Eytan Wronker
Fantasy Children's Book & Cartoon Illustration

ROBOCOSM FAQ’s

ROBOCOSM FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions)

Q: Where can I buy a copy of your Robocosm book?

A: Sadly, it does not yet exist and is therefore unavailable right now. As I've mentioned on my "News" page I have a new idea about how to present the book to publishers and I'm working on that now. I'm trying hard to make the book a reality, but there are many obstacles. I still believe in the project though and I still feel there is hope, so keep watching this website and if there's good news I will certainly announce it here.

Q: How do you pronounce Robocosm? 

A: It's pronounced "Robo-kozzim" as in "cosmic" or "cosmos", meaning "universe". It's about a sort of a "Microcosm" inside the Robot Body, therefore "Robot" + "Cosm"= "Robocosm". I originally thought "Robotopia" (having been inspired in part by "Dinotopia") but I googled that and came up with a few hits, so I came up with a new name that is all mine.

Q: These illustrations are so detailed and elaborate. How long does it take you to draw them?

A:   That is the one question I’m asked most frequently, and I suppose it is a very sensible question. I also suppose I’m not always a very sensible person, because whether I’m creating my own artwork or appreciating someone else’s, I rarely give much thought to how long it takes to make it. I’m more focused on how can I make it look as close as possible to the way I want it to look.

So how long does it take me to attempt that? The short answer is: it takes me a long time. A little bit longer answer: it is impossible really to say for a number of reasons. I generally don’t just start on one illustration and work on it till it’s finished. Instead I typically start one illustration and work it up a few hours at a time (without making any sort of attempt to record how long I’ve been working on it) to a certain point and then I move on to another illustration.

Sometimes it is weeks or months or years before I return to the original drawing and get back to work on it. Altogether from the time I started working on Robocosm to the time I felt it was (more or less) finished was about twelve years. In fact if you really want to go all the way back to when did the ideas for these images begin to form in my mind, that would be back in my childhood so you could say I’ve been working on this my whole life!

Q: Do you use a computer to create these illustrations?

A: No. I make them the old fashioned way. I draw them with a pencil, ink them with a pen, and paint them with watercolor paints.

Q: What was your inspiration for Robocosm?

A: There is no simple answer to that question but the idea of living inside a furnished environment inside my own head and body was one that occurred to me when I was a child. Robocosm is a fantasy It was so long ago I cannot remember how old I was. You could say that as a child I lived “inside my head”. Who doesn’t, at times? Some of us even more so when we “grow up”! In my imagination, however, I thought about what it might be like if I could literally go and live inside my head when the world of outside “reality” just wasn’t measuring up.

The 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage” made a big impression on me. What a cool idea to shrink people down and send them inside a human body. Maybe that’s what got me thinking. Maybe when I thought about that movie (I also read the novelization, written by the great Isaac Asimov) I asked myself some wacky questions and came up with some wacky answers.

What if you could go inside your own body? And what if it was actually hospitable and pleasant in there… furnished with comfortable rooms connected by corridors and elevators rather than just an organic mess of cells and germs and antibodies?

And what if you could control the outside from the inside and even set it on “autopilot”? Then you could just do whatever you want in there and still give the appearance on the outside that you were sitting there in the classroom and listening to the teacher’s boring lecture! After all, your robot assistants could take notes for you and (if you really want to take this all the way) telepathically transfer them into your brain when you’re ready to go to sleep!

The paradox of going into your own body, and the idea that it would be habitable, seemed too bizarre to me to work into a story even it was a fantasy. The solution I eventually decided on was that the outer body would actually be a robot double, built to resemble the self to the most minuscule detail.

As children my sister and I had a collection of little Troll dolls (then better known as Wishniks) and I still have a sketch I did of the interior of a Wishnik equipped with miniaturized living quarters including beds and televisions for the comfort of the little Wishnik (or Wishniks) living within. As I recall had learned about pregnancy  (though my understanding of it was perhaps a little fuzzy) and the idea was that the unborn baby Wishnik would be living in there for nine months and would surely be bored to death if there was nothing to do in there, so I provided a stimulating environment. Here is another drawing I did around the same time of a tree comfortably furnished to accomodate Wishniks and other living critters. It is dated 1964, which would make me around 7 years old when I drew it. I revisited this idea in Robocosm, and you can see an example in image #13 in my online gallery.

Q: But which artists have inspired you in your work?

A: Many different artists have inspired me. As far as “fine” artists I was always most attracted to the work of those who injected some fantasy element into their art, such as M.C. Escher and the Surrealists. A lot of my desire to draw came from reading Mad Magazine and tons of comic books, including DC, Marvel, Underground comics, etc.

A lot of people look at my work and see the influence of Robert Crumb and/or some other artists, and they’re right… too many to name... maybe you can make your own guesses based on what you see... all of them inspired me and I only hope my artwork is halfway worthy of them.

Certainly E.H. Shepard's illustrations in Winnie-the-Pooh were among my earliest inspirations. My mother, who has had a distinguished career as a calligrapher and illustrator, used to read these stories to my sister and me when we were little. Our favorite character was Piglet... which explains why there are so many pigs in Robocosm! Our mother also encouraged us to draw when we were growing up and even helped correct some of my flawed illustrations when I started working on Robocosm.

Q: Do you plan to do a sequel to RoboCosm?

A: I have some sequel ideas but no, there is no plan to do a sequel, especially if I can’t make any progress towards marketing the Robocosm work I’ve already finished. 

Q: In "Boarding the Robot," why is the clock-man in the lower left corner holding a toothbrush?  

A: That "clock-man" (I call them "Chrono-Fighters") is Sir Realistik (loosely based on Salvador Dali) and he's holding a toothbrush because he was brushing his teeth when this miniaturization/teleportation took place and he got sucked into the space/time vortex for a millionth of a second... he probably won't even remember it when it's all over. Sir Realistik, definitely the most eccentric of the Chrono-Fighters, is one of the more minor characters in Robocosm but maybe he’ll play a larger role if there’s ever a sequel.

His name is a pun, btw. Sir Realistik = Surrealistic. There are other puns and word plays scattered throughout Robocosm as well, although you needn't catch the puns or any of the other details in order to follow the story or enjoy the illustrations.

Besides the trademark spiky mustache, another clue to Sir Realistik's persona is his melted timepiece, based on Dali's most famous painting "The Persistence of Memory." All the other Chrono-Fighters have a reflective helmet covering their head and a round analog clock on their chest, but Sir Realistik's helmet is smashed to show his face and mustache, and his clock is always melted... although in "Boarding the Robot" the stretched out clock is even more exaggerated because it is distorted by the gravitational pull of a black hole. 

Q: The underwater world of Atlantis in the “Robocosm Bathtub” is spectacular!  But I've spent several minutes trying to determine what happens when the bathtub drains.  Surely, all those wonderful creatures go into a state of suspended animation, like Sea Monkeys, and are revived by water when Max next takes a bath. OK, I get it, they all live inside the robot, and reenter when the bathtub is drained...there are no permanent denizens of the underwater world?

A: Something like that... Ultra-Brain and Professor Tiberius have also postulated another explanation involving parallel universes, inverse time-flow, and some kind of inter-dimensional nexus. When I last saw them they were still debating some of the finer points of string theory mathematical equations. Quite frankly it all went way over my head… but apparently Atlantis continues to exist in some other dimension when the bathtub is drained.