When you hit your comic store this week to pick up your weekly dose of newsprint opiates there’s a new title from Blacklist Studios called Robot 13 that you probably won’t have in your stack. I wanted to take the time to talk to you early in the week so you could put it on the list of things you need to discuss with your friendly neighborhood comics retailer. Simply put, you need Robot 13 in your hands, and the guy you buy your comics from needs it in his (or her) store. Trust me, neither of you will regret the decision.

Before I tell you how much I loved this book I want to get my gripes out of the way so I don’t need to finish off with them. First off I wasn’t crazy about the dialog. While I thought the storytelling was very well done, the dialog seemed forced in places and didn’t flow the way conversation shouldat times. The other complaint I have is that the book was too short. I know the 24 pages is fairly standard, but the story has so much potential and the writer and artist do such a great job of sucking the reader into their world, would it have killed them to let us look a little longer? Now that that’s out of the way…

Robot 13 is what good comic books are all about, a deep rich story that leaves you yearning for more and wondering how you are ever going to make it through until the next issue shows up, imaginative and captivating art that pulls you in to the moment of the title, and most importantly an almost perfect interplay between those two critical dynamics whereby they rely on one another to truly put a fantastic finished product in the reader’s hands. I want to give you a little deeper look at what I mean about each of those elements in Robot 13

First the story, I don’t want to tell you very much about what happens in the book because on the surface this is a very simple straight forward story. The depth comes from what’s not said in the first issue. Writer Thomas Hall does a masterful job of giving us a fast paced action story that keeps us engaged and turning the pages as fast as we can while at the same time he withholding enough information to hook us on the larger plot he’s developing for the series. The episode is satisfying, the series plot is intriguing, and the details are put together with tremendous skill. I realize that I sound like some shithead art house critic when I say that, but really all I’m saying is that Hall has put together a story that works on multiple levels, and done it with good storytelling as opposed to doing a whole bunch of writing.

Of course good storytelling without a great deal of writing is only possible in comics with outstanding art and artist Daniel Bradford nails it perfectly. Clearly inspired by Mike Mignola, Bradford’s art is clean and expressive, which isn’t normally an easy thing to do when you’re drawing a robot. His style is perfectly suited to the story and he helps give life and personality to the characters. I really enjoyed the fact that the writer let the artist tell so much of the story in Robot 13 and if you pick it up you’ll know what I mean. The story didn’t rely on the dialog or the art, instead it found a middle ground from which to tell the story, and it’s a story I can’t wait to pick up when Robot13 #2 comes out.

I give Robot 13 four and a half stars, and a bookmark in my web browser so I can be sure to get my fat little fingers on number 2.