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June 20, 2009 ... Above the Nevada desert.
Roy Fokker in Skull One is en route to a local RDF base. As he makes his final approach, he notices an old Veritech sitting on the runway in a similar configuration. Standing by it is one Lisa Hayes. When Roy dismounts his craft, he tells her he thought she was at Macross City working on the SDF-1. She tells him that she's preparing the VF-14 for a flight to the museum. Roy tells her it's good to see her, grabbing her shoulder in a friendly manner, and asks how Claudia is, but Lisa tells him to stop it--they're professionals. And Claudia's fine, she tells him. She tells him she has a bad feeling, and Roy reminds her that she was much more cheerful when they first started working together. "That was a long time ago," Lisa says, "long ago ..."
Two years earlier, in February of 2007, a younger but similarly surly Lisa Hayes brings a younger and slightly more immature Roy Fokker to a hangar on Macross Island to get familiar with his new mount, the YVF-14A Tigercat Prototype 001. The aircraft is a live simulator prototype developed to test a new battle configuration, which was discovered on the VF-X prototype by accident.
Meanwhile, at an unspecified location in the desert of the Middle East, a mysterious scarred figure in a similar aircraft remarks that he got all ten targets destroyed. "I believe the Blue Max is now ready for combat!"
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NOTES
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| FIRST APPEARANCES | |||||||||||||||||
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| TIMELINE | |||||||||||||||||
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This story takes place prior to the ROBOTECH TV series, in a later timeframe than Return to Macross but rather contradictory to it in several respects--first and foremost that in 2007 the VF-1 isn't done yet, and in Return to Macross Fokker had been playing with it for three years already. So that series is right out as far as Prototype 001 is concerned. Of course, this series is also rather contradictory to the ROBOTECH TV series as well. According to the episode "A Rainy Night", Roy and Claudia hadn't seen each other since the Global Civil War (or whatever conflict was depicted in that episode--I believe it was the Unification Wars in the original Macross series, but such conflicts were never referred to in ROBOTECH) until she tracked him down during the development of the VF-X, the ORIGINAL Veritech prototype. Since Lisa never knew that Roy and Claudia weren't always a happy couple, she wouldn't have known Roy prior to the VF-X test run, which "A Rainy Night" says that Roy participated in. (With me so far? Good.) So, Lisa couldn't have shown him the YVF-14A, which was BASED off of the VF-X, because Lisa couldn't have known Roy until after the testing of the VF-X, and furthermore, Roy and Claudia weren't going out at this point, which is because Claudia first met him again right before the test flight of the VF-X, and in Prototype 001 he knows Lisa as Claudia's friend. Furthermore, Roy was involved closely in the VF-X's development, so he would have known about the Guardian mode before Lisa, and also, Lisa and Claudia had only met each other two weeks before the test flight of the VF-X, so Roy couldn't possibly have been with Lisa during the timeframe in which the YVF-14A was produced. I know, it's all rather confusing, but in short, Roy and Lisa should not be in the hangar talking about this plane derived from the VF-X in February of 2007. It just does not work. Oh, and notice that the date given for the series' opening is several months after Harmony Gold's current date for the SDF-1's launch. Apparently Ted was working from the ORIGINAL Harmony Gold ROBOTECH series start date (July 1, 2009, as noted in the Comico Graphic Novel).
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ARTWORK |
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Nomura sure can draw airplanes nicely. His characters are okay, not exactly great, but servicable. However, his two years younger renditions of the characters look much too young. Fokker looked about that young during the early flashbacks in "A Rainy Night", but by the time he was on Macross Island he looked about the same as he did in the first eighteen episodes of the TV series. Lisa looks a bit young for 22, but hey, some people are like that.
The two-page technical spread on the YVF-14A is pretty nice, lavishly and lovingly detailed. Nomura really likes his planes. The computer effects throughout are, for the most part, merely okay, and are rather arbitrarily used in one instance. However, the first two-page shot of Skull One coming in and the YVF-14 sitting on the runway is a thing of sheer beauty ... well, except the overly computer-colored terrain in the distance, but aside from that, it's just terrific.
That new character (identified in a later chapter as Max Focke, Roy's old mentor), though, is pretty stock looking, and he looks kind of Asian even though I don't think he's supposed to be. Plus he has the "look, I'm evil!" scar. *sigh*
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| STORY | |||||||||||||||||
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This story has eight pages, which I'll go through one-by-one here (okay, some two at a time). That's the easiest way to treat this very prologue-like first chapter of Antarctic's longest-running story. The first page is Nomura going, "look, I know techincal airplane landing jargon!" The second and third pages are, "look, I made up a brand-new retroactively-inserted old mecha, just like Bill Spangler used to make up at least once a year or so!" (Okay, Nomura didn't know enough about ROBOTECH when he wrote Prototype 001 to be able to make a reference like that, but still, it's true ...) Pages four and five are Nomura writing Roy and Lisa badly (Lisa has bad feeling) and first alluding to his idea of them being a "team", which is something they NEVER EVER WERE in the original TV series. And Roy would NEVER use the "I'm an embarassed anime character, so I'm scratching the back of my head" gesture. He's not a wimpy Tenchi-boy! He's a brazen drunken red-blooded American MAN! That is technically more a writing problem than an art problem, since it's essentially a characterization flaw, one which also seeps into his "I'm a sheepish overeager schoolboy!" dialogue all up and down page five. Then we have pages six and seven, which are mostly taken up by the standard cut-away two-page spread of the YVF-14A itself. The panels along the bottom make very little sense, first because Lisa refers to the "new configuration" and "unique feature" without explaining what it is. Of course, the mecha is in Guardian mode at this time (not made very clear, since the main shot of the mecha is a schematic and not a shot of the mecha with Lisa and Roy), but you'd think she'd at least tell Roy what this mode is called. Second, the way her dialogue reads, it sounds like the word balloons are switched around. (The two sentences are "We rushed in creating this live simulator prototype model to test the new configuration for possible use in combat tactics," and, "During the system check of the VF-X prototype, we discovered this unique feature quite by accident." Read them aloud and you'll probably find that they flow better the other way around.) However, the second line does lead into Fokker's next line, which is a really lame joke. (See "QUOTES" above.) Then Lisa gets all flabbergasted, since (and this IS in character) she has no sense of humor. And finally, on page eight we meet the EVIL BAD GUY for the first time and get to see HIS Guardian-capable shiny new fighter. Oh, he's not going to use it to fight Roy in some climactic duel, is he? (No, actually he's going to use it to fight Roy in an ANTI-climactic duel, because Ted's going to go crazy before the story ends and shuffle Lisa off into a parallel SDF Macross dimension which is actually all just a crazy dream she shouldn't be able to have because Breetai, Exedore, Khyron, and Azonia are all there, and NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT THE ZENTRAEDI YET!)
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| FINAL THOUGHTS | |||||||||||||||||
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This first installment of Prototype 001 is merely okay. That said, by being merelly okay, that makes it one of the better installments. It looks at least like it's going somewhere. Later installments feel like they're sitting in "idle". The fun never stops, let me tell you ...
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