The headline’s the thing, but feel free to burst your bubble with actual content here.

For example, both C3PO and RTD2 are male. It seems obvious with 3PO, but R2′s sex is projected on him by those around him. It usually takes a female outfit, name or a set of metal breasts to provide the audience a cue that a robot should be perceived as anything but male. Of course, this is all nonsense because they should be genderless. And yet we live in a time were female robots are being designed and built. It’s lead to a lot of discussion in the last month. Interesting stuff which no doubt I’ll come back to.

Taking a break from writing this afternoon I dipped into some old issues of 2000AD from 1979 and stumbled across this suggestion from the editor:

Haven’t seen any subsequent reader response yet, but two progs along I did spot this letter:

Awesome. I take it that Judge Anderson was just about to leave the drawing board. I couldn’t resist the temptation to skip forward to 1984 and see my favourite Joe Dredd and Casandra Anderson story, City of The Damned, kick off:

There’s a good reason I have Steve Dillon’s work on my arm. To me it was here that 2000AD really grabbed my attention and never really let go.

I wouldn’t be writing a TV show if it wasn’t for this comic. In particular, Slingers came from a direct response to the decline of the 2000AD. The story was originally called Rat Packers and owed a lot more to Robo Hunter and Rogue Trooper in those early drafts than the concept it’s now evolved into.

I’m also glad to say it has a whole bunch of strong female characters and that show #2, De-Tech, has a female lead. I may well have to rename her Casandra…

There’s another issue here about the gender trap of course. Some of my favourite later 2000AD writers and artists started out as readers and went on to influence yet another generation of readers. None of them are women.

I do remember Jan Shepard getting a mention in David Bishop’s Thrill-Power Overload. She was one of the original art editors on the comic. Her assistant at the time, Kevin O’Neill, went on to co-create  Nemesis the Warlock, Marshall Law and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

What became of his boss  after she left for Starlord I have no idea…

A few months ago I saw an extended trailer for the new Pixar movie WALL-E and it immediately stood out thanks to a barrage of visual gags and an animation style that was both stunning and beautiful. I’ve been eager to find out if the delight I felt in watching the snippet would carry through for the whole movie. The image that I took away that evening was the rusty battered robot hanging on with one arm to a spacecraft in flight while allowing his free hand to wade through an ice field:

There’s been a lot of talk online comparing WALL-E to Short Circuit (which I hoped was lazy linking as the robot in that movie is about as endearing as a lump in the testicle), but as I watched that little guy hanging onto the ship I was immediately hit by memories of The Black Hole and more importantly Silent Running.

I was really looking forward to seeing it.

I got my chance at a press screening last night and as soon as it started I felt all those expectations and the NEED to see a good sci-fi movie taken out of my hands, pushed to one side and given a little reassuring pat on the head. Any worries I had simply fell away as Pixar gave me far far more than I expected.

WALL-E is by far the best movie I’ve seen this year.

I’ll go further and say it’s the best thing to come out of Pixar to date and has given me renewed faith in what can be done with technology in a medium that at its heart is about delighting the audience in a very old fashioned way. This story of a love sick robot and his accidental adventure that changes the lives of those that he bumps into (often literally) should be an easy target for a cynical bastard like me. But the little guy won me over immediately and in the same way that Harold Lloyd did when I was a kid.

By far the most interesting Pixar creation so far and what’s best is that he’s teamed with a for once formidable female lead in the sleek, smooth (and just a little bit deadly) Eve.

At its most basic level WALL-E is about an old school SONY tape deck trying to win the heart of an Apple iPod.

I dare any geek not to love that concept.

I have a lot of time for movie robots*. One of my first websites was nothing but movie robots, and Huey, Dewey and Louie from Silent Running are way up there. Whenever anyone talks about the wonders of 2001 A Space Odyssey I drag them back to reality by pointing out that Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 eco space movie is the real wonder. The relationship between Bruce Dern and his renamed drones is something that got under my skin at an early age and WALL-E has more than one nod to that movie.

I’m going to see WALL-E again as soon as it opens on the largest screen I can find and ideally on a weekend afternoon when the place is filled with kids. For all the joy an old nerd like me got out of it WALL-E is also a brave family movie that dares to swap obvious voice talent for some real story telling. It’s something I’ll be returning to here once everyone else has had a chance to see it.

I hope it makes a fucking fortune.

*Not as much as this guy. Check out his home built Dewy. If I was working on something like, I don’t know… the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still for example… I’d probably drop him a line.