Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
In the last chapter of Robotech: Dana meets with the remaining members of her people who didn’t go with the Robotech Expeditionary Force and it was a rather bleak reunion. Some good news came with the arrival of Colonel Jonathan Wolf, hero of the wars on Tirol and experienced fighter of the Invid, along with new mecha and protoculture plus a ship that may just give the planet a fighting chance of surviving a third Robotech War over the mysterious power source known as protoculture.
That would make a nice catch-up bit for the show, but we know Colonel Wolf isn’t really that great a hero. For example that time he got drunk while on monitor duty and made out with an amnesiac victim of the Regis’ experiments because she resembled his girlfriend who was forced to go off with T.R. Edwards. It should also be noted that he had a wife and son on Earth and we don’t know how that ended. Even if that ends up not happening in McKinney’s take on The Sentinels we also know Wolf’s fate, a huge fall from honor that at least comes with redemption. What we don’t know is…do you spell his last name Wolf, Wolff, Wolfe, or Wolffe because this franchise can’t seem to find an agreement on that.
Wolff (I’ll use the novel’s internal spelling here, which clashes with the back cover) is a rather fascinating character from an external view. Originally a one-shot character in Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, making Scott a former member of the “Wolff Pack” and the celebrity Scott notes about him kind of forced Robotech II: The Sentinels to use him, even knowing how he would turn out. In other words they had to come up with something tied to his wife Katherine and their son Johnny, convince us this great commander could fall so far that he sold out soldiers to the Invid, realize how wrong he was and sacrifice himself in a fit of redemption, and make us feel sorry for him in the process. We can’t already hate Wolff if we go back to his solo episode and if they’re watching for the first time after reading the comics and novels new audiences can’t expect what he’s mixed up in. How this book handles him and his wife and son is going to be rather fascinating if only to see if James Luceno, the surviving member of the duo that makes up the pen name Jack McKinney at this time, pulls it off. With that let’s see Wolff’s arrival shakes things up.
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