The History of RoboCop Comics

Regaining his composure and fixing his tie, The Old Man addresses the cyborg that saved his life. “Nice shootin’, son. What’s your name?”

With a smirk, RoboCop turns and tells him, “Murphy.” Roll credits.

And there ends RoboCop, one of the most solid movies of the ’80s. Filled with action, satire, awesome practical effects, and style. It was no surprise that they would try to follow it up with spinoffs. There would be sequels, an eventual reboot, video games, cartoons, a live-action series, and so on. There ended up being a ton of comics over the years, spanning 30 years with five different publishers and over 100 issues.

It makes sense that there would be so many RoboCop comics. The first movie was a fantastic superhero origin story. He’s ROM: Spaceknight mixed with Judge Dredd and there’s a lot of mileage you can get out of that. At the same time, it’s such a fantastic movie that it’s widely felt that the sequels don’t measure up. After RoboCop 3 came out and bombed, the comics suddenly went from being promotional tie-ins to being a series of attempts by different creative teams to go, “Wait, no! I think I can do better!”

The character is well-traveled and his different homes have given us many different types of stories. Some are excellent. Some are outright terrible. Let’s take a look at Alex Murphy’s panelized history and its never-ending supply of ED-209s.

Warning, there will be some spoilers ahead, but I’ll try to hold back when I can.

MARVEL COMICS (1987-1992)

In 1987, Marvel released a black-and-white adaptation of RoboCop that was available for $2. I’d buy that for half the price, but that’s just me reaching for a tired punchline. Written by Bob Harris with art by Javier Saltares and Alan Kupperberg, it’s mostly what you’d expect. The movie is retold in 48 pages in the ’80s Marvel style.

In other words, it isn’t so R-rated.

You know how it goes. Blood splatter is blackened out and the more violent deaths are in the shadows. That whole bit where Anne Lewis corners a goon while he’s taking a leak and he momentarily distracts her with his wang is absent.

“Ladies, I’d leave if I were you.” Man, I don’t know. It doesn’t have the same ring to it.

For the most part, it’s the same story. Honest cop is killed by criminals, gets remade as a cold-hearted cyborg, gradually regains his humanity, and gets revenge and attains justice. There are differences, though. There’s an intro scene where Clarence Boddicker and his gang shoot a bunch of police officers. Boddicker notices that one is still alive and mentions how he must be losing his touch. He warns the cop that he wants his kind off his back, but then the cop finally dies and he shrugs it off. “Hmm… Looks like I ain’t lost my touch after all.”

Everyone looks how they’re supposed to except Emil (he’s the guy that got turned into a toxic mutant), who looks less like Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and more like the Marlboro Man. Otherwise, changes include RoboCop having a bit more agility and an epilogue that has RoboCop standing vigilant on a rooftop because this is a Marvel comic in the 1980s.

Several years later, they would rerelease the comic in color form as setup for the new RoboCop ongoing series. The title would last for 23 issues – the longest of any RoboCop run – and is almost cut in half in terms of tone. The first ten issues are by Alan Grant. #11 is a very strong fill-in story by Evan Skolnik, and issues #12 to #23 are by Simon Furman. Most of the art is by Lee Sullivan with later issues done by Herb Trimpe and Andrew Wildman.

The Alan Grant run starts off a little off-model from the first page when we see a street punk riding a hovering motorcycle. While Marvel’s RoboCop doesn’t take place in the Marvel universe, it sure feels like it the way Grant goes a little too deep into science fiction technology. You have flying cars, cloned dinosaurs, and all sorts of robots.

Like this guy:

Regardless, the comics are good fun. They aren’t must-read, but they’re good for what they are. The characterization is on-point, the art is strong, and it not only holds onto the movie’s satirical nature, but it uses it to push the story forward. For the entire series, commercials and news broadcasts would bring up weird stuff off-hand and a few issues later it would come into play as part of the plot. Like how there’s a quick commercial for a television you put inside your head. Several issues later, RoboCop begins the story shooting down a man who believes he’s in the wild west and he turns out to be one of many driven insane by the television brain thing.

Also of note are Grant’s final two issues, where Detroit is overtaken by a fad of people becoming masked vigilantes. The whole thing pokes fun at superheroes and has such a nonchalant bodycount by the end that you’d think Garth Ennis wrote it. Hell, it even features Beer Gut Man, who is like the prototype for Ennis’ Six-Pack.

Around this time, Marvel released the adaptation of RoboCop 2, by Alan Grant and Mark Bagley. Again, it was first released in black and white, then rereleased in color, though the color version was made into a three issue miniseries. This one is closer to the source than the first book and certainly flows better than the movie. For one, you don’t go about a half hour without even seeing RoboCop. The bit about Murphy’s wife being written out happens far later in the story, but other than that, it’s about the same.

I will say, one interesting thing is Cain’s design. Unlike the movie, Cain is shown to be wearing circular black sunglasses, a long coat, and a top hat, which is not only a better, more striking look, but it’s also how he looks in the NES game.

No matter how good the adaptation, it still suffers from being RoboCop 2, a movie that’s filled with good ideas and good scenes, but is completely all over the place and refuses to become a cohesive product. But you know what? It could have been much, much worse. You’ll see why soon enough.

[related article: RoboCop 2 has a hidden joke aimed at the studio]

The Marvel ongoing would mention the events of RoboCop 2 offhand during Furman’s run and let me tell you, Furman’s run is awesome. Really, instead of Frank Miller, they should have just had Simon Furman write the second and third movies by adapting it from his comic run. His first four issues would have made a perfect sequel. With RoboCop being such a success and it being so hard to just have a prime cop corpse fall on your lap like in RoboCop’s origin, OCP secretly starts kidnapping people so that they can lobotomize them and make them into RoboCops. RoboCop stumbles upon this and is both horrified and feels guilty, knowing that his own existence has ruined so many lives.

It basically takes the great “Introducing RoboCop 2!” suicides bit from the second movie and writes a story around it. A really good story. Also really good is an arc called “Mind Bomb” where a drooling, borderline catatonic young man ends up in the police precinct, figured to be a mugging victim. Instead, he’s some kind of creepy, unexplained, malevolent psychic that slowly drives anyone nearby mad with negative emotions, including RoboCop. The final confrontation between the two is extremely dark for an early ’90s Marvel comic and deserves a look.

Furman’s run ends just a little too early in that there are a couple of plot threads that never get wrapped up. Lewis’ late-husband turns out to be alive, but it’s never really expanded on and the villain behind it gets away and is never mentioned again. There’s a widow-based villainess who kind of vanishes from the story.

Still, the comic ends on a strong note that’s both badass and bittersweet, reminiscent of how Grant Morrison’s lengthy Batman run ended. While the movie has RoboCop come to terms with his humanity, the latter half of Furman’s run is about RoboCop coming to terms with his robotic side and his duty. There’s a brief period where he mentally sheds his programming and becomes 100% Murphy, but he has to turn his back on it, as well as the possibilities of being with his family because it would only lead to disaster.

Coincidentally, a failed pitch for the RoboCop comic would become a series that would reintroduce Marvel concept Deathlok. The difference is that after a year or so of being elusive, Deathlok is able to reconnect with his family and tries to make it work. He also has the similar drawback of only being able to ingest baby food.

DARK HORSE (1992-1994)

The Dark Horse comics take on RoboCop is notable for being the only continuity where RoboCop 3 happened. That obviously wasn’t an option for Marvel since it wasn’t out at the time, but because RoboCop 3 was considered a mistake before it even hit theaters, later publishers would totally ignore it.

It’s also worth noting that RoboCop 3 is a movie that was delayed about a year and that kind of makes the Dark Horse comics a bit screwy. Namely in the way that there is absolutely no sign of Anne Lewis in any comic outside of the eventual adaptation and instead we get Dr. Marie Lazarus as RoboCop’s closest associate. Anyone reading between the lines would realize that Officer Lewis wouldn’t be making it out of the movie trilogy alive.

Dark Horse would start off with a bang via Frank Miller and Walt Simonson’s RoboCop vs. Terminator. I’m not lying when I say that this is one of my all-time favorite comics and easily my favorite work by Miller, Dark Knight Returns included. The basic idea is that the catalyst for SkyNet becoming sentient is that it connected to RoboCop and learned it from him. The last survivor of the human race, a female soldier named Flo, goes back in time to kill Alex Murphy. SkyNet sends Terminators back in time to stop her from succeeding.

The only real drawback of the book is how it’s pretty one-sided on the RoboCop half of the crossover. John Connor and the rest of his family are completely absent with John getting only a brief mention. It probably wouldn’t have worked as well otherwise, but it does seem to trivialize the first two Terminator movies when Connor is ultimately a failure.

The miniseries has some amazingly badass moments, including a battle between two ED-209s and a T-800. Then things come to a head in the war-torn future where we have an army of jetpacked RoboCops with an Alex Murphy hivemind taking it to an army of Terminators.

Another nice thing about the book is the ending and how it subverts nearly every other Terminator comic. Terminator comics always seem to have the same ending. SkyNet is defeated! The day is saved! Evil robots will never threaten us ever again! …OR WILL THEY?! It’s such a tired trope. Even though most of those comics would come out later, Miller is ahead of the curve by taking that concept and perfectly turning it on its head, giving us one of the better endings in comic history.

So yeah, if you haven’t read RoboCop vs. Terminator, get on that. Do yourself a favor. Unfortunately, for every good there must be an evil and with this outstanding Terminator crossover, the scales would have to balance via a really terrible Terminator crossover. We’ll cross that bridge later.

Read RoboCop vs Terminator on Amazon

Dark Horse wouldn’t give RoboCop an ongoing series, but would instead do a handfull of miniseries. A couple of them would have prologues done in the pages of Dark Horse Comics. Dark Horse Comics #1-3 set up the events for RoboCop: Prime Suspect while issues #6-9 set up RoboCop: Mortal Coils.

Prime Suspect by John Arcudi and John Paul Leon is easily the best Dark Horse RoboCop comic outside of the Terminator crossover. The story has to do with a harsh critic of RoboCop being gunned down with a gun that only RoboCop can wield. RoboCop escapes capture and tries to find out who framed him for murder, but finds that he can’t even trust Dr. Lazarus.

The art might be a bit off-putting for some, but I like it. The ending is a bit confusing, setting up for something that doesn’t seem to ever pay off, but otherwise it’s a good time.

Read RoboCop: Prime Suspect on Amazon

A few months later, we’d get Mortal Coils by Steven Grant and Nick Gnazzo. This would be the first of many RoboCop comics written by Steven Grant. It goes into expanding the world of RoboCop outside of Detroit. We know what futuristic Detroit is like, but what about Philadelphia and Denver? RoboCop goes to Denver and gets sucked into a plot involving corrupt cops, a tech-obsessed anti-hero named Hooks (whose design is overwhelmingly ’90s), an evil and elderly businessman named Edward Agincourt, and some criminals led by a dude named Coffin. Coffin is essentially the Undertaker with a laser cannon.

The core part of the plot is so simple that it’s a surprise it took so long for it to show up in a RoboCop comic. Agincourt is on his last legs and he wants Dr. Lazarus to give him the RoboCop treatment and make him immortal. Kind of like in that Mr. Freeze episode of Batman: The Animated Series. It’s an idea that will get used again in another comic, but it’s done really well here, leading to a horrible and fitting end where Agincourt gets a bit of a monkey’s paw answer to his wish.

Steven Grant and Hoang Nguyen would work together to give us a three-issue adaptation of RoboCop 3. RoboCop 3 is a movie that I don’t hate quite as much as everyone else and I consider at the very least better than RoboCop 2 due to having an actual coherent narrative. Sure, it’s cheesy, has a PG-13 rating, and features a little girl hacking an ED-209 in the first five minutes, but it has its charm.

The comic does kind of rush through things. One of the better moments of the movie to me is when RoboCop is talking to Nikko and realizes through his data files that unbeknownst to her, her parents are dead. Then he handles it through careful explanation where he doesn’t mention their fates, but comforts her by letting her know that they’ll never be truly gone. It’s one of the film’s better character moments. Here, they just power through the moment in two panels.

By the way, that makes the ending of RoboCop 3 really awkward because with the good guys having won, Nikko is probably really close to finding out about her parents.

The book does have a couple good lines that didn’t make it into the final cut of the movie. Like how Rip Torn’s CEO character has no name in the movie, but here he’s identified as Mr. Morton. When he goes on a rant about how worthless RoboCop is, he wonders aloud whose idiotic idea that was. Johnson meekly responds, “Uh…your late son developed that project, Mr. Morton.” Cute.

Also, when the two ninja cyborgs attack RoboCop at the end, McDaggett says, “No jokes about them all looking the same now. That’d be terribly offensive.” I can see why that got cut.

The last Dark Horse RoboCop comic would be RoboCop: Roulette by John Arcudi and Mitch Byrd. Of all the RoboCop comics out there, it’s probably the most boring. There are a bunch of unlikeable characters tossed in there and a threat that never really clicks. The one redeeming factor is the ending. One of the major characters is one of the scientists responsible for RoboCop’s creation and we see that he’s genuinely haunted by what he’s done because of how human RoboCop is. If he was just a machine with living brain tissue like intended, he’d be able to sleep at night, but the fact that Murphy is in there and has held onto his humanity makes the scientist feel like a monster.

“I can see it in his eyes. He remembers who he was, and is repulsed by what he’s become. My God, listen to me. Here I am, horrified to learn that we used ‘too much’ of Alex Murphy when we built RoboCop – and yet I’m praying that, somehow, there’s enough human in there for him to forgive me.”

With that deflating comic done with, RoboCop wouldn’t make another print appearance for almost a decade.

AVATAR PRESS (2003-2006)

Let’s get this over with.

On paper, Avatar had what seemed like a brilliant comic. Frank Miller’s RoboCop. Frank Miller always hated how his screenplay for RoboCop 2 was altered several times over. Hollywood considered his original script unfilmable and unusable. What better use of the comic medium than letting one of the kings use it to show off what he really had in mind? Hell, the dude wrote RoboCop vs. Terminator!

Starting in 2003, Miller would oversee the project, though he wouldn’t be the one writing it. Instead, Steven Grant would return to adapt Miller’s screenplay with Juan Jose Ryp doing the art. Frank Miller’s RoboCop would be told via nine issues over the course of three years due to some crazy delays.

To call this series a mess would be an understatement. If you thought Frank Miller would work better without a filter, you’re in for a rude awakening. It’s like watching the Spike TV episodes of Ren & Stimpy or Vince Russo’s World Championship Wrestling. Miller’s “pure” take has zero mention of Cain, his cronies, or his drugs, but it does feature a handful of aspects that were used in RoboCop 3, such as the Rehab mercenaries taking over for the police in Detroit and the idea of OCP callously destroying the homes of innocent people.

One of the main Rehab soldiers is a pretty blatant copy of Frank Miller’s Marvel supervillain Nuke. He ends up being the guy who becomes the guinea pig for RoboCop 2 since there’s no Cain in the story. That makes it all the more interesting that Cain’s big drug in the movie was called Nuke. I have to imagine that’s not a coincidence.

The main villain is Dr. Margaret Love, who is more or less Dr. Juliette Faxx from RoboCop 2 with a different name. Remember that five minute segment in RoboCop 2 when Faxx has RoboCop reprogrammed to be a better role model? That’s Love’s deal here. She’s obsessed with him becoming what she thinks children should look up to. It’s not the worst idea, but it’s done pretty badly. She’s just a terribly-written character in general, over-sexualized so hard that it makes your eyes roll.

Like, when you look at it, the movies didn’t really sexualize the main female roles. Sure, there were strippers and prostitutes and stuff, but the major female characters came out all right. There was nothing overtly sexualized about Lewis (though to be fair, the Marvel series did give her a couple cheesecake moments). Dr. Faxx had a sexual relationship with The Old Man to help climb up the corporate ladder and get her way, but it was never portrayed as over-the-top. Even Dr. Lazarus spent the entirety of RoboCop 3 in frumpy mom jeans.

Here, though? Look at what they’ve done to Lewis.

She spends about half of the comic in torn outfits with her breasts and underwear constantly hanging out. It’s kind of awful, made worse by the Avatar Press house style where everything looks like chunks of bloody barf. Not joking, reading this comic made me physically nauseous. So even if comic book women in low-cut outfits constantly picking up dropped pencils is your thing, the art still makes it a challenge to actually find it erotic.

I also feel the comic goes over the line on the whole dystopian thing to the point that it’s no longer fun, but just mean-spirited. I don’t know. Saying it’s 90 degrees in the shade in December because of global warming hits me as trying too hard to be dire. That, and rape is brought up every five pages.

Read RoboCop: The Complete Frank Miller Omnibus on Amazon

The one good thing I can say about the book is the ending because it comes up with a promising direction for RoboCop himself instead of just sticking to the status quo. Although the details are different, RoboCop’s programming purges all of his many directives like in RoboCop 2. The movie forgets about this, but in the comic, once RoboCop has taken out RoboCop 2 (which has Dr. Love’s mind in it during the climax and speaks like a dominatrix because Frank Miller), he just goes off to do his own thing. OCP is the enemy and there’s now nothing tethering him to them. He’s free. He finds a place to regularly recharge and listens for radio talk of OCP goons going after innocent people, which causes him to spring to action. That’s not bad.

During all of those delays, Avatar released a couple of one-shots. RoboCop: Killing Machine by Steven Grant and Anderson Ricardo and RoboCop: Wild Child by Steven Grant and Carlos Ferriera. Killing Machine is about a teenager trying to hack into RoboCop while Wild Child is about Lewis’ never-before-mentioned sister returning to Detroit to raise hell. These issues aren’t anything special, but aren’t nearly as bad as Frank Miller’s RoboCop. There was going to be a third one-shot called RoboCop: War Party, but that was never released.

Wild Child does have some weird continuity going on. Lewis mentions that she and RoboCop appear to be the only two cops doing anything and says offhand that OCP is gone. That doesn’t really jibe with Frank Miller’s RoboCop or any of the movies, but whatever.

DYNAMITE ENTERTAINMENT (2010-2012)

Dynamite would give us three RoboCop comics, all written by Rob Williams. The first one is an ongoing that lasts only six issues with art by Fabiano Neves. It takes place after the first movie, opting to completely ignore the sequels. The main villain is Edwina Odenkirk, a woman who pretty much runs OCP while The Old Man is slowly succumbing to old age and dementia, constantly mumbling one-sided conversations as if Dick Jones was both alive and in the room. Odenkirk is basically a charismatic, delightfully scummy, and better-written version of Dr. Love.

This comic is a mixed bag. There are some good ideas and original character concepts, but it gets a bit messy. Like how in the first issue, Odenkirk fires all the cops (sans Robo) and has them all replaced with ED-209s. A good high concept, but as someone points out in a later issue, they’re pretty much worthless when stairs are involved. It’s a quick line that’s never given any thought outside of a little joke despite being kind of a huge plot hole.

Williams does a pretty bang-up job writing all the commercials and news programs. If his run had an actual ending, it would have been a worthy follow-up to the Marvel series. In fact, one of the things it has going for it is that for the first time, RoboCop actually defeats The Old Man. In the movies, The Old Man becomes a full-fledged bad guy in the second movie and gets away scot-free. In the third movie, he’s not even in it. He never really gets what’s coming in the Marvel comic. In Williams’ comic, he actually writes an especially cool scene where RoboCop gets the better of him.

His victory unfortunately leads to a problem where RoboCop goes insane. Figments of dead characters from the first movie like Boddicker, Bob Morton, and Dick Jones start appearing and talking to him all the time.

The series would continue over a year later with the miniseries RoboCop: Road Trip with art by Unai de Zarate. In it, RoboCop and his allies escape Detroit due to Odenkirk becoming too powerful to the point that not even the US government seems to be able to stop her. Unfortunately, it ends on a cliffhanger right when things are getting interesting. It turns out that OCP isn’t the only corporation that’s been taking over the country. RoboCop finds a possible ally in White (TM), a company run by a young philanthropist who detests OCP’s evil. How the corporate war would have played out is something we’ll never find out as there was never a follow-up series.

In-between those two comics, Williams and PJ Holden gave us the miniseries Terminator/RoboCop: Kill Human. As much as I love RoboCop vs. Terminator, I hate Kill Human to an equal degree. I hate, hate, hate this comic. I hate it even more than Frank Miller’s RoboCop.

To be fair, it does start out okay enough. RoboCop is reactivated in the distant future at the end of the SkyNet war, woken up by the last surviving human. She ends up getting killed. RoboCop reads the files on how this all came to be (which isn’t explained further than “Terminator 2 happened and then nuclear explosions happened anyway”) and then goes back in time to stop it. How he plans to stop it makes zero sense and isn’t even partially explained. Again, it also makes no sense that SkyNet is out to kill John Connor since the Terminators win the war anyway.

Buy RoboCop Volume 1 on Amazon

Long story short, the comic has RoboCop allow John to get killed by the T-1000 because the ends justifies the means, which is such an out-of-character thing. Plus we don’t know what the “ends” is in this case. The whole comic is half-baked, lacks any logic whatsoever, and gives me a headache.

BOOM! STUDIOS (2013-present)

BOOM! Studios got the license and started it by rereleasing Frank Miller’s RoboCop. Great. They do have a pretty good reason for it, at least. After the rerelease, they followed up with RoboCop: Last Stand by Steve Grant and Korkut Oztekin. Again, this is supposed to be a comic adaptation of Frank Miller’s writings, only this time for the script to RoboCop 3. It’s not nearly the trainwreck of Frank Miller’s RoboCop, but it is a strange pile of comic. I do dig the art.

It’s an eight-issue series and the first four issues are pretty straightforward. It’s an alternate telling of RoboCop 3 where the Rehab soldiers aren’t there because they were taken out in the previous story. Granted, there’s still a bunch of evil cop replacements hired by OCP that RoboCop’s up against and it does follow up on the ending from Frank Miller’s RoboCop where he goes rogue. For the most part, it comes off as a grittier, more adult take on the movie’s events. Dr. Lazarus isn’t an OCP employee, but a scientist obsessed with RoboCop’s tech and the way his mind mixes organics with computers.

Dr. Faxx (who is now a separate character from Dr. Love) is one of the main villains and she becomes a close ally to Otomo, the mass-produced Japanese ninja cyborg. Otomo helps her overthrow OCP and even kill The Old Man. Later on, Dr. Faxx gives him a robo-boner.

Told you.

The fifth issue is when things go flying off the rails. I mean FLYING. The comic goes from “badass revision of RoboCop 3” to “wait, what?” in no time flat. You know that cute little girl from the movie? Yeah, RoboCop picks her up by the hair and punches through her skull. It makes more sense in context, but still, that’s weird.

The final four issues are a mixed bag, but ultimately worth checking out. If anything, the fights between RoboCop and Otomo are a million times better than what we got in the movie. Don’t worry, we still get the bit where he readjusts his jaw. Can’t mess with what worked.

In 2014, BOOM! would tackle the controversial RoboCop reboot. You remember that, right? The movie that was decent, but doomed to be damned by the public no matter what because it was never, ever going to be better than the original? For once, they didn’t do an adaptation of the movie, but did a series of one-shots that take place in its universe, all done by different creative teams. The titles, Hominem Ex Machina, To Live and Die in Detroit, and Memento Mori aren’t much to speak about, but the last story, Beta, is worth reading.

The story by Ed Brisson and Emilio Laiso is a prequel. It’s about the original attempt to create RoboCop using a soldier killed in the Middle East. He ends up sharing more similarities with the Alex Murphy from the original movie in that he’s constantly having nightmares about his death and wants to avenge it, though he doesn’t have the full picture. All he knows is that certain fellow soldiers are giving him the side-eye since coming back from the dead and they were more than likely involved with him dying. The truth turns out to be too much to handle to the point that everything goes horribly wrong and the scientists involved have to sweep everything under the rug.

That brings us to the most recent series written by Joshua Williamson and Dennis Culver with Carlos Magno and Amancay Nahuelpan on art. This is another series that decides that RoboCop 2 never happened, meaning that BOOM! Studios has done three different RoboCop comics in three different continuities over the course of two years. That’s impressive.

The entire story takes place over 12 issues and it’s good shit. The series centers around a villain named Killian. He’s a criminal who was in prison for a long while, got out, and sees that he has to compete against RoboCop if he wants to thrive. It just so happens that he’s crafty enough to make it work and tries to use his charisma and political knowhow to turn the city against itself and destroy RoboCop. Plus there’s a major revelation about who he truly is.

The ongoing is pretty humorless and doesn’t really give us any fun news bits or commercials, but it’s still great. It’s incredibly intimate, making the characters seem more dimensional and real. Everything’s more down-to-earth, rather than going crazy with sci-fi nonsense. You don’t need hovercrafts and giant robot dogs. Having RoboCop fight two guys in a monster truck works just as well.

Read RoboCop: Dead or Alive Vol. 1 on Amazon

And man, if you want some of that R-rated action, the penultimate issue has some gnarly violence going on.

Up next for Murphy is RoboCop: Citizens Arrest in 2018. Brian Wood and Jorge Coelho will tell a story about RoboCop 30 years after the events of the first movie. The public is turned into the police as they’re convinced to spy and narc on each other for money. Looks interesting.

Who knows how long the BOOM! Studios agreement lasts? It’s funny how RoboCop has gone from a franchise that got comic tie-ins because of being current at the time to getting comics because it’s become a time-tested nostalgia act. Maybe in another couple of years we’ll see him show up in a DC comic or as part of IDW’s collection. Heh. You know, for a guy known for sticking around Detroit so much, RoboCop really does get around.

Gavin Jasper is proud that he got to use the term “robo-boner.” Follow him on Twitter!