A to Z Challenge: Wolfe, Jonathan

What's interesting about the character of Jonathan Wolfe is the writers of the books and comics basically reverse-engineered him.  Technically his first appearance is in the third generation.  Scott Bernard and company come upon Wolfe's base, where he's scoring victories against the Invid.

Scott is almost instantly enthralled with Wolfe, whom he sees as a hero.  He's all too eager to sign up with Wolfe to fight against the Invid.  But soon Scott is lured into a trap.  Too late he finds out that Wolfe isn't really winning victories against the Invid; they're basically letting him keep some supplies and stuff in exchange for human lives.

Wolfe realizes what a coward he's been and sacrifices himself to help Scott and company get away.

So his beginning is also his end.  But in the books, starting with #19, The Zentraedi Rebellion, the writers go back to detail Wolfe's past.  He missed the SDF-1 expedition but survived Dolza's Rain of Death along with his wife Catherine and son Johnny.

After the war he's transferred from Albuquerque to Cavern City in South America.  His wife and son aren't really happy with the move but he enjoys the challenge of raising up a new unit.  One of his lieutenants has the last name Bartley.  He's the father of Rook Bartley, one of Scott Bernard's group.  It's all connected, right?  Rook's father and Wolfe go to Mexico City, where they get some parts to fix up some old tanks.

The tanks come in handy when Wolfe's unit--the Wolfe Pack--fight against Zentraedi rebels.  During one such occasion, though, they get dosed with a rare disease that causes some members of the unit to flip out and try to kill people.  The disease spreads to all of Cavern City, leading to the city being put on quarantine for a while.

Wolfe in old comic book

Wolfe and family eventually get transferred back north, but Wolfe doesn't want a desk job, so he agrees to go on the SDF-3 expedition with his Pack.  Shortly after the SDF-3 defolds, Wolfe is assigned to go pick up a stray ship, in which is the singer Lynn-Minmei.  They become infatuated with each other.

But their relationship goes south when he chooses to go with Rick Hunter and others with the Sentinels.  After the Sentinels are stranded on the dying world of Praxis, Wolfe goes with Janice Em and Vince Grant in a Veritech boosted to the atmosphere by some local organisms, back to the expedition headquarters on Tirol.  The maniacal General TR Edwards won't let Wolfe and company have a ship to rescue the Sentinels so with some covert help from Dr. Emil Lang, Wolfe steals the SDF-7 to rescue the Sentinels in the nick of time.

While he was there he tried to see Minmei but she wasn't having it.  When she's abducted by Edwards, he stages a fake wedding and she basically tells Wolfe to fuck off.  So he accepts Lang's invitation to take a prototype ship back to Earth.  It was supposed to be a round-trip, but it turned out one-way for him.  He arrives after the Robotech Masters have been defeated and the planet is pretty well defenseless.

Dana Sterling and her platoon are able to commandeer Wolfe's ship to head back to Tirol while he continues down the path of alcoholism and becoming the broken down loser he is in the TV show.  The circle is complete!

Some of the book stuff doesn't really jive with the TV episode as at one point Scott says he was part of the Wolfe Pack, which he wasn't in the books.  And there's some confusion in the TV show about who exactly sent Wolfe back and his mission because of course this was really a Japanese series totally unrelated to the Macross series.  In the TV episode his last words are the names of his wife and kid but the book adds Minmei to the list.  Because of what I just said about the series not really being connected.  And I don't think the books existed when they first dubbed it.

Anyway, this worked a lot better to give a character a tragic backstory than the Star Wars prequels did.

Sue Graham

Interestingly it wasn't the only time this happened.  Near the end of the third series Scott Bernard's team comes across a woman named Sue Graham.  She is recording the battle around Reflex Point for Admiral Hunter's perusal.  After showing the team to a "synchro cannon" she's killed by the Invid.

The books created a whole tragic backstory for her too.  While in the TV episode she claimed to be an intelligence agent, the books made her a journalist who started by covering the Zentraedi rebellion in Book 19.  Later she goes with the expedition to Tirol sensing it's a big story.

After the Invid are driven away by the Sentinels, Graham becomes the personal photographer for Rick Hunter.  She comes onto him and while Rick rejects her, his wife thinks he's getting too cozy with Graham, so she has Max Sterling transfer Graham to the Jupiter Group going to Earth before the main fleet's arrival.  It's not quite as deep as Wolfe's story but along the same lines.