The Four Color Media Monitor

The news may have originally come out a few weeks ago, that Robinson wrote only one issue of DC's new Masters of the Universe miniseries. Keith Giffen, who took over the second issue, told Newsarama:

I know fans are going to say, "what happened to Robinson?" And they're going to be surprised I didn't ask for details, but I honestly don't want to know. The only thing I asked was, "is the assignment open?" In other words, am I stepping into an assignment someone else is already working on? Because I won't do that. But apparently the book was open.

We'll probably never know what happened, but one potential guess is that Robinson decided the project wasn't his style, and quit. Larry Hama once gave an interview where he said that back at the time he first wrote the GI Joe series for Marvel in 1982, a lot of prominent comics writers were reluctant to take up assignments based on licensed merchandise like toys, possibly because for them, the idea was too juvenile. Maybe that's why Robinson abandoned the MOTU mini after just one issue, but if he really concluded it was too childish for his career, he shouldn't have bothered in the first place. It's rather funny if he does think this, because already, juvenile is pretty much where his writing skills have descended to. There may be ongoing series where a prominent writer jumps ship in a hurry, but it's not often I hear of a miniseries where they abandon it on such short notice. All I know is that thanks to that, this miniseries may now stand less of a chance than before.

Robinson could probably be likened to his fellow UK native Chris Claremont, as a has-been who was once prominent but whose talents later unraveled, with one difference being that Robinson's may have deteriorated a little faster than Claremont's did, and he got into the career much later than Claremont too, at a time when sales figures were plummeting to much lower numbers than they were in the Bronze Age.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, licensed products