“Yesterday’s” Comic> Robotech: Sentinels–Rubicon #1

“Isn’t this overkill to find a lost dog?”

Robotech: The Sentinels–Rubicon #1

Antarctic Press (July, 1998)

“A Sort of Homecoming: Prologue”

WRITER: Alan Nepomuceno

PENCILER: Vithoon Kamchareon

INKER: Michel Lacombe

TONING: Ben Dunn

LETTERER/PROOFING: Doug Dlin

Fun fact: When this came out I remember complaining about it on alt.toys.transformers as part of some off-topic conversation, not knowing that Dlin worked for Antarctic Press or on this book. I wasn’t really paying attention to credits like I do now with this site. We usually got along pretty well, and if you’ve seen my post on the first canon female Decepticons he did the translation and allowed me to use it in the re-letter. However he wasn’t happy with my take on it. Still I really didn’t enjoy it and ended up not getting the full series. This is sort of a second-chance, to see if I made a mistake. This first issue review will be a bit off format.

From what I can tell, Scott brings his old squad from Earth to Tirol. There various characters from the three wars and some characters I don’t know like “Meg” cohabitate. Tirol has become the center of relations between the various Sentinel races, but all we see in this story are humans, micronized Zentraedi, and Tirolians. As we see the characters interact, including Lancer getting to meet the singing team of Minmei and Musica (I guess Janice isn’t back to music), some force keeps appearing in the area, destroying REF and Invid alike, and one of the beings within that force calls the other mother.

I say “from what I can tell” because while the art isn’t bad I can’t really identify the characters, in some cases even after they’re named. Max has an eyepatch now for some reason, the only female characters I can identify quickly are Meg and Sera because they’re the only ones with short hair, and that’s about it. Why is Nova making sure Sean (or who they say is Sean) isn’t flirting again? Honestly it feels like they just wanted characters from the three wars interacting and it doesn’t really work for me.

This appears I only picked up two issues before giving up but judging from this issue I don’t think I was wrong to drop it. The writing and art are okay outside of not being able to tell which character is which. It’s just, and I’m not trying to insult anyone here, this feels more like a fanfic than a regular story, an excuse to get everyone together but too afraid to use proper character models. The result is that sometimes I can’t even tell what’s going on. Why did Scott bring only some of the team here? What happened to everyone? The only decent mystery is the two beings whose warping in keeps causing trouble but I can’t really follow what’s going on. Ultimately I’m not sure dropping this was a bad move. We’ll see what happens next week with the second issue.