Answers to questions!

Regarding the questions asked on the comments thread on the Breetai's stupid hat post early last week:

Anonymous: The difference between the AnimEigo Macross box set and the recent ADV Films release of Macross is that the AnimEigo discs feature fewer episodes per disc and only a single audio track, the original Japanese audio. The AnimEigo release is spread over nine discs. The ADV release is spread over seven discs and features that all-new English dub. In theory, I think this means that the image quality on the AnimEigo release should be a little more pristine-looking, a little less compressed-looking, though in practice I don't think you'll notice too much unless you've got some high end viewing equipment or a really sharp eye for that sort of thing.

Macross really doesn't come off as that different from ROBOTECH, at least to me. There were some issues with the translation on certain episodes of ROBOTECH during the teens where the dialogue was a lot clearer in Macross, a lot more exact and to the point, but the overall story and the character arcs were similar enough that I didn't feel like I had missed much by watching ROBOTECH first in my youth. It's still interesting to see the differences, but they're nowhere near as radical as they are in Mospeada, or especially Southern Cross.

MedMapGuy: There is no comic series set during the events of the novel Before The Invid Storm. However, many of the events of Before The Invid Storm are alluded to and quickly summed up in a few short flashback scenes in the pages of Bill Spangler and Tim Eldred's Invid War comic book series, issue #3 (published four years prior -- Luceno spun his plots out of Spangler & Eldred's more obscure work).

Honestly, Before The Invid Storm felt like a formality to me, one last gap that needed to be filled in the narrative of the McKinney ROBOTECH timeline. And yet, Luceno stops right before Spangler & Eldred's comic book series. Was it so as not to step on Spangler's toes again, as he had done in rewriting large chunks of Spangler's Malcontent Uprisings comic book series in the novel The Zentraedi Rebellion, or was it because he was just done telling the story he set out to tell and figured the events that followed weren't important to the narrative of the ROBOTECH novels? Who knows? Maybe someone should have asked him when he was on Space Station Liberty a few weeks ago. Me, I would have been more interested in a straight adaptation of Spangler & Eldred's Invid War series -- that's practically the only gap left in the McKinney novels' narrative, the time between the Invid Invasion and the arrival of Scott Bernard in Earthspace, and it's only plugged up with those first twelve issues (plus the Firewalkers one-shot) of the Invid War comic book series.

Anyway, hope that answers your questions.

Oh, and for the record, I only finished up two new entries on the comic blog during the past week: Robotech II: The Sentinels Book IV #13, the final Sentinels issue, and Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles #2. Both need to have image scans added -- didn't have the time to do any major scanning -- but the text is all there if you're interested. Next on deck is Robotech: The Macross Saga #36, the final issue of Comico's adaptation of the first generation of the ROBOTECH TV series. There's lots of little interesting points in that book where it diverges or adds to the events of the TV episode, and there are certain precedents it sets that the folks working on the comics at DC/WildStorm have been playing with a lot the past few years. It's an interesting piece, as I've pointed out before.