man-bot (with a white stripe) with the primary malfuction of suffering from "frequent bouts of curiosity and passion."

Hence, the stripe.

You see, Bob works in the kind of environment where a lack of creativity and an unquestioning submission to authority garners one the title of a "team player." Bob, in the most literal sense of the term, is a cubicle drone. This, as in the world of humans, is a soul sucking, mind numbing downward spiral of a career choice.

Naturally, this is the product of million's of years of mechanical evolution, its unnecessity having become a necessary building block in the stability of the robots'...um...

..."comfort."

*Ahem* I swear, it's not about people.

Thus, we experience Bob's trials and tribulations as he trudges along his maladjusted journey, trying to keep his sanity while suffering through everyday ROBOT social problems (health and weight loss, nightmare relatives, the strangle-hold of complacency that television has on the populace...you know, all the things ROBOTS are concerned about).

At the end of the day, Bob's soul may be a shrivled, cancerous tumor of what it once was, attempting to violently claw itself out of its' chasis of a tomb...but hey, that's what booze and cheerleaders are for!

Yeah, uh...I mentioned that this isn't a social commentary, right? Good. Because it's not.

Readers of We The Robots get the all-to-uncommon priviledge of a webcomic by an already established, award winning animator. Chris Harding's art approach to We The Robots is reminicent of both a children's book and a child's third-grade art project (swearing added), with each scene and character done in a texture that appears similar to color cardboard-paper cut-outs pasted together to form a coherent story. Chris' reputation shines through these incredibly iconic characters, evoking a time in a reader's memory when everything was so, so very simple.

Yet his concepts within each strip, like a child's perspective of the outside world, are grand in social scope. All joking about the comic's "true" intentions aside, Chris accomplishes the daunting task of putting a fully-fleshed robot society in a world filled with all-too-familiar "human" failings, and succeeds without coming off as preachy about our own modern, complacent society. All this, while still having a good hardy laugh about wars, alternative medicine and alcoholism.

I also have to give at least one thumbs-up to a certain element of the comic's webdesign: The fact that beside every strip is link to buy a signed framable print of any strip you so desire. The option to purchase any print of a favorite webcomic is commendable enough alone, but the fact that Harding goes through the trouble to sign every order is downright awesome, especially for a collector nerd such as myself.

Though the centeral plot device behind the comic's humor, the fact remains that We The Robots presents human struggles as played out by a parade of fictional autonomous machines -- so much so that a reader can quite quickly forget that the characters are in fact not human.

While this is just as much a great strength as a weakness, it's sometimes nice to be reminded that we're not supposed to take all of this too literally. Some of the funniest strips have been those that feature the more mechanical side of our code-compilling counterparts, namely because of the reality-check of the hilarious absurdity of the primary situation.

With iconic imagery that would make Scott McCloud proud juxtaposed with incredibly relatable work-place and societal horrors made laughable, We The Robots gives us the simplicity of a child's fanatasy, while subtly reminding us to take a break from the keyboard to watch the birds fly overhead.

Problem is, you're gonna have a hard time being torn away from the comic to bother with going outside. And who wants to have "frequent bouts of curiosity and passion," anyway?

Commies, that's who.

...seriously, NOT commentary!