Victorian robot is a history emcee

Artist Paul Guinan creates a cypher to chronicle adventures

By RANDALL BARTON

The Portland Tribune, Jan 22, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

©PAUL GUINAN

Top: Boilerplate, Paul Guinan’s Victorian robot creation, poses with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders atop San Juan Hill, 1898.

There is something iconic and immediately beguiling about Boilerplate, beginning with the simplicity of the robot’s design.

His cylindrical body and head are topped by a doughboy helmet. The trumpet mouth resembles the mouthpiece of a candlestick phone, and he has light fixtures for eyes. The robot’s blank expression invites comparisons to Edvard Munch’s famous painting, “The Scream,” but it’s his Zelig-like history that pulls people in.

The robot’s story is that he was unveiled at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and disappeared in the Argonne forest during World War I, standing shoulder to shoulder in history with everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to Pancho Villa.

People have discovered photos of the robot, in more modern times, on www.bigredhair.com or as the cover art on the Canadian band Stars’ release,“Sad Robots.” Many have wondered whether he really existed or is just a Victorian-era hoax, like the Piltdown Man and the Cardiff Giant.

In fact, Boilerplate is the invention of Portland comic artist Paul Guinan.

The robot began as a cartoon drawing, took form as a 12-inch articulated model, and — through the magic of Photoshop computer software — is now pictured in some of history’s great adventures.

The Web site www.bigredhair.com, which Guinan and his wife Anina Bennett founded in 1998, began featuring images of Boilerplate in 2000, and Guinan has continued to add story and images since then. In December of 2003, Boilerplate made the cover of Real Robots magazine and a month later was featured in the Christian Science Monitor. By January of 2004, his Web site was getting as many as 30,000 hits in a day.

Film on paper

Raised in an artistic Chicago home, Guinan followed his parents’ example and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Though he chose to study film, the expense of working in the medium caused him to fall back on his childhood love, comics.

“It’s like filmmaking on paper,” he said. “You can set up your shots, your special effects, a cast of thousands; you don’t have to worry about budget or other people telling you ‘well, we can’t shoot that.’”

Guinan began working as a staff artist at Chicago’s First Comics, one of the first independent comic book companies to set up direct distribution to specialty shops in the 1980s.

After leaving First Comics he created a series of female action heroes, called Heartbreakers, for Dark Horse Comics in Milwaukie, Ore.

“It was chicks packing guns and blowing stuff up,” Guinan explains. “At that time (1989), there was no precedent. There were women super heroes like Wonder Woman and Black Canary. But there was no naturalistic, street action hero. The only example in media at that time was Ripley from the ‘Alien’ movies.”

An editor at First Comics, his wife Anina Bennett helped him flesh the stories out. When she was offered a job at Dark Horse in 1991, the couple moved to Portland and bought their first house.

“I was part of the gold rush, or western migration to the Comic Mecca that Portland has turned out to be,” Guinan says. He founded a comic book studio in Southwest Portland called Periscope that became the industry’s largest and began as a means for freelancers to socialize, network and escape their home offices.

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