ABOUT THE ROBOTS
Current Robot Greg has read enough author bios that he should be better at coming up with one for himself, yet surprisingly isn’t. However, the years of comic reading his parents told him would never pay off obviously have, so we’ll cut him some slack on this.
He lives in Baltimore, hosts this show, contributed to Multiversity Comics as both a podcaster and a columnist (Multiver-City One, Soliciting Multiversity: Best of the Rest, and the comics binding column Shelf Bound), and can be followed on BlueSky at @gregmatiasevich.bsky. social.
Robot Emeritus Mike started reading comics when splash pages were kind and the proper proportions of a human being meant nothing. Part of him will always feel that way.
From 2013 to 2021 he was co-host of this very show and also an editor & frequent contributor to Multiversity Comics, including founding of the weekly Multiver-City One column that covered all of Tharg’s thrill-powered 2000AD offerings for over a decade.
F.A.Q.s
so what's the robots from tomorrow origin story?
Pretty straightforward actually.
I co-hosted an unaffiliated podcast called The Next Issue, with Harry Cee back in the late 2000s. TNI was a MUCH looser affair than what RFT ended up becoming. Harry met Mike at the 2010 Baltimore Comicon and invited him to join TNI, which he thankfully did. Mike’s presence helped whip that show into shape. For instance, it was Mike’s idea to start doing the weekly Pull List episodes as a way to both stay timely AND build up a better recording/posting rhythm.
In 2011, Mike ran into Brian Salvatore and the Multiversity Comics gang at another show (probably NYCC) and got the invite for TNI to join their podcast rotation later that year.
Mike and I parted ways with Harry in 2013, and TNI was quickly relaunched as RFT without missing even one Pull List episode!
(I would say without missing a beat, but anyone listening to our very first episode will hear a brief-but-hysterical bump in the road to RFT…)
WHERE CAN I HEAR THE NEXT ISSUE EPISODES?
Unfortunately, like most things on the internet, the vast majority of those episodes have been lost to server changeovers or other such tech disasters. The few remaining TNI episodes will be moved onto the RFT feed as Season Zero episodes, and tagged here as such as well.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE EPISODE NUMBERING?
Short answer? Math was never our strongest suit. Longer answer?
TNI put out its episodes on two separate feeds rather than the single-feed RFT method: a main feed for episodes with all three of us, and an interview/specials feed for more individually produced episodes. The main feed episodes had their own consistent numbering tracks (one for the Pull List episodes, and one for general discussion episodes), while the specials feed went unnumbered.
When RFT started in September 2013, Mike and I ditched the two-feed system. However, we kept the Pull List episode numberings and started over numbering for the non-Pull List episodes, so RFT Episode 1 was our discussion of MARCH: BOOK ONE, even though it was the third episode on our feed. We finally streamlined numbering with our 100th overall episode (the Amy Reeder & Brandon Montclaire ROCKET GIRL interview), and just continued the numbering from there.
In setting up this new archive, this seemed like a nice opportunity to do some straightening out of the back catalog. For instance, some earlier RFT episodes combined interview subjects for purely Multiversity Comics posting and scheduling reasons. In a perfect world, each interview would have been their own episodes, so those instances will now be separated accordingly. Moves like this means subsequent episodes would need to be renumbered. Keeping overall numbering in the titles would really f*#king confuse things, so their being dropped from the titles.
That said, the episode posting dates will stay the same, so category browsing will still have episodes come up in chronological order, and the Pull List episodes will have their overall number included in the episode post (because we did over 400 or so of those bad boys and I get a kick out of it).
WHERE'S THE REST OF THE ARCHIVE?
All RFT episodes are still available on our podcast feed and on our LibSyn archive site.
This site is basically a more curated and comprehensive version of that LibSyn archive. But with 800+ episodes of content to review, refresh, and repost, that’s going to take some time. So in the interest of not having things look like a complete mess in the meantime, we’re going to be releasing updated episode posts and content on an ongoing basis.
What other content, you ask?
Well, one of the gifts Multiversity Comics gave us was NOT owning any of the material we produced for the site. So some of the material Mike & I made for that site has been moved over here. Things like my Palomar censorship article or Shelf Bound columns on comics binding, or Mike’s Never Just Say ‘That Sucks’: A Guide to Discussing Comic Art primer for incoming Multiversity Comics writers.