What's Past is Prelude Again: Examining the Shadow Chronicles Comic Preview (Part 5)
Finishing up this series a bit late, what with everyone having seen the book and all. But there's a couple of things still worth noting on the big two-page spread ...
As I note here, there is a page in-between this spread and the other pages bundled in the preview. It's the page where Rick and Jean see Kyle's face, and then the Inorganics start pouring out of the Tiresian Royal Hall pyramid, in a replay of this scene here in Sentinels Book IV #13.
The first point is the coloration of the Invid Inorganics. Scrims and Cranns, the models we see here, do not appear in the animation, as I recall, but all the Inorganics we DO see in the animation -- the Odeons and Cougars/Hellcats -- are blue. The covers of the Sentinels comics were notorious for bizarre off-model coloration, oftentimes making Invid green when they're always shown to be sort of magenta, fox-like Garudans a sort of forest green, and giving Rick's old Macross-era flight helmet a sort of green gradient effect which makes for a striking cover, but is hardly accurate. So the sort of rust red that the Inorganics sometimes appeared to be on the Sentinels covers seems to me a trifle dubious. Blue would probably be most apt.
And yet, here they are sort of grey. And I think I know the source of that color.
Robotech Art 3 is about the best source of information ever published on the Sentinels animation project. Unfortunately, a lot of the lineart in the book has thick, blotchy lines and has been colored in black, grey, and a very intense red. Hm, what colors are those Inorganics? Why, they're gray and ... red. Oh dear. The colorist was given the page from Robotech Art 3 to go off of, wasn't he? Ah well. At least it makes a kind of sense.
Then there's the matter of the ship Edwards escapes in. I think it's a new design that appears in Shadow Chronicles. I've snatched this outline of a ship from the mecha size comparison chart in the Shadow Chronicles section of Robotech.com and have circled the various points that lead me to believe this is the one. In the finished comic book it's referred to as a prototype, so I figure I'm probably right. The image file calls it a "Shimakaze," but since the filename for the ship we know to be the SDF-3 (it matches the design seen on the cover of Prelude issue #1) is identified as a "Shinano," I find the name highly dubious.
Shimakaze translates to "island wind," and was the name of a prototype naval destroyer used by the Japanese at the end of World War II (1943), fast and powerful as well as the pinnacle of warship technology at that point in history, but deployed a bit late to do much of anything to turn the tide in their favor. Shinano is also the name of a World War II Japanese vessel, a large one-of-a-kind aircraft carrier -- the largest built by ANYONE until the '50s -- completed November 1944 and sunk by an American submarine at the end of the same month. Shinano is also the name of a river in Honshu, Japan.
Who wants to take bets that these are the actual designations of these ship designs when Shadow Chronicles is released in Japan as a Mospeada sequel?
That wraps up the preview. Now, to patiently wait for my very own copy of the book itself ... and in the meantime, I've got a few odds and ends I'd like to bring up over the next few days, to keep you all coming back until then.
As I note here, there is a page in-between this spread and the other pages bundled in the preview. It's the page where Rick and Jean see Kyle's face, and then the Inorganics start pouring out of the Tiresian Royal Hall pyramid, in a replay of this scene here in Sentinels Book IV #13.
The first point is the coloration of the Invid Inorganics. Scrims and Cranns, the models we see here, do not appear in the animation, as I recall, but all the Inorganics we DO see in the animation -- the Odeons and Cougars/Hellcats -- are blue. The covers of the Sentinels comics were notorious for bizarre off-model coloration, oftentimes making Invid green when they're always shown to be sort of magenta, fox-like Garudans a sort of forest green, and giving Rick's old Macross-era flight helmet a sort of green gradient effect which makes for a striking cover, but is hardly accurate. So the sort of rust red that the Inorganics sometimes appeared to be on the Sentinels covers seems to me a trifle dubious. Blue would probably be most apt.
And yet, here they are sort of grey. And I think I know the source of that color.
Robotech Art 3 is about the best source of information ever published on the Sentinels animation project. Unfortunately, a lot of the lineart in the book has thick, blotchy lines and has been colored in black, grey, and a very intense red. Hm, what colors are those Inorganics? Why, they're gray and ... red. Oh dear. The colorist was given the page from Robotech Art 3 to go off of, wasn't he? Ah well. At least it makes a kind of sense.
Then there's the matter of the ship Edwards escapes in. I think it's a new design that appears in Shadow Chronicles. I've snatched this outline of a ship from the mecha size comparison chart in the Shadow Chronicles section of Robotech.com and have circled the various points that lead me to believe this is the one. In the finished comic book it's referred to as a prototype, so I figure I'm probably right. The image file calls it a "Shimakaze," but since the filename for the ship we know to be the SDF-3 (it matches the design seen on the cover of Prelude issue #1) is identified as a "Shinano," I find the name highly dubious.
Shimakaze translates to "island wind," and was the name of a prototype naval destroyer used by the Japanese at the end of World War II (1943), fast and powerful as well as the pinnacle of warship technology at that point in history, but deployed a bit late to do much of anything to turn the tide in their favor. Shinano is also the name of a World War II Japanese vessel, a large one-of-a-kind aircraft carrier -- the largest built by ANYONE until the '50s -- completed November 1944 and sunk by an American submarine at the end of the same month. Shinano is also the name of a river in Honshu, Japan.
Who wants to take bets that these are the actual designations of these ship designs when Shadow Chronicles is released in Japan as a Mospeada sequel?
That wraps up the preview. Now, to patiently wait for my very own copy of the book itself ... and in the meantime, I've got a few odds and ends I'd like to bring up over the next few days, to keep you all coming back until then.
posted by Captain JLS at
16:43
1 Comments:
Regarding the Mospeada issue, I know a thing or two that point me in that direction (he said with a grin).
As for the gray-red thing, yes, all the lineart in that book is those colors, except for the pages on the Flower of Life, which have the Flowers in single shades of red, green, yellow, and blue. I suspect a scan of the page in question was the culpret in that particular coloration, because otherwise, yeah, you'd think the colorist would go, "Oh, it's ALL that color." I suspect a similar situation resulted in Kyle's monochromatic Sentinels-style Expeditionary Force uniform ...
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Captain JLS, at 03 October, 2005 22:01
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