“I can’t wait until they fix my bed.”
Robotech: Clone Special Edition
Academy Comics (June, 1995)
“Youth Inertia”
WRITER: Rosearik Rikki
ARTIST: James Scharmen
Unable to undergo the life-extending Xalon process, Bibi (one of the ship’s characters that didn’t contribute much in the previous storyline so I never really mentioned her) decides to return to Earth. Partway there she changes her mind, but grows impatient as the computer tries to plot a course back to the Mordecai. This leads to the computer having an error, forced to crash land, and create a status field that she ends up in for around a year. When she wakes up she finds a community of Zentraedi refugees, including a Micronized Zentraedi couple who take the tarot cards (a farewell gift from Demont) and give her their baby, who may be named Alegra? These Zentraedi don’t seem to speak English. With the baby and what cards she has left, Bibi returns to the Mordecai.
Technically I could do this in the usual format but…I have so many questions. Where did these refugees come from? When did Bibi get this “flesh breakdown syndrome” that only keeps her from using the Xalon process and not much else? Why did Rikki decide to have her leave the ship, be lost for a year, and give her a Zentraedi baby? Why did two Zentraedi get micronized just to have a baby, and why are they going on about “culture” like the Japanese T’Sentraedi from Macross? Nothing about this story makes a lot of sense to me.
There is an interview in the back with Rikki and new artist Scharmen (who I will admit has an art style that works better as a Robotech comic than Wolfgarth’s…which isn’t a slight because I couldn’t do it either) but it started out with a lot of words and wasn’t very interesting. It just seemed to be a repeat of previous comments in the back of earlier issues, where Rikki goes on about this being some alternate Robotech future rather than tied to the series, which again makes me wonder why they didn’t just save this idea for their own project. There’s also some pieces showing off the character redesigns in Scharmen’s style, including giving the Iconocasts actual legs.
I kind of like Bibi, what little we’ve seen thus far even though she didn’t contribute to the plot until now, but this was not a good story for her. And the change in artist will come to naught as we’ll see in the final two issues of this “alternate Robotech” idea. Notice I didn’t say last two issues of Clone.
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