“R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Revised and illustrated by Kateřina Čupová. Trans. from the Czech by Julie Nováková. Written in 1920 by Karel Čapek. Lettering by Damian Duffy. Rosarium. $32.99. December 2024. 264 pages. All ages.
Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.
Check Fables out online at www.fablesbooks.com, order over the phone at 574-534-1984, or email them at fablesbooks@gmail.com.
Full disclosure: I contributed to the Backerkit campaign to help Rosarium release this book, and Rosarium’s founder, Bill Campbell, is a friend from college.
Karel Čapek is a foundational voice in the literature of the Czech Republic, but not as well known to most of the rest of the world. His main claim to fame is linguistic: he and his brother coined the word “robota” for his 1921 play, “R.U.R.,” or “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” The many versions and adaptations of this classic dystopian work include a 1922 Broadway production with young Hollywood film star Spencer Tracy, and a 1938 BBC television series, arguably the first science fiction show on television.
To Čapek, robots were not giant, clanking tin cans with monotone voices, but more organic beings. In his original vision, robots were much closer to humans, uncanny replacements for workers increasingly dehumanized by assembly lines and other pressures of mass production:
In Czech artist Katerina Čupová’s graphic novel version of R.U.R.—originally released by Argo in the Czech Republic—Čapek’s robots are also surprisingly colorful. I fell in love with this book when I first saw its cover, and the internal art proves just as stunning, page after page. Visions of ominous mass-anything tend toward the monochrome: black-and-white stills of Hitler’s marching troops, or ranks of all-white stormtroopers in the first “Star Wars”’s reimagining of nightmare fascist history. Yet Čupová chose to tell this story of mass mechanized dehumanization with bright watercolor. The effect is like a brilliant dark mirror of Mary Englebright gift-kitsch, or a kaleidoscope version of Fritz Lang’s deco noir classic “Metropolis.”
The story begins with Harry Domin, the CEO of a global robot factory, presenting his work and mission at a business conference. “What do you think makes the best worker?” he asks his audience. Domin oversees the mass production of the robots on which his futuristic world has come to depend. Although “Old Rossum,” the robots’ original inventor, created them with utopian rather than capitalistic goals, Domin’s job is to maximize production and profits. So of course the answer to his rhetorical question is not “loyalty” or “honesty” but “The lowest cost” and “Having the fewest needs,” as he further explains to Helena Glory, an idealistic ingenue touring the site:
Domin theorizes that with his robots taking on more and more “useful” work, humans will have more time to indulge in “useless” pursuits, such as “To go for a walk, or to play the violin,” and even “To feel joy.” Narrative and visual evidence throughout the book suggests that Domin’s philosophy isn’t working out as intended. Unemployed workers beg for coins on the street, and in an unsettling mystical twist, humans are rendered unable to reproduce.
Čupová’s adaptation is an especially powerful read in our current moment. With artificial intelligence scraping the work of creatives and intellectuals for profit, then labeling that same work “useless” when it comes to fair compensation, Domin’s 100-year-old speech sounds like it could have been delivered by a tech bro.
It remains unlikely that Silicon Valley’s sunny projections for AI’s effects on society, if allowed free reign, will turn out much better than Domin’s projections for his robot-driven world. This book feels not just prescient, but a testament to the elements of human-powered creative expression that machines simply can’t replicate. Čupová’s visually explosive style is fueled by its imperfection, especially in the tension between strong architectural lines and a watercolor wash that refuses precision (the alternately pink and purple stairs, for example, in this image):
Later in the story, as the order within the factory begins to erode, this mid-century modernist visual structure melts into a style closer to Expressionism:
Flaws and unpredictability make humans both beautiful and maddening. As Elias Rosner observes in his “Solrad” review of “R.U.R.,” Čupová’s choice of difficult-to-contain watercolor as a medium fits with the story’s warning against any too-perfect utopian vision. Neither is this book perfect: Čupová’s illustrations occasionally prioritize beauty over narrative clarity, and the gender dynamics in a 100-year-old play don’t translate well at times. These are minor details, however, in a work so vibrant, you can almost hear it hum like Domin’s factory.
Shout out as well to Damian Duffy’s expert and surprisingly delicate lettering. An art in itself, lettering is another area of human expertise too often handed off to clunky technology that misjudges sizing, line breaks, and other elements of comics design, thus drawing attention to the words rather than blending in with and supporting the visuals.
Čapek died young, not long before the Nazi regime, which had named him an enemy of the state for his essays warning against encroaching fascism, expanded an earlier territorial breach and took over his whole country (another disturbing detail echoed by today’s headlines).
Yet when the 1938 Munich Agreement essentially handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler, Čapek refused to abandon his faith in humanity. “It was politicians that did this, not ordinary people,” he wrote, as cited in a biographical piece on Radio Prague International. “When I think of Germany, I don’t think of Hitler—I think of the small pub where I drank and chatted with the locals.”
Similarly, Čapek refuses to give up on individuals in R.U.R., ending on a note of optimism—dark optimism, but optimism nonetheless, as suggested by this surprisingly lush page toward the end of the book:
Rosarium Press holds such a diverse roster of publications, I’m never surprised by a new title. I did wonder, however, how “R.U.R.” made its way there. “Argo hit me up with the project,” said writer, editor, artist, and Rosarium founder Bill Campbell in an email. “I don’t know how they heard about me, but folks do contact us from time to time. Since I lived there [in 1993] and loved Čapek’s ‘War with the Newts,’ I checked it out.”
Here’s hoping that a comics version of Čapek’s “War with the Newts,” widely considered his masterpiece, is next on the list for this brilliant creative team. Here’s also hoping that world leaders take warnings like Čapek’s and other enemies of fascism and authoritarianism more seriously in the twenty-first century than they did in the twentieth.