DAY THIRTY-EIGHT: Return to Macross #22 - Storming the Gates (1995)

Written September 14, 2010

By Bill Spangler (writer) & Wes Abbott (artist)


(10) Yep, we're taking a few steps back today to root around in the back issue bins and turn back the clock in the ROBOTECH chronology as well -- back to the days before the Zentraedi invasion, when Robotechnology was all shiny and new to the people of Earth, and Roy Fokker was running around Macross Island shoving his nose into places where it didn't belong and occasionally punching terrorists in the face. As I said some time ago, I'm setting aside a few slots on the calendar to talk about "War of the Believers," Wes Abbott's four-issue swan song on RETURN TO MACROSS, which Academy Comics later collected in a skinny little hundred-some-odd-page graphic novel.

(9) This first installment opens with Nina Lang, lead singer of of Absolute Zero and the sister of Dr. Emil Lang, doing an anti-Robotechnology commercial for the Faithful, the religious group that believes the SDF-1 was placed on Earth as a new Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She's been rattled by the fortress ever since the incident where the mentally unstable RDF would-be instructor Shane Gleason had a nasty flashback in the middle of the night and stole a Destroid to try and "escape" his "captors." Gloval remarked back in the first issue that the stress of living around the battle fortress had driven some people off  the deep end, but Gleason's experiences during the Global Civil War had pushed him WAY over and endangered the lives of everyone on the island. The Faithful discovered her misgivings and, given that Robotechnology's chief expert, he of the mysterious all-black eyes, is her brother, gave her a platform to offer those misgivings up to the world.

That, I think, is a shrewd little bit of plotting. Spangler worked this out nicely; he added a singer to the cast, important for anything with "Macross" in the title, and at the same time added the character as a relative to an existing character in a way that made good sense for the plot.

Dr. Lang's response to the situation is to offer to debate his sister on the topic live on MBS -- a debate he would, of course, win hands down, being the world's foremost expert on Robotechnology. Good for his job and the advancement of science, bad for his relationship with his sister.

(8) Enter our villains, chief among them future Southern Cross Supreme Commander Anatole Leonard. Spangler wrote a few stories with Leonard as one of the "villains" -- THE MALCONTENT UPRISINGS, CYBERPIRATES, and MECHANGEL among them. His appearance here tracks from points Luceno made in THE ZENTRAEDI REBELLION (itself based on Spangler's MALCONTENT UPRISINGS), and even before that the characterization he and Brian Daley offered up in the three novels based on the Robotech Masters episodes of ROBOTECH -- Leonard as anti-alien religious zealot. Here he's presented as a former member of the Faithful pushing his own extremist agenda, associating with thugs and mercenaries to further his cause. I always feel bad enjoying this, MALCONTENTS and its novel counterpart, and the Masters novels because I truly dislike their take on Leonard, but there's more than enough good in all these stories that I can't hate them -- and I especially find it difficult to blame the writers since I found the root of that all the way back in ROBOTECH ART 1 (again, the very first line in his bio in what was touted at the time as "The Official Guide to the Robotech Universe:" "Supreme Commander Leonard is a pathetic bigot.").

Anyway, Leonard's plan in this first installment of "War of the Believers" is to disrupt the testing of the latest Destroid model, the Spartan (today referred to by its original MACROSS name, the Phalanx). In order to succeed, he enlists the help of one Reynaldo DaSilva, a scruffy thug in a wife beater who becomes a more major villain during the final stretch of RETURN TO MACROSS, when it was drawn by the then-not-ready-for-prime-time Dusty Griffin. More on all that later, if I wind up especially hard up for material sometime next year.

(7) Despite the fact that the test of the Spartan was supposed to be top secret, Leonard's cohorts manage to assemble a crowd of around a hundred and fifty people to protest the event. It's guarded by armored GMP officers, which despite how well drawn they are always look a little odd mixed up with Macross characters and settings.

It looks a little funny seeing Anatole Leonard, clad in his nice suit, personally setting the bomb that will cause the explosion that distracts the GMP and disrupts the test. Doesn't he have any trusted lackeys? Or wait, I think that sort of becomes a plot point in the next couple of issues.

(6) When the explosion goes off and his right hand girl Jessie leads the crowd onto the testing field, one of the characters who runs onto the field is obviously FATAL FURY/KING OF FIGHTERS's Terry Bogard, complete with ball cap, ponytail, and sleeveless jacket with "NEO GEO" written on the back. He even says, as he's running onto the field, "Come on, come on!" which is what Terry says at the start of each match in most of the KOF games.

(5) While the GMP prepares to gas the protestors, Roy notices DaSilva taking snapshots of the Destroid. Again, seeds for later storylines; also, today it wouldn't be anywhere near as obvious, given digital photography, cameras in every cell phone, or even in cases like this more discrete methods of shooting pictures for folks with the right connections, as DaSilva would have. Roy, being Roy, shoves past the GMP officers to take DaSilva down, but while he gets a good uppercut in, his efforts are undercut by the GMP's blanket gassing of the area.

(4) The issue ends with Roy expressing his doubts that this is the Faithful and a mysterious figure halfway across the world deciding it's time to return to Macross Island. That mysterious figure turns out to be the long-absent Charles Conrad Wilbur, the founder of the Faithful who couldn't bring himself to destroy Roy's VF-1J prototype back in issue #4 using that bomb supplied by T.R. Edwards and planted by mechanic Rob Leeds -- in one of Spangler's less successful, more eye-rolling relationship ties, the brother of future SDF-1 bridge tech Vanessa Leeds. Wilbur is planning on returning to the island to denounce the violent protests. This, as you can imagine, won't end well for him.

(3) As you can see, it's a very brief opening story; it's paced with big, wide open panels that would actually translate well to manga size. Some of the emptier panels would probably look better at the smaller size, to boot. There's one panel in particular that just has a couple of GMP armors with no background that looks especially unfinished and empty. Interesting that, because the next issue has a lot more action and detail, and Abbott uses a lot of screentones there as well. I get the feeling he probably paced production to give more attention to the busier story.

(2) Emptiness of panels and brevity of story aside, it's another lovely issue from Abbott. As the Destroid walks out, it looks appropriately massive. I love the way Nina, as she's standing on the shoreline of Macross Island in the commercial, has the wind blowing her hair in her face; it's a really nice touch. His characters are always so full of character; when DaSilva comes into Leonard's apartment, he leaps over the back of the couch to get on it, and Jessie shies away and steps out for a smoke. So many nice little touches.

And seriously, the guy can draw a mean GMP combat armor. It might look out of place, but regardless it looks really, really great.

(1) I know I've got a problem when it comes to ROBOTECH; it's that too often I see the good idea at the core of something and sort of shrug when the execution is off. For crying out loud, I played ROBOTECH: INVASION all the way through twice, maybe three times. (And I used to make fun of people who still bought SPAWN games ...) But I'm pretty sure I'm not totally high on this one; while it's not as good as the issues yet to come, this is some pretty solid action-adventure comics work, if a bit slight, and "War of the Believers" gets better from here on out. I got to the end of this, started flipping forward (I was reading the trade paperback, which resides at present on my ROBOTECH bookshelf -- much easier to get to than my ROBOTECH comic book boxes), and then sighed because Wes Abbott isn't drawing any comics these days -- at least, not that I know of, not since the end of the second DOGBY book back in 2008.


So, more Spangler & Abbott in a few. Next up, just a little art commission that recently found its way into my hands courtesy of my now-ex-roommate and former Emissaries editor/publisher, then back to the TV series write-ups for the first on-screen appearance of the Robotech Masters!

DAY THIRTY-TWO: Return to Macross #13 - High Strangeness (1994)

By Bill Spangler (Writer) & Wes Abbott (Artist)


(10) A few years ago, I interviewed Bruce "Invid War: Aftermath" Lewis about his days working at Eternity Comics, the folks who published ROBOTECH comics in the early 1990s. My strongest recollection of that interview is an anecdote he offered about the guy who ran Eternity's parent company, Malibu Graphics, strutting around the office, looking over pages in progress -- specifically, looking at one of Lewis's ROBOTECH pages -- and going, "We're still publishing this crap?" by which he meant Japanese-influenced anime/manga-style comics. Well, after approximately April 1994, they no longer were. Malibu Graphics was already helping to publish the Image line of books, and now was reorganizing to get their cut of the new superhero universe game with the Ultraverse. With Malibu's Eternity imprint shuttered, the ROBOTECH license moved to a small independent publisher that originally went by the name Acid Rain Press; under that name, they had been publishers of sexy vampire comics. Starting in September 1994, they rebranded themselves Academy Comics, a name more befitting a publisher whose primary -- almost sole -- output was ROBOTECH comics.

Yeah, think about that one for a moment. From September 1994 through December 1996 there was a small press publisher whose ENTIRE REASON FOR BEING was publishing ROBOTECH comic books. Even more amazing, for about the first year or so they were sharp, nice looking, well-made books; save Bruce Lewis's final issue of AFTERMATH, most of the work up to about September 1995 was quite good from a craft perspective, even if some -- especially today -- might quibble with the stories. As the months wore on from there, though, only the Waltrips' SENTINELS comics and their related spin-offs held the line; their other top talent (Wes Abbott, Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons, Sean Bishop) spread to the four winds and they were left with lesser talent, or in at least one case talent that wouldn't fully blossom for years to come.

(9) But today we're talking about one of the first issues to come out of Academy Comics Ltd. of South Bend, Indiana -- one of the four issues they put out at launch. In that first month, with the exception of their ROBOTECH #0 issue -- an introduction to the current line, cleverly written by Bill Spangler as an epilogue of sorts for John Carpenter, the Expeditionary Force officer who commanded the ship that returned to Earth in the Robotech Masters episode "Outsiders" who Spangler put through his paces in his earlier INVID WAR at Eternity -- the books they published were basically the "next issue" of the titles that went silent when the Eternity imprint shut its doors. ROBOTECH II: THE SENTINELS just trudged right along with business as usual, having left its original writers behind a few issues into BOOK III; Jason & John Waltrip just kept on doing their thing month-in and month-out. INVID WAR: AFTERMATH now had a totally new creative team with their own agenda, but boy, that was a pretty book; Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons can draw the hell out of anything she puts her mind to, even if the issues of AFTERMATH leading up to the launch of the new title centering on the characters she and husband Rikki Simons introduced in their three-issue run read like the worst kind of fanfic. And in the middle was RETURN TO MACROSS, picking up where it left off at Eternity except without the "Zentraedi quest for the SDF-1" stories and blessed with a new artist who would stick around more-or-less consistently through issue #26, one Wes Abbott.

(8) Today, Wes Abbott's better known as a comic book letterer, having done lettering work for the last decade-plus for Image, Marvel, and DC Comics -- lately, mostly for DC's WildStorm imprint, oddly enough the folks who currently hold the license to publish ROBOTECH comics. Midway through the last decade, though, he did throw his hat into the ring of TokyoPop's "Rising Stars of Manga" competition and consequently got to flex his artistic muscles again on two books he wrote and drew, DOGBY WALKS ALONE (2006) and DOGBY WALKS TALL (2008), two volumes of a somewhat absurd revenge/wandering loner adventure story centering on a silent big-headed costumed character of the sort you see at theme parks like Disneyland.

His RETURN TO MACROSS work is a little more raw, obviously the work of a younger and less experienced hand operating on stricter deadlines, but it's obvious from his first issue that with the right vehicle for his talents Abbott could go far. There's a couple false moves here and there, but his character style is slick, emotive, and distinctive, the guy can draw the hell out of a Veritech, and he ratchets up the tension nicely with expressions and effects borrowed from the manga playbook.

(7) The story for this first Academy Comics issue of RETURN TO MACROSS is pretty straightforward. Roy Fokker arrives at Armor-1 with his Vertiech to put it through its paces in the vacuum of space. Doctor Lang is on-board the space platform to monitor the test results personally. No sooner has Fokker arrived, though, when a report comes in from Moon Base ALuCE of an unidentified object coming from outside the solar system putting out some kind of weird signal. Lang worries that it might be from the aliens that created the SDF-1, and Roy volunteers his Veritech for the job of going out and taking a closer look at the object. Oddly, Armor-1's chief researcher Dr. Sunderlin gets all edgy and nervous about Roy going after it. He's been a jerk all along -- he couldn't be some kind of mole for an anti-unificationist faction, could he?

(6) While en route to the original mark, Roy spots another, closer bogey coming in. He identifies it as a Pegasus-class long range shuttle, a spacecraft that was pretty common during the Global Civil War. It tries to shoot him down, but the far more maneuverable and versatile Veritech avoids its missile barrage and takes it out.

While Roy's taking care of the shuttle, Sunderlin shows his true colors, threatens to toast Dr. Lang with a taser, and explains that the object returning to the solar system is actually full of bio-warfare agents cooked up by the Neo-Tsarists during the Global Civil War, launched into space right before they lost to the Internationalists and discovered by Sunderlin's Exclusionist allies. (Leave Spangler to his own devices and he starts spinning out these factions like crazy; you need only look at his big long list of Malcontent groups in THE MALCONTENT UPRISINGS and the names dropped in INVID WAR for further proof of that.)

(5) Roy snags the capsule, but then radios back to Armor-1 that it's pock-marked with meteor holes and there's something green oozing out of it. Suddenly his transmission breaks up. Lang suggests that years of being exposed to deep space radiation might have mutated those bio-agents into something that can survive in the vacuum of space. Sunderlin thinks this is nonsense, but nonetheless when one of Armor-1's bridge techs insists she can't get Fokker back on the line, Sunderlin starts to freak out and flees the bridge. Armor-1 commanding officer Captain Mayhew quickly gets to a control panel and releases gas into the elevator to knock him out, and Roy reveals that was just a bluff -- the capsule is intact. Lang gives the go-ahead to destroy it, and Roy does so, another crisis averted.

(4) Funny, it's not a far cry from the crisis in FROM THE STARS; in fact, rereading this little done-in-one adventure, one in a series of continuing crises, I find myself making the comparison that RETURN TO MACROSS feels like the syndicated TV version of FROM THE STARS's slick big-budget feature film. In fact, the stable supporting cast of characters in RETURN TO MACROSS and the way they become a close-knit group is somewhat reminiscent of modern day CBS procedurals like the CSI franchise shows or NCIS -- or, I guess, similar to the main Macross Saga cast in the Reconstruction era, which I guess makes a kind of sense, given that they're sort of building a new world here as well, albeit one that will never reach the heights they're reaching for. Robotechnology will certainly change the world, but for the better? Well, I'll get back to you if Tommy & Co. ever finish their SHADOW CHRONICLES cycle, and we'll see where planet Earth and humanity stand when they're done ...

(3) In the Eternity run we saw Spangler seed in the Global Military Police early on, even complete with their gladiatorial-style Masters-era armors as early as the Knight of Knives affair running through #5-8. No reason not to stir those contents in vigorously, I suppose. This time he decides that Moon Base ALuCE should be in service in the pre-Macross Saga era, which I suppose makes sense given that we've got Mars Base Sara out there -- why have a presence on Mars before the moon, eh? I have a soft spot for decisions like this, instances where authors tie the disparate parts of the ROBOTECH saga together a little tighter, make the whole more cohesive even if clearly the places and organizations in question are, err, "off-camera" afterwards until we reach their original first appearance, so long as it's something like this that broadens the universe rather than the unfortunate tendency authors of licensed works have to make everyone somehow distantly related or old friends or what-have-you.

(2) There's something about this issue that seems deliberately small-scale and introductory; it really does have the feel of a soft reboot of the series, a statement of the sort of story you'll be seeing in these pages month-in and month-out, a bit of action and adventure in the years prior to the Zentraedi's arrival. When I was a teenager, I used to sweat the details -- everything needed to "fit," everything needed to make sense. T's needed to be crossed, I's needed to be dotted. You still see me sweat these kinds of details in the TV episode breakdowns, but I realize I'm looking at this stuff with a quarter-century of hindsight, proper translations of the Japanese material available to review courtesy of the internet and commercially available DVDs, half-remembered bits of the McKinney novels and Comico comic adaptations clogging my brains -- and to be honest, I'm sort of making my final statement on this stuff. I'm not saying, "How dare this twenty-five year old English dub of an even older Japanese cartoon not make sense!" And likewise, I used to take offense to the fact that RETURN TO MACROSS featured Battloids stomping around Macross Island a good four and five years before "Boobytrap." Today? Heck, I wouldn't mind it if Bill Spangler or Robert Gibson or whoever might be writing it today managed to stretch those four, five, whatever years of time out to a hundred -- heck, let's go whole hog, let's say TWO hundred issues. If they were as well written and drawn as this, I'd read 'em if they were still being published today. If they were interesting stories and the characters were consistent with the folks we know from the TV series, well, to hell with the finer points of continuity. Let's have some fun and blow some crap up with big robots.

(1) The series moves from this minor episode to a tie-in to Rikki Simons and Tavisha Wolfgarth's run on INVID WAR: AFTERMATH, where an operative for the Isle of the IHE hacks into Dr. Lang's files and gets his brain fried for his trouble. That same issue introduces a new major character, Dr. Lang's sister Nina Lang, a rock singer for the band Absolute Zero. Eleven years later, the Waltrips and Tommy Yune would introduce another sister for Dr. Lang bearing a more familiar name, who would be retroactively killed off at Alaska Base. More on her a few days from now.

Issue fifteen starts things really rolling by introducing Shane Gleason, a former wingman of Fokker's aboard the Kenosha. Unbeknownst to Fokker, Gleason's been having bad flashbacks to a period when he was tortured by the Exclusionists. He winds up hallucinating that he's still being held prisoner, steals a Destroid, kills some people while making his "escape," and is ultimately stopped -- and killed himself -- by Civil Defense forces. This enables the new, charismatic leader of the Faithful, Geoff Davies, to get a foothold in Macross City politics -- and turn Nina Lang to his side, to do some anti-Robotech commercials for the group. Meanwhile, Anatole Leonard's militant splinter cell of the Faithful seeks a less peaceful means of ending the Robotech project, like firing missiles at Roy's Veritech in-flight, in hopes of downing it in the middle of the city.

Spangler obviously realized that the Faithful is the most interesting "foe" he set up in the early issues of the series, and Anatole Leonard's association with them -- set up by James Luceno in THE ZENTRAEDI REBELLION -- was ripe for the picking given the woeful mischaracterization that was going on with that guy since day one. (Given that the official licensing guide called him "a pathetic bigot," Harmony Gold basically gave the authors of the licensed works carte blanche to do it, too.) These threads would culminate in a four-issue arc entitled "War of the Believers," which Academy would ultimately release in trade paperback. Those four issues are going to be the subject of the next handful of "comic book weekend" posts for two reasons: first, as I said, I really do like the Spangler/Abbott run on RETURN TO MACROSS, and this is the best of that work; and second, otherwise at this point I'd be shining a light on material that's contemporary with The Macross Saga, and most of that ranges from mediocre to awful. (Does anyone want to be reminded that WINGS OF GIBRALTAR exists? Anyone?)

But next up, it's back to the TV series:

"Stay tuned for 'Showdown,' the next chapter in the continuing drama of ROBOTECH!"

DAY THIRTY-ONE: Return to Macross #1 - Shadow of Zor (1993)

By Bill Spangler (Writer) & Mujib Rahiman (Artist)


(10) I remember the first time I read this comic book. It was during one of the usual weekend shopping expeditions to Joplin, MO, that my family did; they used to be weekly when I was in grade school, but the frequency of them had dropped to maybe once or twice a month by the time I was in high school. I was often cajoling my folks into swinging us by the Book Barn, a used books/comic books/trading cards/records/toys shop, which is where I got most of my ROBOTECH back issues from the Comico, Eternity, and Academy days; I'm not sure if I'd started the ROBOTECH comic site yet in those days, but at that point I was already building my continuity database for my own obsessive purposes. I sort of remember finding this one in the back issue bin, in one of the long boxes under the table -- the ROBOTECH stuff was never on the table, it was always under, in the more "undesirable" indy/manga/kids' books long boxes. But moreover, I remember reading it over, and over, and over again during the car ride across town to the mall, and then a few more times on the forty-five minute ride home.

I liked it a lot. Still do, in fact.

Part of it is that Bill Spangler is incapable of writing a dull ROBOTECH comic. He makes the caption boxes sing, he's got the character voices down, and his plotting is second to none. Even when he's making me tear my hair out with continuity gaffes, or simply doing a story I find utterly wrongheaded (I'm looking at you, MECHANGEL) there's a sense of dramatic logic behind every move he makes and the end result is always well put together, when his artists aren't letting him down.

In this case, his artist was far from letting him down; to this day I adore Mujib Rahiman's artwork, and it's a shame he didn't stick around through the entirety of issue two -- Tim Eldred took over after a handful of pages, and while I usually enjoy Eldred's work, it was better when he was adding a layer of gritty realism to the Third Robotech War; even when you're throwing them into a tense military action thriller setup, these are still brightly colored, iconic characters and they need an artist who makes them pop. Rahiman does that. I've said before that Breetai and Roy Fokker are two of my absolute favorite Macross Saga characters, and he draws both of those characters to perfection. He's also one of those artists who takes the Japanese style of the original animation -- complete with such anime and manga conventions as super deformed characters and speed lines, the whole nine yards -- and gives his own spin to the art, doesn't let a certain conception of what constitutes anime or manga-style art work straightjacket his art style. The result is something interesting, cool, and unique.

(9) Spangler's big idea behind RETURN TO MACROSS was to split time between Breetai's search for the SDF-1 and Roy Fokker, Gloval, and the rest on Macross Island's adventures dealing with the new wonders of Robotechnology, terrorist threats, politics, and life in Macross City. Unfortunately, the way the original TV series set things up makes this difficult to deal with dramatically. Breetai only really has Exedore to play off of, and those two get along like two peas in a pod. Meanwhile, you've got Roy as a test pilot trying out a classified top secret fighter jet that turns into a robot, but you can't have the robot out and about because, obviously based on the people's reactions in "Countdown," nobody's seen any of the giant robots as of 2009.

The solution? Throw off the straightjacket of continuity and go to town. You know who'd be fun to play off of Breetai? Khyron. That would be a ton of fun. Never mind that the two obviously haven't met before "Bye Bye Mars"; Breetai knows he gets results, but hasn't heard of his reputation for chaos and collateral damage. Veritechs are classified top secret? Whatever. Readers expect to see robots and planes that turn INTO robots, so deploy 'em as necessary. It makes the continuity a mess, and while I'm sure there are ways Spangler could have tiptoed through that minefield, when you're writing a setting based on The Macross Saga, there are certain toys you want to play with, and likewise toys that your readers probably want to see you play with. For a lot of fans, Khyron is a guy they want to see more of, and naturally they want to see Veritechs and Destroids stomping about as well.

(8) The first issue starts with the scene the Comico Graphic Novel opened with and LEGEND OF ZOR ended on, Zor's ill fated final seeding mission. Spangler's take plays a lot more like the version of events Daley & Luceno chronicled in the first novel, GENESIS, and is mostly written from Breetai's perspective, given that he's the character we'll be following in this half of the series month-in and month-out. He loses his eye in far more dramatic fashion here, and Rahiman makes that moment awesome and painful in equal measure.

This take on Breetai has always bugged me, using him as a mere infantryman guarding Zor when the SDF-1 is lost. Again, it's a matter of shrinking the universe, narrowing future story potential and possibilities, making everyone important related -- and also making the quest for the SDF-1 his first command mission, having him lose his eye so soon before that mission, and so on and so forth. It's one thing to say that the events we saw on TV were the most important events in the characters' lives; it's another thing to say that almost nothing happened to them before it. Despite this distaste for the idea, which originated in the novel GENESIS, I believe it is at least well-handled here; Spangler and Rahiman make the material work, even if I think the ideas behind it are utterly wrongheaded.

Rahiman draws Zor in a Bioroid pilot's uniform, like Zor Prime wears, rather than the fancy caped outfit Neil Vokes drew in the Comico Graphic Novel. Come to think of it, I wonder if Vokes designed that outfit or if someone internally at Harmony Gold or Tatsunoko did; it's the same design we saw, more or less consistently, in LEGEND OF ZOR and all of Zor's appearances by the Waltrips' hands in SENTINELS and the WORLDS OF ROBOTECH books -- yes, I'm pondering the look Rahiman DOESN'T give Zor here.

Also, the SDF-1 is drawn identical to its appearance after being rebuilt by mankind, not as the pseudo-Zentraedi ship -- identical to the SDF-3 -- it's depicted as in the Waltrips' LEGEND OF ZOR or the Comico Graphic Novel. Considering that would go hand-in-hand with Zor's uniform design, that's not too shocking, though it really doesn't jibe with Exedore's remark in "Boobytrap" that "it appears to have been completely remodeled."

(7) It's a little weird that Spangler calls the Zentraedi and Invid "ancient" enemies when the Waltrips' comics suggested that as of this encounter the Invid and Zentraedi -- or at least the Invid and THESE Zentraedi -- had never fought before. As I said when I was looking at LEGEND OF ZOR, that was a tidy solution to the problem of the size of the Zentraedi fleet versus the scale of the Invid's forces -- or at least, it would be if the Waltrips hadn't had the Masters realize immediately that their new foes were coming from Optera. But Spangler is working from the Daley & Luceno playbook -- which itself is extrapolated from Macek's playbook -- which posits that the Invid have been a thorn in the Zentraedi's sides for a while. It makes me wonder if Spangler even looked at what his fellow ROBOTECH creators were doing at Eternity, or just assumed that they were hewing to what the novels did, more or less, as he was doing.

On the flip-side of that, watching Breetai and his men go hand-to-hand and toe-to-toe with the Invid Scouts is really cool and awesome-looking. It makes me wish that more of the pre-Macross Saga Zentraedi stories were just Breetai's forces taking on Invid on various worlds rather than the psuedo-STAR TREK alien encounters and Breetai vs. Khyron mind games that Spangler served up for the rest of the original Eternity RETURN TO MACROSS run. (His later WARRIORS miniseries through Academy Comics, with Byron Peneranda, would be more along these lines, albeit with a sort of kaiju/tokusatsu bent.)

(6) After we see the SDF-1 crash, we jump ahead to Roy Fokker's arrival on Macross Island -- not his first arrival there, which was depicted in the Comico Graphic Novel and Daley & Luceno's GENESIS (and was later retconned away in Yune, Faerber, and Vo's FROM THE STARS (2002-2003)), but his arrival five years after the SDF-1's crash, as he joins the Robotech project as a Veritech test pilot.

When he arrives, he's greeted by Captain Gloval, with whom he has some history in this version of events -- prior to the post-Robotech.com reboot, Gloval had captained the Kenosha, the aircraft carrier Fokker served aboard as a Western Alliance or Internationalist (depending on which source you read) fighter pilot. While the two barely interacted in the TV series, the way those limited interactions played and the way Gloval always leaned on Roy and the Skull Squadron to save the SDF-1 during the more desperate fights in the first half of the Macross Saga always, to me, suggested some kind of history between the two men, though that history could just as easily have been built during the years serving together on Macross Island leading up to the space fortress's launch in 2009.

One of the more interesting contrasts between RETURN TO MACROSS and the more TV-series hewing FROM THE STARS is the level of secrecy surrounding the SDF-1, Macross Island, and the Robotech project at large. When Roy arrives via chartered flight on Macross Island, he's already familiar with the project to some extent; Gloval tells him that there's constant video coverage of the Robotech project, and we are later shown that MBS is already up and running as a cable outlet providing 24/7 TV coverage of what's happening on the island. On the other hand, Yune, Faerber, and Vo's series, written and drawn about ten years later, gives us a Roy Fokker completely unaware that anything's happening on the island -- he's utterly shocked when he sees the island, the ship, and the city around it from his fighter canopy -- a public that's been told that the SDF-1 is a ship derived from the alien artifact's technology and NOT the original ship reconstructed, and a Veritech prototype with tape over the transformation controls so its pilot can't see them, so classified are the fighter's secrets. Within an issue's time RETURN TO MACROSS's Fokker will have the Veritech completely explained to him; two more issues later, he'll be piloting a Battloid to save some people trapped in a burning building, right in view of the general public. So much for "classified top secret," the words Fokker specifically uses to Rick in "Countdown."

(5) One thing I think RETURN TO MACROSS really gets across, despite all the terrorist threats, despite the fact that all our heroes are members of the military, despite misguided folks like the Faithful and outright scummy folks like T.R. Edwards and Anatole Leonard (per Spangler, Daley, and -- most of all -- Luceno) getting in their way -- despite all this, there is a feeling and sense of optimism and wonder that permeates the series. These characters are living in an age of change and opportunity, similar to, say, the dot-com boom of the late 1990s here in the real world; something that makes the world smaller, something that brings people together, and something that everybody wants a piece of. Only in this case there's the additional knowledge that we're not alone in the universe that operates as a rallying point, something that carries with it the feeling that human history has really begun a new chapter, a chapter that really anyone could be a major player in if they're smart, clever, or lucky enough. Fokker says it himself: "The technology inside the Visitor is going to change the entire world! Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?" ("The Visitor" is sort of the "ASS-1" ["Alien Star Ship One"], the thing people called the SDF-1 before it was the SDF-1, of the Daley & Luceno-driven version of the ROBOTECH universe -- albeit not as unintentionally funny as its MACROSS counterpart.)

That feeling of looking forward to a better world and standing on the stage of history continues through the first story arc -- the first four issues -- and resumes when the series becomes a little more freeform and freewheeling, less Zentraedi and Edwards-centric, at Academy Comics.

(4) Conrad Wilbur and the Faithful, a group who believe the SDF-1 was sent from the heavens by God as a test for humanity -- the new forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil -- are the "bad guy" for the Macross Island side of the first four-issue story arc. Wilbur's wife was killed during the shockwaves that resulted from the arrival of the SDF-1. He came to Macross Island as a doctor, but soon formed the Faithful and began holding his rallies, gathering a larger and larger following as fear and stress began to take their toll on the people working in and around the space fortress. They represent the flip-side of the optimism represented by our heroes. Fear of the future, fear of the unknown -- these are honest feelings. But once you wrap them up in beliefs people have carried with them since birth, beliefs they carry in their hearts, then they become dangerous. And when the ringleader is himself a true believer, well -- then you get the endgame of this arc in issue #4, where he stands with his finger on a trigger that could kill Roy Fokker and destroy the last remaining Veritech Fighter prototype.

I could have sworn that the Faithful were an invention of Daley and/or Luceno, something seeded in GENESIS, but according to my research this evening they're first mentioned in the novels in Luceno's THE ZENTRAEDI REBELLION, which first appeared in bookstores in March 1994. Of course, book publishing being what it is, and that book being the SIZE it is, the idea still could have originated with Luceno -- unless I've forgotten a reference in an earlier Spangler-written ROBOTECH comic. In any case, religion versus science is always an interesting conflict to play with, especially when you've got someone like Gloval assuring Roy (and the reader) that these aren't stupid or evil people -- they're just scared. And when you're scared, you do stupid things, like listen to opportunistic backstabbers like T.R. Edwards ...

(3) During a rally, someone pelts Dr. Wilbur with a big rock that knocks him unconscious and Roy gets the blame. I have to wonder, if we took a look around, would we see T.R. Edwards standing just off-stage with a bag full of rocks?

The big problem I have with the first three four-issue arcs of RETURN TO MACROSS is that they're more like six two-issue arcs. They don't have room for fuller exploration, room to breathe. Worse, while Spangler's usually pretty good with the Zentraedi, unfortunately the Zentraedi material in issues two through twelve is some of the weakest Zentraedi stuff he's ever done -- I think I get where he was going with the final four issues, having Breetai bottled up in Khyron's cyberspace simulation in contrast to Roy being bottled up in the Lemurian submarine courtesy of T.R. Edwards, but the end result is still just the typical and familiar "trapped in a computerized fantasy world" story that just happens to star Breetai and Khyron. In short, I think he wound up constrained by his own format, and when he tossed that yoke aside when the ROBOTECH license moved over to Academy, the book got a lot better.

(2) This is one of Spangler's more interesting conceits -- that the Global Military Police is already a functioning organization. It's one I have no problem with, since it's not like there's anything that outright says otherwise. Okay, the fact that they're stomping about with gas gun-wielding Destroid Defenders is a bit of a stretch, but we do see Destroids used for civil defense in the Reconstruction era, so it's only a short stretch. Yeah, you'd think a Destroid would be terrible for crowd control, given how slow and lumbering they are and how likely it would be that one would accidentally step on the crowd, but I suppose that's what the gas is for, and "off-camera" there's a small team of GMP officers in body armor with fancy nightsticks to work their way through the crowd, right?

Roy's reaction to all this, of course, is frustration with a bit of anger. Like he says, things were supposed to be different here. And as I said above, the whole arc is about that faith and optimism being restored, not only in Fokker, but in Dr. Conrad Wilbur as well. It's easily the best of the three arcs that Eternity published, though I do have a soft spot for the mystery of the "Knight of Knives" killer in the second Macross Island arc, with its clever little red herrings and the mysterious alien figure that escapes from the SDF-1. This, however, is founded on such a strong thematic core, and as a bonus it's got Rahiman on the first issue and about half of the second, and the rest of the four-issue arc is penciled by the ever-reliable Tim "Man, do I love me some VOTOMS" Eldred, whose clean, solid work suffers only by comparison to Rahiman's eye-popping, highly stylized art on the first one-and-a-half issues. (Well, and also by comparison to his own work on INVID WAR, which was brilliantly inked first by Fred Perry, who used some lovely ink washes for shading, and then by Anthony Carpenter, who did some nifty textured hatching effects for shading.)

(1) If I seem like I'm being a little dismissive of the Eternity Comics incarnation of RETURN TO MACROSS, perhaps I am. When I read this first issue, I figured it would just go from here to full on "adventures on Macross Island" stories, and the next several issues I came across were all Academy Comics issues, stuff from the brilliant Spangler/Abbott run and a stint from the final run, where Spangler was alternating with Robert W. Gibson on writing and a very young, raw, just-out-of-high school Dusty Griffin was on art. And guess what? That was all Fokker, Gloval, Claudia, Dr. Lang, and the rest on Macross Island. Also, no sign of T.R. Edwards, who in RETURN TO MACROSS has a terrible Errol Flynn ZORRO mustache. Past this fantastic first issue, I just see those next eleven issues as building blocks towards the thirteen issues that follow that. I freely admit that perception could be the result of a bias caused by the wacky out-of-order way I read the series, but I think it's more likely that the more focused Spangler/Abbott run (and the Robert Gibson/Sean Bishop issues that briefly interrupt it) really is just that much of an improvement over the twelve-issue Eternity Comics run.

NEXT TIME: Well, what else? We're jumping over those eleven building blocks and taking a quick look at RETURN TO MACROSS #13, "High Strangeness," the first issue published by the short-lived Academy Comics, Ltd., and the first issue to feature the fantastic and under-appreciated cartooning of one Wes Abbott. Be forewarned, I will be talking about the start of one of my favorite ROBOTECH comic runs ever, so there may be excessive amounts of hyperbole. Brace yourself.

DAY TWENTY-FIVE: The Legend of Zor #6 - The Avenging (1992)

By Jason Waltrip (Writer/Artist) and John Waltrip (Writer)

(10) Jason Waltrip, he of the slightly better character art and less imaginative panel layouts than his brother John, brings the 1992 full color mini-series chronicling the twins' take on the story of Zor to its pedal-to-the-metal conclusion. And while in all my earlier readings of this series I found things to enjoy in the earlier issues -- and even in this reading you probably noticed my appreciation for John Waltrip's storytelling in the odd-numbered issues, even if I was frowning and wincing every once in a while at the story being told -- this one's always bugged me.

(9) I'll be hitting a few issues of the Waltrips' SENTINELS comics during the course of the coming year, so at some point in the future I'll be taking a good look at how Jason Waltrip depicts Tirol, but right off the bat the moon is depicted as having one circular megalopolis, Tiresia, a few small bodies of water, and ... err, lots of brown. No cloud cover, either. Again, obvious problems of scale. An entire empire ruled from a planet whose entire civilization takes up approximately the space of, I don't know, Tokyo? At least when watching the SENTINELS video you could tell yourself this is a world in decline -- "Only the old and sick remain on Tirol!" -- and the Regent's victory over Tiresia is more symbolic than anything else. But here at what is supposed to be the height of the Robotech Empire, the Masters' immediate area of influence is a silver spot on a sandy-colored sphere hanging above the gas giant Fantoma. How terribly ignoble.

(8) When Zor enters the throne room of the Robotech Elders, for once they appear to be speaking as one, their remarks flowing from one to the other. But once he approaches the center of their chamber, Nimuul takes over again, settling the matter once and for all that the Waltrips' version of the Empire will never evolve into the Masters we see in the episodes of the TV series that bear their name. When Zor insists that the Zentraedi cannot be used to "complete [the] annexation" of the Local Group worlds, Nimuul goes into a red-faced rage worthy of the Waltrips' T.R. Edwards, a far cry from the Masters who constantly maintain an even tone and prattle on about "primitive emotions."

I can only assume the Bioroid Terminators who guard the Elders are red because the Emperor's Royal Guards from RETURN OF THE JEDI were red.

(7) Zor is given command of the SDF-1, described as the flagship of the Masters' new fleet. If memory serves, it was Daley & Luceno who assumed and stated that the ship was of Zor's own design; the RPG might have said the same, I forget. Since then, many have stated that it's a little over-the-top ridiculous for Zor to be not only adept with biology (deriving the bio-energy of Protoculture from the Flowers, cloning/genetic engineering) but also starship design. Given the pace of this version of the story, I'd certainly agree with the Waltrips' take, though in a longer, more drawn-out version I'd either go all-out and make Zor a Jack-of-all-trades genius or make him the imbalanced "visionary" of a triumvirate of scientists who have the additional skills, expertise, and understanding to make his concepts a reality.

(Remember: the Masters' society is fixated on the triumvirate, and yet Zor is given all the credit as an individual. This means either he predates the rise of the triumvirate -- highly possible given how he gave rise to the Age of Robotech with the discovery of Protoculture -- or he was so exceptional as an individual that he rose above his station as merely one of three. To be honest, over the last year-plus I've become fascinated by the latter possibility, for reasons I'll get into later ...)

Nimuul tells Zor that he's being given command of the SDF-1 because he seems "so adept that these space voyages." The discovery of Optera was, however, either dumb luck or Shaping-influenced "destiny," depending on your take; I'm gonna say the Elders just want to put Zor out to pasture now that they've got their hands on all the Flowers of Optera, a society of completely obedient clones, and the legions of Zentraedi out among the stars doing their bidding in the name of empire-building.

And then Nimuul does a stupid thing and tells Zor that Zol died -- off-panel, around the end of issue #4, if you don't recall. Zor staggers about for a bit, crestfallen and dumbstruck, and then makes a grandiose gesture of looking out into the pink clouds and purple skies of Tirol, raising his fists into the air, and crying out that he shall avenge his father. Once again, I find this whole issue of Zor's father highly unnecessary -- shouldn't the abuse of the wonders Zor has created for the Republic-turned-Empire be enough motivation for Zor to desire vengeance on the Elders' heads? Is that not the interpretation one would most easily take from the sequence right before the commercial break in "Catastrophe," as Zor cries out, "The Protoculture has brought only death!" and blasts the Flowers with his rifle? One might argue that it humanizes Zor, but one of the things that's intriguing about the way ROBOTECH bashed luckless and vengeance-driven Seifriet Weiße into the character of Zor Prime is that the resulting character feels so detached, disjointed, and alien. Some of this comes from Paul St. Peter's odd performance, while some of it comes from mapping the desired Zor Prime arc on top of the preexisting Seifriet Weiße character arc. In any case, the end result is that when I take into account the Masters' bizarre culture, the oddity of Zor Prime as a character, and the way that the original Zor is spoken of throughout the ROBOTECH TV series, the last thing I expect is for Zor to have the same motivation to fight the Masters that Inigo Montoya had to fight the six-fingered man.

(6) The one thing I like about Zor's reunion with Arla is the remark she makes when he tells her that he's been ordered away again: "Not again! Every time you leave, things here get worse." Which is true. Zor disappears, and the Elders' power and influence increases. This time things will be different; this time he goes to his computer, forges some official-looking documents, and -- hold on, orders the cornerstone of the modern age of Tirolian society to be loaded onto his starship? And this all happens as he sits at his computer, with Arla hovering over his shoulder? The entire operation to disconnect and disassemble it, put it in a series of containers, have it moved to the spaceport, have a shuttle pick it up and transfer it to the SDF-1 ... you see what my problem is, right? It's farfetched and a little ridiculous that the most important thing on the planet could be removed from its chamber with so little as some forged digital documents that could so easily be traced back, by the technicians under Vard's command, to Zor's laboratory.

Zor thoroughly frying all his documents via a power surge at least makes sense, though you'd think information that valuable would have been backed up by Robotech Empire computer technicians -- especially given how long the Elders have been mistrustful of Zor and how long and often he's been away. If he'd held his misgivings closer to the vest and played up his importance as the only one who understands Protoculture, I'd buy this scenario a little more.

(5) Vard confronts Zor about the transfer of the Matrix to the SDF-1. Zor and Vard have their ideological argument once again about all that's good in the cosmos versus what is "good for the Empire," and Zor just about convinces Vard to let him go, but as he and Arla walk away, Vard fires and hits Arla as she shoves Zor out of the way of the blast. Then Zor freaks out, draws Arla's gun, and blasts Vard repeatedly in typical "red rage" overdramatic fashion. My pattern-obsessed mind looks at this and jumps straight to Rick in the VF-1D in "Countdown" thinking that Minmei (the mother of "a" Zor per THE END OF THE CIRCLE) is dead or wounded and blasting that Battlepod to scrap, though certainly this sort of scene neither begins or ends there.

The problem with this scene, besides being a bit cliche? Remember that this series was following from the ROBOTECH saga as written in Daley & Luceno's novels. In the very first novel, Vard is still alive and serving aboard the SDF-1. I presume that the Waltrips, as they admitted they did with Nimuul in the Special Edition of issue #1, just mapped the most appropriate name from the already established stories onto the character they created. Hence we get the Vard that breaks from Zor's side following the Techno Voyages rather than the Vard that stays by Zor's side until his death at the hands of the Invid.

Two things strike me about Arla's death in particular. First, there's a part of me that wants to somehow tie this to Zor Prime's dream sequence where Musica is killed by the Bioroid Terminators -- perhaps that was his mind filling in gaps in his long-term clone-progenitor memories with elements of his own personal history? Second, it would have paid off the scene in issue #2 where Zol pulls his gun out of the safe if it had been established that the gun on Arla's hip was Zor's father's gun.

(4) I do find it interesting that Cabell is officially ordered to continue Zor's research on Tirol; that adds more fuel to the idea that Zor was being sent off-world because his usefulness to the Elders was at an end, that his post as commander of the SDF-1 was about keeping him out of the Elders' hair going forward.

From here on, things sort of fast-forward. Zor's lab and the Flower of Life greenhouses explode, the SDF-1 flees -- and why don't the Masters have any ships to pursue him, anyway? Where are those millions upon millions of Zentraedi ships? Why isn't anyone in orbit to defend Tirol? Why isn't anyone in orbit just doing BUSINESS with Tirol? Why is the universe so small?

The SDF-1 design used, of course, is the very Zentraedi-styled SDF-1 design from the Comico Graphic Novel which was adapted into the SENTINELS/pre-SHADOW CHRONICLES SDF-3 design.

Dolza and Breetai are aboard the SDF-1; the former was established in the Comico Graphic Novel, the latter in Daley & Luceno's very first ROBOTECH novel, GENESIS. Both presences bug me, but it's not Jason & John's fault.

The seeding missions, Zor's atonement for his "sin," is glossed over in a single panel. Oddly, though we know from other accounts that he visits the worlds of the Local Group, which are all under the Masters' control, the Zentraedi and the Masters never find him. Obviously the Waltrips have made him a fugitive too early; the Masters should still trust him when he loads the Matrix on-board; the Empire should be in a state of prosperity and have plenty of Protoculture to spread around, and the Matrix should be, in their short-sighted minds, superfluous at the moment -- and THEN Zor dies, his secrets dying with him, and the ship is lost.

(3) Quickly, the Invid are whisked on-stage in the crab-like mecha form we know them from the TV series so that they can fulfill their destiny. killing their betrayer. Given Dolza's show of strength in "First Contact," you've got to wonder why, when Cabell tells the Elders that the new threat is coming from Optera they don't just order the Zentraedi to take care of the planet. Then again, there is that line the Regess gives at the end of The New Generation about the Invid being driven from their planet "twice in our recorded history," or words to that effect. It could be that the Zentraedi DID surround the world in one of their patented full laser bombardments, and then the Regess just did the phoenix of mindstuff thing and escaped through the cosmos.

I was going to ask where the glowing sphere ship comes from, but it's actually straight out of the Comico Graphic Novel. Which does make you wonder where Neil Vokes got the design from, but given early ROBOTECH, it could be anywhere or just out of Macek's (or Vokes's) fevered imagination.

In the Comico Graphic Novel, it was established that there were already obvious hostilities between the Empire and the Invid -- Dolza warns Zor that an Invid Sensor Nebula would spot them if they lingered for too long -- but here when the Invid arrive in orbit this is the first time Zor sees the fruits of his handiwork, the foul turn their evolution has taken. It shatters him, and causes him to make his final desperate gambit. That right there, that actually works for me. Zor, who was so fascinated by the society of simple hive-minded slugs, bears witness to their ultimate form, designed for death and destruction -- after having seen everything he's created perverted to that end -- and it finally causes him to give up. "It doesn't matter anymore," he tells Dolza and Breetai. "Look at what they've become because of me. Let it end HERE."

(2) In the short time available, there's only one panel of Zentraedi mecha attempting to repel the Invid onslaught. This is the ONLY TIME Zentraedi mecha appear in the entire series. Mind you, I think that's one panel more than we saw Zentraedi mecha in the very same sequence in the Comico Graphic Novel.

This is one of two times the loss of Breetai's eye is shown in a comic published by Eternity, out of three times the death of Zor is depicted in comic book form. The story that Breetai lost his eye in the service of Zor originated with Daley & Luceno's GENESIS, and the other take on it -- in the pages of Bill Spangler and Mujib Rahiman's RETURN TO MACROSS #1 -- was, as I recall, much closer to Daley & Luceno's work.

In the Comico Graphic Novel and, IIRC, GENESIS it is Dolza who speaks to Zor as he is dying, not Breetai. And I wonder, how does Breetai expect them to leave? He tells the dying Zor that they must return to Tirol, but they have no ship. The SDF-1 is en route to its fate per "Boobytrap."

(1) It drives me a little crazy that in the eighteen years since this comic series was published there hasn't been an alternate take on this material. The reason prequels usually suck is because there isn't actually a story there. But in the theft of the Flower from Optera, the crafting of the Zentraedi, the period of civil war suggested by Gloval and Exedore in "Khyron's Revenge," the "war with the Micronians" Dolza speaks of in "First Contact," the transformation of a freer and more open society into the bizarre restrictive clone society of the TV series with its assembly-line psuedo-androids and swapped-out clone bodies and such, and the ultimate defiance of Zor -- "your purpose has always remained the same," the Masters say in "Catastrophe," suggesting that purpose has always been at odds with the Empire at large -- and the rise of the Invid as a potential threat just as the Empire begins to wane and the situation grows desperate, there is so much potential for powerful, dramatic storytelling. It doesn't have to be this obvious, juvenile rough outline with a cackling bad guy, a generic blonde love interest, an imprisoned noble father, a best friend-turned-enemy, and plot holes and loose ends you could ram the SDF-1 through as it breaks through hyperspace on its fated collision course with Earth.

Of course, at the time nobody at Harmony Gold was doing anything more than rubber-stamping this material, the Waltrips were obviously working from the timeline in the back of the last SENTINELS novel more than anything else, and this was the first comic book story they'd ever written. It's not like Malibu editorial was going to deny the artists of their flagship book the opportunity to flex their writing muscles on a six-issue mini-series designed to fill in the blanks of a story that had a direct bearing on said flagship book. The failure of LEGEND OF ZOR is one of the authors' ambition being too great for both the space available to tell the tale and their storytelling skills at the time. Shame, that.

There was actually a sequel series to this planned called ROBOTECH GENESIS: INVADERS. The Waltrips actually finished two scripts for it before the comic license jumped from Malibu/Eternity to Academy Comics and they wound up doing the WORLDS OF ROBOTECH one-shot comics instead. The unfinished series would have covered the Invid invasion of the worlds of the Local Group in the wake of the loss of the SDF-1 and the Protoculture Matrix. Those finished scripts were serialized in issues of the ROBOTECH fanzine EMISSARIES; the first, in the last few issues of Vol. 1 published by my pal Evan Cass, and the second in the issues I managed to publish of Vol. 2. I haven't read that stuff in years, but I seem to recall it being somewhat intriguing.

DAY TWENTY-FOUR: The Legend of Zor #5 - The Harvesting (1992)

By John Waltrip (Writer/Artist) and Jason Waltrip (Writer)


(10) You tell me the Tirolian Civil War depicted here was long, and I just don't believe you. It was the Zentraedi versus, like, fifteen guys with a cache of stolen guns. If there's one thing that's long plagued the Waltrips' ROBOTECH work, up to and including the last decade's PRELUDE TO THE SHADOW CHRONICLES, it's been a problem of scale. And I think this is a trickle-down problem from Daley & Luceno, and even to some extent from the TV series. The difference is that aside from the First Robotech War, which really was basically a war between one ship and millions, throughout the rest of the televised ROBOTECH saga there was a sense that there were things happening elsewhere, stuff we just never saw because it was outside the scope of the narrative -- potentially other fronts in the war against the Robotech Masters, other bands of freedom fighters clashing with the planet's Invid overlords. The previous issue of this series really failed to give a sense that maybe someone else was resisting the Elders as well, or that the rebels we saw were part of a network. It looked for all the world like the guys in that one room were the entire rebellion. Even if they weren't, what did that war look like? What weapons did they have? We just see Zentraedi soldiers standing triumphant. No mecha or other vehicles, not even as scrap in the streets. And Zor wonders about Arla, only furthering the sense that this is, like, hours later instead of years.

(9) But the plot demands that this WAS a long time later, because Protoculture reserves are dangerously low. Has Protoculture become the key to the entire civilization yet? It's unclear; certainly it fuels their entire war machine, but we're not given enough sense of the culture to see how deeply infused into every aspect of Tirolian life the Flower and its fuel byproduct have become.

This is the last odd-numbered issue, and consequently John Waltrip is back on art, with his finer line and greater attention to detail. I love the look of the Elders' throne room, looking even more like something out of SOUTHERN CROSS, with its mix of Greco-Roman architecture and twisting, almost organic-looking technology. You can even see, in the background of the shot where Nimuul shows Zor the current state of the Invid, the Robotech Masters of the TV series huddled around a Protoculture Cap.

The sight of Zor genuflecting before the Masters and saying "What is thy bidding, my Masters," is a frustrating one. It's an obvious callback to STAR WARS, especially in a scene concerning the end of a rebellion against an empire. Was it absolutely necessary? Especially with that precise dialog? Ugh.

(8) Zor is ordered back to Optera with a task force of Zentraedi to seize all the Flowers, their purpose being twofold: to refuel the Empire and to prevent the Invid from ever possessing Protoculture and rising up to become a threat. Despite the images Zor is presented with, he insists that the Invid are primitive, that they pose no threat, and besides that, the Flowers were theirs to begin with. Is this Zor being naive again, or is this Zor simply pushing back, trying to resist his orders despite the one key thing that, as far as Zor knows, Nimuul still has over him? His open resistance causes unnamed Elders Hepsis and Fallagar to warn Nimuul that Zor cannot be trusted, but Nimuul is so sure he still has Zor wrapped around his finger, even though unbeknownst to Zor he has had Zor's father killed.

I guess that's why Nimuul figures he's still got him; Zor has no clue that Nimuul no longer possesses the one card he had against him.

What in the hell does Zor mean by, "What better way to fight them than to feed those monstrous egos?"

(7) Cute liquid-eyed Invid industriously copy the Greco-Roman splendor of Republic-era Tirol. When we first see the Invid in The New Generation, they're mysterious armored figures ruled over by a mother figure that first manifests as a glowing light and eventually appears evolved as a giant bald woman in a long robe, which is kind of creepy and weird. They get less mysterious and weird when they're brought back in SENTINELS, transformed into slug-like humanoids equipped with less mystical, organic-looking, and more conventional technology. Starships, landing craft, sky bikes for their combat armor -- they became more like the other threats our heroes faced in the prior two generations of ROBOTECH.

This actually is used somewhat as a plot point; the Regent's forces are supposed to be more of an emulation of the Robotech Masters, while the Regess follows her own path towards reclaiming what was once theirs.

But the end result of the conventionalizing of the Invid is what we see here, the comical robed slugs of the Waltrips' comics. What was at least visually interesting in the SENTINELS animation was played for laughs under Mason & Ulm's keyboards and the Waltrips' artwork, and evolved -- how appropriate, given who we're talking about -- into what we see here. Look at the funny slug people trying to create culture!

I had never noticed that the central hive on Optera, which appears throughout the SENTINELS comics, is shaped in an emulation of the Tiresian Royal Hall: large narrowing structure with a smaller central command structure on top. Huh.

(6) This bickering is established in the SENTINELS animation, which would be its key foul contribution to the degradation of the Invid. The schism is one thing. It's not a bad idea. It's the petty, human back-and-forth that devalues both characters and makes them ... well, too human. The name-calling in particular is just childish, and is probably the part most like what we see in the completed SENTINELS animation, unfortunately.

I actually really like the way the two are described, the Regent seeking to "evolve" through acquisition, through the accumulation of more and more material things, while the Regess seeks to evolve towards that which she desires. They're both depicted as blind towards what their industrious children are up to below the central hive, both obsessing over their own personal goals -- their racial hive-mind link between one another severed in their emulation of the more individual Tirolians, perhaps?

I think it was the RPG that floated the idea that the Regess and Regent were one and the same entity before Zor set foot on Optera, which would go a ways towards explaining exactly where the Regent was back in issue #2. It's said outright here, that these two WERE one. Only, the form Zor encountered was undoubtably feminine, and was already halfway towards Zor's own form in an emulation of Haydon, he whom she mistook Zor for. It's a problematic little plot hole I discussed in further detail back in my write-up of issue #2.

(5) The defoliation of Optera begins. The Zentraedi-manned harvesters have the smooth, simple lines of a lot of the Waltrips' mechanical designs, and to be fair share a general aesthetic style with the mechanical designs the Japanese produced for the SENTINELS animation. They kind-of sort-of look Zentraedi, but more resemble pillbugs than anything else.

Zor orders the Zentraedi not to harm the inhabitants, but doesn't he remember exactly what he told the Elders long ago, that the Invid and their Flowers live in symbiosis? Without the Flowers, what does he expect the Invid to do? Or is this the big plan, to do essentially what he does -- leave them alive to stew and become wretched, corrupt, and dangerous to the Empire that has done essentially the same to him?

What is the point of the Zentraedi soldiers on the ground, beyond the visuals of giant soldiers stomping the artifacts of the Invid's emulation of Tirolian culture?

(4) How is it that the Regent, the one of the two more prone to outbursts and tantrums and the one who is depicted as being revenge-bent and in thrall to the yearning for conquest that drove those he emulates and loathes, is the one who can see Zor and his people for what they are, while the Regess, the thoughtful, curious, and creative one, is the one who continues to believe that Zor and Haydon might be one and the same -- even after sharing a mental bond with him, even despite the logical argument the Regent gives her: why would he GIVE them the Flowers, then TAKE them back? Is this a manifestation of a sense of doubt that might have taken root in the Regess's mind if the two were still one?

It's interesting that the Regent refers to the other Invid as his kindred, while the Regess refers to them as her children. Again, a sign that the Regent is a more recent manifestation, perhaps not even as old as an individual entity as some of the smaller Invid surrounding him in the shelter.

(3) The Regess takes the betrayal ... badly. She hits Zor with a nasty mental whammy via the mind link they still share.

It occurs to me, seeing Zor aboard a Nupetiet-Vergnitzs flagship, that we've gone through five out of six issues and there is as of yet no SDF-1. It's only introduced in the next -- final -- issue. That strikes me as an odd decision given all that Zor has yet to do, but one that's par for the course with the strange push-and-pull pacing of this series. I suppose that's the price one pays for the more deliberately paced, dramatically designed odd-numbered issues. It's true, this REALLY needed to be a longer series -- at least twice as long to fully explore even Zor's own story, if not the story of Tirol's transformation from spacefaring republic, to interstellar empire, to ruin.

(2) Laid low by the Regess's mental attack, Zor orders the mission aborted with one sector's worth of Flowers remaining. It is just enough. Betrayal has followed betrayal, and now the Invid shall be transformed again. The only problem I have with this depiction is that I seem to recall someone, I think Daley & Luceno, floating the idea that the Invid become a mecha-wielding race in emulation -- again -- of the Zentraedi arsenal, and we see no Regults, no Glaugs, no Powered Armors in the defoliation of Optera. They don't even seem to reach their peak power until next issue, and it never seems as vast as we're led to believe in the TV series.

Of course, the narrative reason to keep the Zentraedi weaker would be to make the Invid on equal footing. If the Zentraedi don't pack the punch we know they can from the TV series, they can't return to Optera and raze the planet after the Invid start making a nuisance of themselves.

(1) If the Regess knows nothing of betrayal before this moment, I wonder, what of the Regess's proclamation at the end of the TV series that TWICE in their history they've been forced from their homeworld, forced to flee to another galaxy. (One of these times is when the Regess takes her Invid from Optera to Earth to seize its supply of the Flowers of Life.) Oh wait, that's one of those little hiccups in continuity that everyone conveniently forgot while they took Daley & Luceno's words as law. That was lost under the same circumstances as the Disciples of Zor were lost, the "wars with the Micronians" were lost, the Zentraedi Civil War hinted at in "Khyron's Revenge" was lost.

If you actually trace everything that's said in the TV series, you could probably craft a whole cycle of books, a whole other eighty-five or more TV episodes, from all the snippets of history hinted at there. Instead we got six comic books derived from the most streamlined version of the history, already warped to match a rewrite of history designed to support the unfinished SENTINELS animation project, streamlined even further and pock-marked with sci-fi cliches. It doesn't even get the Robotech Masters' culture right at the end; it never evolves into a standing culture like that seen in the TV series. I'd love to see someone take another crack at this story someday. I'm sure an interesting yarn could be spun from the materials the Waltrips were unaware of and the materials they neglected.

NEXT: The SDF-1 begins its mission, and the Invid begin theirs in the final chapter of THE LEGEND OF ZOR - "The Avenging."