The comics audience sure has some long memories.

Got a couple emails over the weekend pointing me to the press release announcing my pal Paul Guinan's Heartbreakers meet Boilerplate and asking me why we're not publishing it since these folks had remembered seeing the Boilerplate maquette on the AiT/Planet Lar table in San Diego way back in 2000. One guy even remembered that Adam Beechen and I were supposed to be the writers!

There's no secret to it as far as I'm concerned; Paul wanted to do a different story than Adam and I did, so we gave Paul the name to do with what he would. Believe me, I'll be first in line to buy a copy from IDW this summer; that project looks sweet.

I did find this one page of notes that Adam and I used to verbally pitch Shelly Roeberg on the floor of a San Diego way back when. You can see our straight-adventure take is much different than Paul's immersively historical accuracy!

Boilerplate

The High Concept: Post-Civil War robots on the rampage!

Tag Line: "Party like it’s 1899"

The Duration: A three issue mini-series

The Theme: One can always aspire to be greater than the sum of one’s parts. Especially if one’s parts need oiling every once in a while...

The Skinny: Scarred emotionally and physically from the events of the American Civil War, carpetbagger and tinkerer Caleb Butler vows to honor his dead brother’s memory by constructing a pneumatic replacement. No other sons will die in useless conflict while there are steam-powered soldiers available. At least, such is Butler’s dream. While news of the success of Butler’s "independent automaton" spreads like Sherman’s flames throughout the recently reunited United States, unscrupulous men scheme to pry the secret of the piston-driven mannequin from the good-natured tinkerer. Unscrupulous men, indeed; men like railroad magnate Johnson Cole... who envisions an entire team of (well, OK, let’s say it) robots at his command. Cole first has his men kidnap Caleb Butler and forces him to create an army of automatons for the deranged railroad man. Taken away from his tool shed, and in fear for the safety of his prototype (which escaped Cole’s men), Butler produces a cadre of inferior copies. Each attempt, while bearing superficial similarities, all go horribly awry. One begins to see that the success of the prototype hinged upon Butler’s input of his dead brother’s diary... Henry Butler was an inherently good man, and the copies of the prototype are merely weapons platforms for Cole’s plans of global domination.

Meanwhile, the prototype has to learn to navigate society on his own... and is subsequently "adopted" by a Doc Savage-like band of assistants: Terrific Nelson, an Oscar Wilde-level epigrammatist with a hidden secret (his powers of persuasion and cleverness are not his own); Jolly Goode, the English thespian and master of disguise most famous in the States for his revue "The Jolly Goode Show"; and the winsome and enigmatic Cervelle, a French beauty that is, in fact, the hidden brains of the outfit.

Boilerplate and his band of familiars then attempt a rescue of the kidnapped scientist and subsequently battle Cole’s army of robots. Imagine a bloody battle not unlike that of Little Big Horn with swarms of hydraulic robots amassing over the rolling plains... and only a plucky automaton with the soul of a man and his three friends there to oppose the monomaniacal plans of a madman...