And you thought keeping your cat off the curtains was hard.
Robotech: Return To Macross #26
Academy Comics, Ltd (November, 1995)
“One Minute”
WRITER: Bill Spangler
ARTIST: Michelle Birchfield
The Salamander, a computer hacker named Scott Felder, has come to Macross Island in the hopes of hacking into the SDF-1 computer. He uses his friendship with Brian to get the access code, but he knows his friend well enough to figure it out himself and hopefully not implicate Brian, who has been dating Nina. (Guess what the passcode was. Four letter passwords are never a good idea.) However, Salamander is hit with the same whatever that messed with Dr. Lang (someone trying to explain why the artists on Super Dimensional Fortress Macross made his eyes weird I imagine) and now he “sees everything”. Now they have to find Salamander before something bad happens.
What they got right: I like the idea of someone hacking into the SDF-1‘s computer and dealing with the alien tech’s influence on him. Not too many stories (of the issues I have) really go into the ship’s tech, just the reverse-engineered stuff and their treatment by the rest of the world. This has the potential to do something different.
What they got wrong: We’re risking falling into the origin trap. Did we need an origin for Scott Bernard’s first name? Meanwhile we have Rolf Emerson over in the sister comic, and the whole Anatole Leonard business that just wrapped up in this title. Nina is so off-model that I didn’t recognize her at one point. And the title is written as “Title: One Minute”. Whoever lettered that apparently never titled a splash page before.
Recommendation: An interesting start and I am curious to see where it goes. Might be worth checking out.
BW Media Spotlight 
What’s up with the lizard and the woman in the Daisy Dukes shorts on the cover? As I recall, Daisy Dukes shorts came back in style in the mid 90s (there was even that Miami bounce song “Put Them Daisy Dukes On”. This is a comic from the mid 1990s, but why are those 2 images on this Robotech comic book cover??????
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I think the woman is supposed to be Nina and the “lizard” represents the Salamander, the hacker Brian is also dealing with.
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Very fascinating. I say this because a salamander looks totally different from a lizard. Salamanders are amphibians who live in water or wet locations, while lizards don’t live in water. Plus, lizards are reptiles. I’ve seen plenty of salamanders because I used to see them all the time along a brook in some woods close to my childhood neighborhood. They’re much smaller than lizards. I think the artist needs to retake 10th grade biology!
With those Daisy Dukes shorts that Nina was wearing on the cover, it did make me look up the song by that Miami bass group, and I watched the music video on Youtube. The video was from 1993, and that was the last time I had seen it! Clearly, the artist was inspired by the early to mid 90s Daisy Dukes shorts fashion craze of that time period when he or she illustrated Nina in that way.
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