Oct. 24, 2014 | 12:33 p.m.

A new compendium about the cyborg film franchise RoboCop is out this week, and Hero Complex readers get an exclusive sneak peek at some images from the book.

RoboCop: The Definitive History, from Titan Books, includes stills and behind-the-scenes images, concept art, storyboards, script extracts and new interviews.

RoboCop: The Definitive History. (Titan Books)

The 224-page hardcover is penned by British writer and documentary filmmaker CalumWaddell (Slice and Dice: The Slasher Film Forever). The illustrated history chronicles the making of Paul Verhoevens1987 sci-fi classic as well as its sequels, TV spinoffs and this years reboot from Brazilian filmmaker Jos Padilha.

The film franchise follows Alex Murphy played by Peter Weller in the 1987 film and Joel Kinnamanin the 2014 remake a cop who dies in the line of duty only to wake up as a part-man, part-robot police officer tasked with cleaning up a crime-ridden, dystopian Detroit. Verhoevens satiric film, which earned two Oscar nominations, was underscored by political commentary and made waves for its over-the-top violence and gore.

The morality thats endemic to the movie is hard to replicate, Weller said at a 2012 screening of the film. It makes you laugh and cry and moves you, and its hysterical and horrible and all those unbelievable things at once.

The 2014 reimagining, which incorporated drone politics and Padilhas documentary filmmaking sensibility, was met with mixed reviews but earned more than $240 million at the worldwide box office.

Once you have a superhero movie that is not based on the fact that kids want to be that superhero, then the movie has to rely on other things, Padilha told Hero Complex last year. What RoboCop did, the original one, was to rely on politics, social and ethical, and very, very interesting aesthetic decisions about violence and how violence is portrayed in the movie. And we kind of did the same thing, because actually you cannot do something different with it because its the nature of the character. Not even Alex Murphy wants to be RoboCop in the first movie. So once you have a character like that, its not the same thing as Iron Man. Its a different approach altogether.

Noelene Clark |@NoeleneClark|Google+

Read more from the original source:

RoboCop: The Definitive History': See exclusive images from the book