I appreciate how complex Artie’s character is. He is, as of this week of strips, shown to realise that some of his ‘humanitarian’ (for lack of an equally concise term that isn’t human centric) aid schemes are often poorly planned. Similarly, they often achieve negative results or are counter productive. He realizes this and has misgivings and regrets when his well-meant plans turn out this way. Yet he continues to create and enact these plans because he truly does want to help, and despite their chance of failure believes said schemes would help if they played out as he intended.

Yes, he does often end up indirectly (or directly) doing more harm than good to his causes (a trend continued in his skin Skin Horse appearances), but he does not intend to. Rather, his plans fall flat because he – in his enthusiasm to help – spends insufficient time ironing out flaws and planning countermeasures, or they fall flat because the universe itself conspires against their success for some reason. Usually giggles.

Artie’s sad!
Because he did bad …
He’s so sad,
His actions turned bad …
He’s sad!  It’s bad!
Madblood’s mad!

Robots, see!
They wanna be free!
They say, “We
Just wanna be free!”
So free … they’ll be,
‘Cause of me!

Artie’s worry that all of his actions are tainted by his freakishness, his artificialness, is putting a terrible stock into the viciousness of the universe, of nature opposing the will of the unnatural. Just as the unlawful scientists are enemies of human law, so too are their misformed creations enemies of natural law.

In fact [SPOILER], the only reason they end up being dangerous later on is because they weren’t freed in this storyline — they just ended up belonging to someone even crazier than Madblood.  So, granted, Artie (and Dave) trying to help them did have bad consequences, but I don’t think Artie could have been expected to realize what would happen.  [SPOILER]

I’m not trying to argue — plenty of Artie’s other projects, like creating Dana, seemed poorly-thought-out to me and ended in predictable disaster — but I just don’t see the Madblood bots fitting that pattern.