FEATURES MAKE BELIEVE

BRINGING MAKEY THE ROBOT TO LIFE

Written by Gareth Branwyn

Award-winning comic artist Shannon Wheeler joins MAKE.

I first met Shannon Wheeler in the 1990s, at ArmadilloCon, the influential Austin science fiction convention. He gave me a mini-comic of his Too Much Coffee Man (TMCM) strips and I’ve been a fan ever since. The lovable existentialism of the title character, a layabout not-so-superhero, with a giant coffee cup on his head (who gets his power from caffeine and nicotine) has endured. Shannon still does weekly TMCM strips on his tmcm.com site. He also does work for The Onion and The New Yorker, and his comics in The New Yorker even won him a 2011 Eisner Award.

I was thrilled to hunt down Shannon at the 2012 Comic-Con, where we enthusiastically started discussing the possibility of him doing a regular comic for MAKE. He was a fan of the magazine already and was anxious to explore the idea of working with us.

The result is Shannon’s take on Makey the Robot, the iconic Maker Faire mascot designed by Kim Dow. Shannon explains his idea behind the character:

“All of us are a combination of competence and fallibility, enthusiasm and self-doubt.”

“All of us are a combination of competence and fallibility, enthusiasm and self-doubt. Makey is a robot eagerly trying out new projects. I want to use him to express the conflicting feelings of creation we experience by using a fallible robot struggling with his own creations. I want to keep the dialog to a minimum to emphasize the emotional dimensions of our well-meaning hero. I want the cartoons to be poetry more than parody, a quiet commentary on the creative process. In future strips, Makey will go on many building adventures, deal with fellow robots, and meet other makers. Hopefully he won’t break or blow up too many things along the way.”

Look for additional episodes of Shannon’s “Makey” as the end page comic in future issues of MAKE. And perhaps we can even coax the ham-clawed one (Makey, not Shannon) to appear on the website from time to time, too.

Gareth Branwyn writes on art, DIY media, and technology, and is the former editorial director for Maker Media.