#AtoZChallenge Bonus: Titan's Robotech Reboot Comic Fails

When I was doing my A to Z Challenge on Robotech last April I used a number of covers from Titan Comics' recent Robotech reboot comic series because they were pretty cool and easy to find.  But I hadn't actually read the comics yet because they were too expensive.  Fortunately a sale a few weeks ago remedied that, though soon I wished I hadn't.

Issue #1/Volume #1 Cover

First, I noted on Facebook that the sale itself was kind of stupid.  There were two "volumes" each with 4 issues for $5.99 apiece whereas the individual issues were only 99 cents.  So it was about $2 cheaper per volume to just buy the issues separately.  Which was a joke.  Marvel and DC usually have 5-6 issues per volume so the math is close enough that I'd probably buy the collected volume for the sake of convenience.  But only 4 issues makes it completely uneconomical.  I'm just saying.

Anyway, math aside the series wasn't great.  The first 6 issues or so are written by Brian Wood who's the author of the DMZ series and some Disney Star Wars books and comics, none of which I've read.  And from this I probably wouldn't strain myself to read anything he's done either.  After that former Transformers writer Simon Furman takes over, not that it really makes a difference.

There really should have been a 0 issue or expanded first issue to do a little setting up.  As it is you get about 5 pages to introduce the main characters on the SDF-1 and Macross Island and then the Zentraedi show up and everything starts going to hell.  In the rush to get the plot going we lose a lot of interaction like Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes arguing as he crashes the Veritech stunt show, followed by Rick and Roy Fokker getting reacquainted after the 10 years or so Roy has spent with the SDF-1 project.  And we don't get to see Minmei with her family or any of that other stuff that was in the first episode of the show.  Nope, we've got to get things moving because readers bought this for giant robots fighting aliens!

And this sets the tone for the whole series.  Everything is so rushed and jumbled that it loses the intimacy in the character relationships.  Things are pared down so much that it's hard to understand if Rick really cares about Minmei--and she about him--and if Lisa cares about Rick.  Near the end of issue #20 Lisa suddenly kisses Rick and it makes no sense because except for a little talk as captives in a Zentraedi ship they really hadn't done anything that might warrant a kiss.

(And just on an aesthetic level Lisa's hair is light brown or dark blonde, it's not red.  I mean I like redheads but come on it doesn't even match the covers of their own books.)

As weird as it might sound to an outsider, the series about humans in giant robots fighting giant aliens is actually about relationships:  Rick-Lisa-Minmei, Roy-Claudia Grant, Max Sterling-Miriya Parino, Gloval-the bridge crew, Minmei-Kyle, and almost the entire Zentraedi race-Minmei.  So when you lose the intimacy you lose a lot of what made the story work.  Because in the end twas beauty that slayed the beast, or in this case the Zentraedi armada.  Minmei's love songs, Max and Miriya's wedding, and other displays of affection woke the slumbering emotions, the humanity, of the Zentraedi so they could overthrow the programming of the Robotech Masters.  Unfortunately most of this is about as emotional as the Zentraedi before they came into contact with humans.

The need to rush things along also fundamentally alters some characters.  In the show and books, it took a little while to convince Rick Hunter to become a fighter pilot once he was trapped on the SDF-1 with the rest of the people of Macross Island.  His father had raised him to more or less be a pacifist, which was a source of tension between Rick and Roy Fokker once Roy joined the military.  Even though he killed a few Zentraedi during the initial attack, Rick still didn't want to be a combat pilot.  But for the sake of convenience the comic changes it so that once he's aboard Rick desperately wants to be a fighter pilot.  Because there wasn't time to actually let the character develop, let's just radically alter him instead.  The same thing happens with Minmei's cousin Lynn-Kyle.  In the show Kyle is staunchly anti-military.  When the SDF-1 first returns to Earth, Rick is given permission to ferry Minmei back home, where she meets her cousin and he agrees to go back with her to try to stop the war.  But in the comic the SDF-1 goes to moon base ALUCE (which was actually only referenced in the second series, Southern Cross) where Kyle is part of the "civilian oversight" of the military base.  Not only is he working on a military base; Kyle is even wearing an RDF uniform!  WTF?  No way would he be wearing that uniform and working anywhere near a military base.  That's like someone from PETA working in a slaughterhouse and wearing that company's uniform.

Then there's the needless addition of superpowers for Rick and Minmei.  In the show Rick and Minmei are in Rick's little stunt plane over Macross when the SDF-1 folds and ends up near Pluto.  The plane crashes inside an unused part of the SDF-1 where Rick and Minmei are stranded for weeks until they're found by a construction crew.  This is somewhat the same in the comic (only they're in a Veritech, not the stunt plane) but later Rick goes blind before he gains a sort of Jedi-like ability to see without his eyes and control Robotechnology around him.  This is used to escape from a Zentraedi ship, whereas in the show Rick, Lisa, Max, and Ben Dixon just steal a Zentraedi Battlepod and fly it back to the SDF-1, which is complicated by the fact the Battlepod is designed for 40-foot aliens, not humans.  Still, they didn't need to fall back on some deus ex machina like sudden-onset superpowers.  Later it's revealed Minmei has a superpower of her own.  See, she doesn't get famous on the SDF-1 and with the Zentraedi because she's actually a good singer; nope, it's because she has a superpower that makes her voice hypnotic.  Which really just cheapens things with the Zentraedi.  Forget all that stuff I said about awakening their humanity and all that; nope, it's just that her superpowered voice makes them turn.

Besides all that like the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot or the Battlestar Galactica reboot the series throws in some shit with time travel, multiverses, and clones.  The evil Dr. Zand has made numerous clones of Roy Fokker, one of whom kills Captain Gloval--who also has a clone.  Zand captures the real Roy and tells him in Bond villain style that the SDF-1 has conduits through space and maybe time, which he uses to direct energy to the Invid homeworld of Optera to draw the Invid to Earth.  Why?  I don't know.  It's also heavily implied that the SDF-1 that crashes on Earth in the beginning was actually from the future or a quantum duplicate or some damned thing with Lisa, Rick, Roy, and everyone else on board.  None of this has really paid off yet but like Rick and Minmei having superpowers I don't think it really adds anything of value.

The problem like Star Trek reboots is what do you want?  If you just tell the exact same story then it'd be pretty pointless, wouldn't it?  But at the same time you can't fundamentally alter characters and events so you lose what actually made things work.  What this series feels like is like what I said about The Orville:  it's a bad cover of the original.  You can play the same notes and sing the same lyrics but that doesn't mean it's going to be the same, not unless you take the time to actually know what made the original work in the first place.  This comic book series like The Orville fails to do that and so it winds up feeling like a shallow imitation.

If this is the direction they were hoping to go for a live action movie then I guess it's good Harmony Gold has their heads so far up their asses it'll never happen.