Kingdom Come Spotlight: Robotman

I try to avoid cross-comic canon immigrants when I can, but I set the precedent by including Kingdom Come ones on this site, so I guess I have to continue. As a compromise, however, I will post these and any future ones like these on Saturdays.

If you're not familiar with Kingdom Come, it's about a future of the DC Universe and how older versions of the current heroes we know clash with the new generation of heroes. The whole thing was basically a satire of 90s superheroes compared to Silver Age superheroes, and it was very successful, both critically and commercially.

Nearly every character who appeared in it got a new design of some sort, and for the most part, the designs fell into one of a few categories:

1) A design that combines aspects of multiple identities of the character to make it unclear which identity it was. Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman are examples of this kind.

2) A design that combines multiple separate superheroes as certain heroes take on new identities. Red Arrow and Red Robin are examples of this kind.

3) A design that plays on the trends of modern superheroes. Magog and Kid Flash are examples of this kind.

4) Minor tweaks. Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are examples of this kind.

Robotman is an example of #2.

The original Robotman, Cliff Steele, was a founding member of the Doom Patrol, a team of misfits that banded together because they couldn't lead normal lives. His story was basically that he was a race car driver who got into a terrible accident, so his brain was put into a robot body.

Cyborg, aka Victor Stone, has a similar story. He was a football player instead of a race car driver, and the accident he got into varies based on the continuity we're talking about, but the result is the same: part of his body were replaced with cybernetic parts.

It's therefore not much of a stretch to reveal, like Kingdom Come did, that Cyborg eventually "graduates" into being the new Robotman. You can see here that he's now gold all over like the original Robotman, but the clothes he wears still mimic his Cyborg costume.

JLA/Titans was a miniseries that...well, except for launching the Titans ongoing series, I'm not exactly sure what happened in it. I've read the individual episode synopses but they didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But I do know that in issue #3 (December 1998), Cyborg gets a new, all gold body.

That, thankfully, didn't last, and he got his classic body back just in time for the new Teen Titans series in 2003.