The first issue of Frank Miller Robocop came out in July 2003. The last issue came out this past Wednesday. That's what, thirty-two months, give or take? When the project was announced, I really liked Frank Miller. He'd written Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns after all. The story of Frank Miller and Robocop 2 is... somewhat known. After watching Robocop, Miller sat down the next day and knocked out a script for the sequel. He was just done with Dark Knight Returns, so he was a somebody and he's got co-writer credit on Robocop 2. He's also got co-writer credit on Robocop 3, but all of that material appears to have come from his script for Robocop 2, at least as evidenced by Frank Miller Robocop. Miller didn't do the adaptation, Steven Grant did. I find the assignment interesting, since Grant's a raving liberal and Miller's a raving conservative (these days, anyway, I have no idea about back in the late 1980s).
I like a lot of things about Robocop 2, the acting, the directing, the cinematography. Frank Miller Robocop doesn't have better moments, doesn't have better scenes (except Robo kissing Lewis, sorry, spoiled it... you probably weren't going to buy anyway). It doesn't feel like a cop comic book and Robocop, regardless of medium, needs to feel like a cop story. What the film did--and it's impossible to discuss Frank Miller Robocop on its own terms, because it's a response to a poorly received film--was make Robocop a character. Peter Weller helped a lot with that task, but the comic doesn't. The comic makes everyone else into characters and spends almost as much time on the funny commercials and news reels as it does on Robocop. The pacing is wrong. The first three issues (of nine) probably took a good eight minutes a piece, given it's Avatar and Avatar has a low story page-count anyway, I was happy. Then, around issue five or six, it gets rolling and doesn't stop. Instead of a half-hour action packed conclusion to a movie, I get an issue that takes three minutes to read. The art on this book, by Juan Jose Ryp, is insanely detailed, but this detail doesn't make any more compelling than if it had been bland. You can't tell what's going in many cases.
Obviously, Robocop is a difficult property. The first film is brilliant and wonderful and I love and recommend to thinking people everywhere, but it's not conducive to a sequel. There's no happy ending. Frank Miller Robocop paints a happy picture at the end and it's not an effective, because there was no build-up to it through the nine issues. If this comic book is an accurate adaptation of Miller's original script, the director must have shook his head and hired a rewriter immediately. There are no layers, there's nothing for the reader to connect with... It's incredibly shallow. The original Robocop (and even Robocop 2 to some extent) were anything but shallow.
Thank Peter Weller.
Oh, last thing. The comic book redesigns the Robocop 2 robot from the movie. Don't do something like that--and there are other examples, which I cannot think of at the moment--don't redo something and do it worse... but that might just be a description of Frank Miller Robocop. And Robocop 2 wasn't anything great (or even good) to begin with.