Robots

If you ever doubt that this world might be worth saving, consider the following: There is, right now, at this very moment, an engineer and roboticist in Japan named Kenji Ishida who is working on building a full-sized, drivable car that transforms into a humanoid robot that can shoot missiles out of its hand. If that news doesn't cheer you up (and make you at least slightly terrified) then really, I don't know what will.

Kick off the month of May with today's links.

It's the stuff every supervillain-in-training dreams of: A six-legged remote-controlled spider robot that can fire 25 foam darts in rapid succession (although I guess superheroes-in-training probably dream of it too). Say hello to the upcoming NERF Combat Creatrues Attacknid, the future of pretend warfare.

The greatest metafictional mecha warrior that never existed is set to spring from Crayon Shin-chan and onto toy shelves this June as Cantam Robo (a.k.a. Kantam Robo/Quantam Robo" gets the Super Robot Chogokin treatment from Bandai.

There is a dash of humor and a quiet emotional weight to Alexandre Diboine's largely sci-fi digital paintings. His astronauts contemplate their muted landscapes, and his robots often come with wide-eyed children in tow.

Filling the play demands that exists between Hasbro's main line of Transformers action figures and its bricky KRE-O building sets have come new Construct-Bots, customizable -- and yes, fully-transformable -- new robots in disguise due at retail on August 1. CA hit the toymaker's build-a-bot breakfast this morning to see what the line had to offer and, despite my best efforts to make the goofiest f

Over a lifetime of reading comics, Senior Writer Chris Sims has developed an inexhaustible arsenal of facts and opinions. That's why, each and every week, we turn to you to put his comics culture knowledge to the test as he responds to your reader questions!

The Man of Steel movie's June 14, 2013 release date is still a temporal leap over a tall building away, but for those seeking more info about the film's plot, have heart - a set of early leaked Mattel toy commercials may reveal new info about the threat Superman will face...

As near as I can tell, "robots are awesome" is accepted more as irrefutable fact than debatable opinion in today's pop culture scene. Taking this certainty into account, artist Daniel Nyari has created a poster that features 30 headshots of famous robots from film, television, and comics...

It can be tempting to treat robots as something entirely alien. The battle-ready robots that inhabit so much of science fiction come from a seemingly distant future, one where fashions and technologies are so removed from our own experiences that they may as well exist in another dimension...