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Your other victims may have been intimidated by you, Gruaca, but I know all about the Zentraedi. I have known all about the Zentraedi, since the first time I tasted alien flesh, during the Uprisings.
Mini-series / September 1995 - May 1996 / Story by Bill Spangler
THE LOWDOWN
It is the year 2026, and Monument City is a dangerous place. The Masters have not yet invaded, but there are certainly dangerous individuals of an Earth-based sort already within the planet's central metropolis. One such person is Lyss Gruaca, a female Zentraedi assassin and veteran of the Malcontent Uprisings. While she usually kills for profit, Lyss is in Monument to settle an old score with a mad former Military Police Colonel named Frost. She delves into Monument's underworld to track him down and settle the score between them once and for all.
BACKGROUND INFO
In the mid-'90s, the comic book industry entered a "bad girl" phase. Every publisher was churning out books about dangerous scantily-clad females, whether they be superheroes, assassins, or demons from hell. Academy jumped on this bandwagon first with a one-shot, pitting Zentraedi warrior woman Lyss Gruaca--the titular "Mechangel", named for the custom battle armor she wears--against an old friend. As with most Southern Cross-era books, the guy paying her to do the dirty deed is none other than Anatole Leonard, a guy whose name Bill Spangler really tarnished throughout his Robotech books.
The main story that came a few months later, likely because of positive fan response (read: positive horny fanboy response), co-starred Angelo Dante and delved a little into his past (essentially contradicting the letters in the epigraphs in the Southern Cross novels by saying that his father was killed by the villain of the series, the insane and sick Colonel Frost). It also delved deeply into Lyss's past, which according to this story was intertwined with Dante's and his father's. In fact, it was the two of them that saved her from Colonel Frost and created her custom battle armor.
This series may have clinched the fact that Bill Spangler had finally gone off the deep end when it came to Robotech series ideas. The subject matter gets awfully grim, and again we have him using his urban, quasi-cyberpunky setting that he was so fond of, which he never realized didn't really work well with Robotech.
As for the art, it seems to follow the same pattern as artist William Jang's own Macross Missions books: brilliant opening, but it's downhill from there. In this case it's issues 1 and 3 that suffer from extreme sketchiness, while 0 and 2 are spectacularly illustrated.
As with so many Academy titles, I'm sure that there would have been more issues or another series of Mechangel released had Academy not lost the license to Antarctic, but as Roy Fokker once said, "Them's the breaks."
MECHANGEL
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