Toybox

Officer Robyn Slinger, AE Toybox, is a characer in Alan Moore's multi-Eisner award winning series Top 10. She is the newest recruit to Neopolis Police Department, Precinct Ten.

As with all Neopolis' citizens, Toybox is a science hero with her own distinctive abilities. She constantly carries a large black cube with one letter of her pseudonym on each face. It contains her guys, a small army of miniature robotic soldiers, helicopters, armoured vehicles and assorted oddities. Specifically named examples include Hueys and Chieftains.

While initially cowed by being paired with the eight foot tall, blue skinned, chronically anti-social Jeff Smax, she quickly makes a good impression on her first day as her machines methodically search for evidence and corner suspects. She is responsible for arresting Professor Gromolko, one of the Nazi scientists who first built Neopolis and who is now involved in some serious bad juju.

Toybox's automatons were made for her by her father, Colonel Lilliput. The Colonel is a retired science hero now looked after by Toybox. He suffers from Alzheimer's and her duty of care largely prevents her from having any meaningful social life. In the poignant end to the debut issue, she returns from her first day at Top 10 to find her father mutely watching television, unresponsive to her conversation and unmoved from his position that morning. Kissing his head, she quietly walks upstairs, head hung, and spends the night listening to late night radio blues alone.

Described in the creator notes in the first Top 10 collected edition as "an artsy do-it-yourself punk", Toybox's look shies away from the spandex-clad superhero that Top 10 often pokes fun at. She is generally seen in a mid-length coat and a cropped t-shirt bearing her science hero name. The series' main artist, Gene Ha, has designed her toys as Beetlejuice-esque curios, all transplanted Barbie doll heads and protruding clockwork mechanisms. They are also reminiscent of the toys belonging to Sid, the malevolent boy next door in the Pixar movie Toy Story.

In the series, she tends to be a strong supporting character rather than a lead role, somewhat overshadowed by more impressively superpowered colleagues such as Irma Geddon and Smax.