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Forcing the world to conform to one ideology is wrong, Fokker!
We're the new crusaders of freedom!
Backup story ("Tigercat"), Regular story ("Variants") / March 1997 - November 1998 / By Ted Nomura
THE LOWDOWN
Two years prior to the First Robotech War, Roy Fokker leads a team of pilots in prototype two-mode Veritech Fighters called "Tigercats" against an anti-unificationist faction led by Fokker's former mentor, Max "Blue Max" Focke. Unfortunately, in the middle of battle, Fokker's weapons operator, Lisa Hayes, is injured and finds herself in a strange future, one where the Robotech Defense Force and its fleet of Super Dimensional Fortresses are fighting a losing battle with an alien foe called the Zentraedi. Is it merely a dream, or is it a life she has simply forgotten?
BACKGROUND INFO
Prototype 001: Tigercat began life as the back-up story in the premiere issue of Antarctic Press's color Robotech anthology series. Writer/artist Ted Nomura admitted in an early installment of its direct sequel, Prototype 001: Variants, that he was sure he had the least knowledge of Robotech of any of the Antarctic staffers, but was encouraged by Ben Dunn to create some material for a backlog so that Robotech could come out on a regular schedule. Due to some of his colleagues growing increasingly busy, however, Nomura's story ended up becoming not only one of the first to be released, but the longest-running storyline Antarctic published. Unfortunately for those who'd been following Robotech comics for a while, the storyline Nomura came up with contradicted 40+ issues of continuity that Bill Spangler and Robert W. Gibson had built over the course of four years in the form of Return to Macross and Academy Blues, published by Eternity and Academy Comics.
This fact, along with numerous problems introduced by Nomura's inexperience with the Robotech universe, and the fact he didn't seem to understand the differences between it and the non-Robotech Super Dimension Fortress Macross universe, make Prototype 001 a chore to read for the seasoned Robotech fan, though I figure modern day anime and manga fans reading it will only be put off by the hammy characterization and poor pacing. Mind you, part of the pacing problem isn't necessarily Nomura's fault--it's merely because the chunks of story in the Tigercat portion are so short. But the petty things he decided to devote his time each issue to did grow irritating, especially when he kept teasing the reader with snippets of the meat of the story. This probably wouldn't be nearly as problematic if each installment of the story was longer, but with such short chapters I kept wanting the story to start really getting underway each month only to roll my eyes when Nomura would pull some other thing out to parade before the readers that was basically non-essential, such as the two-page crew roster for the Tigercat squadron Roy commands, most of whom only got one line of dialogue each afterwards.
Most of the story's problems would be forgivable if the overall storyline were interesting, but quite frankly, Focke is a poorly concieved second-rate T.R. Edwards, and the alternate universe storyline, while not a bad idea, does little with its promise and is disappointingly vague on several points, which will be discussed in detail in the entries on each installment.
PROTOTYPE 001
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