I’ve espoused the merits of giant robots for years now and I doubt I’ll ever stop. There’s just something about people coming together to create a titanic effigy of steel that is ripe for creating myriad stories. This is the main reason that when a new comic series releases with some connection to giant robots, that series typically goes to the top of by to-be-read pile. And with the release of the first issue of Ram V, Evan Cagle, Dave Stewart, and Aditya Bidikar’s Dawnrunner, I’m always going to have more of these behemoths to write about.

Earth has been invaded. A portal opened above Guatemala and the Tetza entered our world for the first time. Giants with near invulnerability, everything the Earth had to defend itself against the invading force was essentially useless. It was only with the building of two things was human life able to persist: the 1800 mile long wall surrounding where the Tetza roam and the Iron Kings. The former has helped keep the remaining humans safe from immediate threats while the latter is deployed to deal with the Tetza as soon as they come into range of the wall. Anita Marr is one of many Iron King pilots—considered the best by kill count and celebrity status alone. But her old faithful mech, Kylar, is being retired in favor of something new, Dawnrunner. Heralded as the future of Iron King tech, Anita takes the new mech out for a routine fight just outside the wall.

Dawnrunner plays with our expectations. We see giant robots. We see pilots all competing with one another to be the best. We see new technology and our protagonist struggling to get used to it. We can see the general arc of the story and how it can be told. But those expectations lead to us being all the more susceptible to the twist in this story. We’re expecting Anita to have trouble adjusting to her new mech, we’re not expecting her brain to be melded with someone from the past who fought the Tetza in the initial ground war. From this point, we immediately begin to question our own perception of what’s happened up to this point. Was this purely the work of the new mech or was there something more happening? Why these two minds and how are they connected from the past to the present?

V, Cagle, Stewart, and Bidikar have touched on even more than what I’ve gone over in just thirty-two pages while creating the kind of hook that almost forces a reader to come back for the second issue. There’s a density of world building and plot that the team achieve here that’s difficult to create in a first issue without feeling like the lore is simply being dumped onto us. That balance between all of these disparate elements in such a small space already makes us want to see how much more of this world can spring forth through the rest of the series. 

Get excited. Get iron.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.