Strip 36: No Promises

One of the concepts I wanted to challenge with Steel Salvation was the idea of mechanical life-forms as guilt-free cannon fodder. We see it more and more as films, television, and video games try to increase the amount of carnage their heroes perpetrate without increasing the moral burden on their characters or their audience. Want a superhero to single-handedly destroy an entire army? Robots! Want your action star to stylishly murder a bunch of things? Robots! It’s a cheap cop-out, and if audiences can accept and sympathize with an artificial intelligence (which they absolutely can), then it’s also disingenuous, because whether you’re spilling blood or circuits, it’s still the ending of a consciousness, and therefore murder. Roger is our audience stand-in here, as usual, and Dy-Gar is our alternative perspective, flawed as he is. The point is not to agree with Dy-Gar (he is, after all, a murderer), but to at least consider his logic and see if there’s any truth to it.

- J.S. Conner

July 19th 2021