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The Mordecai shall become the great father, forever seeding the universe with the souls of colosal laborers of art, mind and invention.

And we shall unite to be known as the Empire of the Eye.

Clone

Regular series / December 1994 - August 1995 / Story by Rosearik Rikki

THE LOWDOWN

It began as the dream of one man, the wealthy Dr. Gilles Vaudell. In the early 21st century, as the Robotech Defense Force toiled to understand the secrets of the Super Dimensional Fortress One, Vaudell and his wife, Demont--along with a cadre of well-trained and well-paid operatives--did the same from their base of operations on the Isle of the IHE (Immuno Heredity Enigma).

Forty years and three Robotech Wars later, Vaudell's dream became a reality. He had for himself a ship, the Super Dimensional Fortress Mordecai, and a crew of loyalists and clones. He had a plan, the "First Manifesto", to populate the Andromeda Galaxy with colonies of clones raised by Mordecai citizens. And he had immortality--a method he discovered called the Xalon Process provided him and his people with the opportunity to watch their plans unfold over the next several generations.

However, once his ship folded for Andromeda, he soon discovered what the rest of the Earth already knew--that wherever Robotechnology goes, war soon follows. And he soon wondered, "Does being immortal mean only this: that the only death I should fear is a violent death?"

BACKGROUND INFO

Clone #3 Rosearik Rikki's Clone is, to date, the only Harmony Gold-authorized attempt ever made to create a new generation of characters beyond the end of the New Generation episodes of the Robotech TV series. In a way, it is the antithesis of subsequent licensee Antarctic Press's take on Robotech; Clone concerns the continuing adventures of an all-new cast of characters in an unfamiliar place fighting with and being manipulated by all-new alien races. For this reason, fans tended to ask whether this series was necessary, or whether it even had anything to do with Robotech. John Scharmen, artist on the series' 40 page special, said that if you take it as a fourth generation, it's not so irrelevant--it's just another story in the continuing Robotech saga, much in the way that Masters or New Generation was in respect to The Macross Saga. Indeed, after doing Aftermath, Rikki didn't seem to want to write the original Robotech characters again--looking back, he wondered if he'd done Lancer and Annie justice, and had that same feeling about writing other people's characters in general.

Much like Aftermath before it, Clone was obviously going in a very definite epic direction by its conclusion. This direction would have remained in the Andromeda Galaxy had Clone's forebearer, Aftermath, not ended. However, with Bruce Lewis's rushed conclusion to his take on the Robotech universe post-TV series, Rikki rewrote the backstory to his own series, making Lewis's Aftermath stories into a fictional story written by Rand and setting forth plans to bring the SDF-M home in a sequel called, simply, Mordecai. It is ironic that Rikki's story would not even be graced with an ending; a second issue was in the works, but was delayed and then cancelled when Academy Comics lost the Robotech comic book license at the end of 1996.

CLONE

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