“Who keeps painting these murals?”
Robotech: Mordecai
Academy Comics, Ltd (February, 1996)
Rosearik Rikki & Tavisha Wolfgarth
Like the previous Robotech: Clone, which this spins off from, this isn’t a comic but an illustrated booklet continuing the comic. I’m going to break format and review this as I go along, because if this is prose it feels more like doing a bonus Chapter By Chapter, with both being on Monday.
Another 10 years have passed, as if being immortal means we can just keep ditching getting to see advancement and just have the cool stuff we want, like more Clones and further upgraded Iconocasts. Meanwhile the “Protoculture Spider”, Una Von Raye, has taken over the Mordecai Mind while the Demont clone that was the former Mind tries to put the moves on Gilles. Basically these two need to stop putting their clones in charge of the ship and just get back together. It brings nothing but trouble. Remember, the first Mind was based on Gilles and framed the real Demont because she rejected his advances. You’d think these two would get the hint and patch things up!
Meanwhile, Bibi is finally awakened once her clone is declared dead and is reunited with the Zentraedi baby. Bibi is cured of her condition and now she can undergo the immortality process. So the whole point was to get a space baby added to the crew? Seriously, I don’t remember the Flesh Breakdown Syndrome being brought up until the Clone Special and now that plot device is just gone. It comes off as kind of pointless as I’m sure there was some other way to make her a foster mom of a Zentraedi child. (We still haven’t really explained what the Zentraedi are doing there.) We also learn one of Bibi’s friends has found out she was cloned from Gilles and Annie…meaning they took her DNA without her permission while curing her of the Protoculture-induced cancer she suddenly had in the “Threadbare Heart” storyline in Robotech: Aftermath that introduced this series. That seems kind of rude. This is when Una broadcasts to the whole ship and that she’s taken over the Mordecai. She’s discovered that the remaining Monte Yarrow have decided the best way to deal with the humans is to attack Earth…which the crew have abandoned so why is destroying us going to benefit their war to re-destroy the Andromeda galaxy? Since she likes these Earthlings she’s taken over the ship and will be directing them back to Earth to finish off the Monte Yarrow.
At this point the story just feels aimless, like they had ideas (and admittedly there have been some good ones) but didn’t really know what to do with them or to properly evolve one idea into another. The end result, which as I keep harping on never really felt like a Robotech story (I don’t care how many times they declare this an “alternate universe”, that doesn’t change multiversal continuity) to me, comes off as a series of unfocused events with a minor link between them. Assuming they’ve gotten better since this title I would like to see them retool the concept as a standalone property and see what they could actually do with the ideas rather than just time jump from situation to situation. As it stands this is the final story of this continuity and despite some interesting ideas they should redevelop as an unconnected project, I personally won’t miss it.
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