LoboCop #1 (1994)

LoboCop #1 (February, 1994)
“LoboCop”
WriterCop – Alan Grant
Artist/ColoristCop – Martin Emond
SeparationCop – Digital Chameleon
LettererCop – Todd Klein
RoboAssistant Editor – Peter Tomasi
RoboEditor – Dan Raspler
Cover Price: $1.95


Well, here’s something weird…


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After a page where we are read our (copy)rights, we jump into an expositional news segment to set the table for us.  President of OllyConsumerStuff, Olly, is upset at the high crime rate of “Old Detrout”, and has called off his urban renewal project.  To further set the mood, the newscast is interrupted by a commercial for the (toll-free?) celebrity sex line 1-800-STAR-F… um, ya know what… never mind that… let’s get to Lobo.

Who is lurking in a the seedy Metal Bar in the midst of a five day bender.  Now we know Lobo to be a violent fellow… turns out, he’s a violent drunk as well.  In his stupor he has taken out the entire Detrout Police Department.  He decides to guzzle down a… giant steaming barrel of booze, let’s out a thunderous belch… then, dies?

Olly, from earlier arrives on the the scene with a woman.  Turns out he’s not only the President of OllyConsumerStuff, he’s also the chief of police… and probably, at this point, the only boy-in-blue left!  Lobo is declared dead… due to, get this, having partied himself to death.

The pair get it in their head to use Lobo’s pickled brain for a top-secret police project… which has thus far been wildly unsuccessful.  Ya see, they’re trying to create the, ahem, Future of Law Enforcement by placing a human brain in a great big robot body… all earlier subjects turned out to be hippies.  Not sure what or if that’s supposed to be a commentary on anything… so, we’ll just leave it there.

Now, they get Lobo into the office… and saw open his head.  Inside, his brain is wearing headphones and listening to some “atavistic rock”.  The nurse removes the headphones, and gets mauled by the tiny brain for their troubles.  LoboBrain then leaps into the RoboBody… and demands its headphones back.  That’s an easy enough bit’a business to follow, ain’t it?  Olly decides that he can control LoboCop better through the headphones, so it’s a win-win.

Time passes, and we shift scenes to a morbidly-obese crew of bikers holding up a tiny grocery store for their unpaid “street tax”… and so, they blow it up with a missile.  It’s… that kinda story, don’tcha know.  During their attempted escape, they wind up before… LoboCop!  They’re all declared “guilty”, and dealt with in some gruesome ways.  The folks inside the smoldering Mario’s Groceries call out for help… to which LoboCop finds them in violation of the local noise ordinance… and kills them too.  Yeah, it’s that kinda story.

Later, LoboCop is called to a crime in progress… a spindly, and possibly nude, man is fleeing through the alleys from a group of angry transients.  Lobo vaporizes the “baddies”, then kills the running man for excessive use of alliteration… man, I hope LoboCop never reads this blog.

Over the next little while, LoboCop rules Old Detrout with a pair of iron fists… for which, the people at large are less than grateful.  A quarter-million Detrouters have signed a petition to shut the Main ManCop down.  Now, Lobo don’t dig paperwork, so he shoves the entire list down a demonstrator’s throat!

Then, he… ya know, kills everybody.

Turns out this is exactly what Olly had planned… ya see, he wanted to clear Old Detrout, so he could buy it for a song and turn it into a gigundous parking lot.  Fifty-Seven Million spots charging $12.95 an hour to park there.  He then offers his female companion two thousand spots for a roll in the hay.  Okey doke…

With LoboCop’s mission accomplished, the concrete trucks are brought in to pave the city over… with the no-longer-needed LoboCop as part of the pavement!  Olly arrives to inform him that this was all part of the plan… and so, Lobo flips him off… while he sinks in the cement.  Now, remember how Lobo’s pea brain really dug listening to its tunes?  Well, turns out that concrete ain’t the best conductor of radio waves…

and, well…

Olly and Whatsherface realize they need to turn to their fail-safe measures… namely, blowing up Lobo’s brain.  Well, knowing Lobo like we do, we know it’s gonna take a lot more than an exploded brain to put him down.  LoboCop carries Olly and the lady back to the, er… top secret police hospital (?) to have his brain put back into his normal handsome skin… after which, he uses a rusty butter knife to decapitate them… and attaches the heads to the old LoboCop body.

The story ends with Lobo appearing on the news… and killing the newscasters.  He rides away into the sunset as the LoboCop body (with its two human heads) explodes.

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You remember that episode of Saved by the Bell where the gang forgets it’s Screech’s birthday?  And so, to make it up to him they concoct a way in which he becomes Hall Monitor?  They wrangle the position from a sophomore who had to be at least forty years old.  Anyhoo, after a rocky start, he rules the halls of Bayside High with an iron fist… and actually references RoboCop… remember that?  Remember how horrible that was?  Well, this wasn’t quite that bad.


It’s really not “bad” by any stretch… what it is though, is a joke that becomes played out about a quarter of the way through the issue.  By the time this story ended, I had long since stopped caring.  Early on, I can’t say that I actually chuckled or laughed or anything, but I enjoyed it for what it was… an overly-violent, and wildly crude Lobo comic.  But, that only gets ya so far… at some point, I feel like we need a bit more than that.


Now, if this was a 6-8 page backup strip… I think it’d been fantastic.  As a 24-page feature though… it’s a bit of a slog.  At least for me… and I actually dig Lobo!  I know there are folks with an aversion to the character, but I really don’t mind him in small doses… or in his “small” form during Young Justice… which was revealed to not really be him, but we don’t need to discuss that right now.


The art here was… suitable.  I can’t say that I was a fan of it… and I can’t say it was overly-pleasant to look at, but I can’t argue that it fit the tone of the story.  It felt grimy and urban-decayed… characters were ugly, sound effects were bombastic.  Perfectly fitting for a story of this kind.


Now, even with my misgivings… and reservations, I can’t rightly say you should avoid this.  It’s great as a novelty… and it’s a fun parody to RoboCop… or at least I assume it is, I never saw it.  If you come across it for a buck-or-below, I’d say it’s worth grabbing.  Wouldn’t pay cover price though.


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