Catch more from Dalek 63•88 on YouTube
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 Colonel Wolff attempted to restore his family only to learn that bad decisions of his past and the previously unknown time dilation of travelling through folded space has ruined any hope of a reconciliation with his wife and son. What he doesn’t yet know is that he is part of a power struggle between the government and the military to become the leading authority before the arrival of the Invid. Meanwhile the Shimada family is dipping their own toes into the struggle by using the former 15th ATAC and the Starchildren to eliminate what they see is opposition to peaceful coexistence with the Invid, a plan doomed to failure.
I didn’t expect a whole lot of mecha fights in this book and I’m not sure how you’d do it. There are no surviving pockets of Masters’ forces loyal to the goals of the Elders, which were unsuccessful anyway. You couldn’t do their version of a “malcontent uprising” because they don’t have the same baggage as the Zentraedi…in fact you could make they case that they’re part of the Zentraedi’s baggage. According to the show the Invid’s attack was so swift and deadly that there was no initial opposition and it was only the first attempt at retaking Earth from the Invid that served as the first real battle in the war. As someone not usually into political intrigue I’m somehow still enjoying this book. Maybe it’s the characters I already know, but there are plenty of stories that make that unlikely. The presentation is better than the Op Center book I reviewed before. Whatever the case it’s time to see what happens to our heroes next…and which group is responsible for it.
Tell others about the Spotlight:
“Hey, I’m only dragging a thirteen year old girl, an amnesiac, a former gang member, and a lounge singer into battlefield with a former POW and a civilian. Where’s the crime?”
Robotech: The New Generation #18
Comico The Comic Company (September, 1987)
“Ghost Town”
ADAPTATION: Lawrence Schick
PENCILER: Thomas A. Tenney
INKER: Bill Anderson
COLORIST: Kurt Mausert
LETTERER: John Workman
EDITOR: Maggie Brenner
Tell others about the Spotlight:
I tried looking for videos of people playing through the story. All I found were builders and a weird game of hide-and-seek.
Considering a new hairstyle for Leon after a slightly off drawn line looked good to me. Let me know what you think or if you even notice.
A live-action version of Minecraft should be all the proof you need about something I’ve been bringing up in articles the past few years. Hollywood hates animation. Whether it’s cartoons, comics, or video games Hollywood thinks nothing is good unless it’s in live-action. However, whatever lore Minecraft may or may not have it’s the blocky art style that makes it Minecraft. It serves the look of various places, adds to the challenge of building things compared to a more “normal” design system in an online game like Second Life or a 3D graphic program like Blender, and even affects game play from what I can tell. Lose all that and is it even still Minecraft? Especially given how little Hollywood cares about accurate adaptation and just wants to use something popular as a cheap marketing gimmick. I hope the games fans are prepared to not recognize this movie. The rest of us learned that lesson the hard way, especially when it comes to bad video game adaptations.
Meanwhile, over at The Clutter Reports I finished up something I started two weeks ago by cleaning the rest of the bathroom. As usual lately my week of wasn’t all that restful. As I mention in the article I had more of those weird dreams that messed with my head all day, more atmospheric creepy than anything else but it was enough. I got over that only to have two separated days of insomnia. In one way it’s probably good I dropped out of last week, but I didn’t get done what I wanted to outside of banking a bunch of Finally Watched reviews for the future.
I was also saddened to hear about the passing of famed comic creator Neal Adams. I don’t really do the death announcements anymore for various reasons, all admittedly personal more than what passes for professional on this site, but he’s one of the greats of comic book art and I felt like acknowledging it.
This week we’ll see one of those as well as the next chapter of Robotech: Before The Invid Storm. I also finally re-linked Linkara’s first History Of Power Rangers episode as he tries to get past Toei’s copyright bots if you’re curious to check that out. Otherwise I wish I knew but who knows what other plans are going to get scuttled. I did manage to add a few old videos to BitChute and I’m hoping to caption at least one of the uncaptioned YouTube videos this week, but I seem to be in “we’ll see what happens” mode right now and it’s getting on my nerves. We’ll see how back to normal (see what I mean) and I hope you all had a good last week and have a good this week. God bless.
Tell others about the Spotlight:
And yet it looks like I’m going to need another one. My schedule has been broken for a while now. I’ve had late uploads, filler videos because I ran out of time for a proper feature article, and things not getting done when I wanted. It doesn’t help that, as I go over in this week’s Clutter Report, we have a new DVR box so it’s a race to watch everything on the old one that doesn’t seem to want to record. On the plus side I’m banking a bunch of Finally Watched articles for the future, but on the downside it’s something else eating into my time.
I’ve also been wanting to really play with certain pieces of software and learn how to use them better, relink a few things on the site, and try out things that could make for future content in articles, comics, and videos, as well as various combinations of the three. I’ve only done one Reconstruction Zone and one Re-Covered since I started the series a few years ago. So they’re not even series yet. There’s my various backlogs
Therefore I’m taking the next two weeks off to try and do at least some of that. It seems like a decent stop point in the book review, though honestly I would have rather waited until I was between books, though that does mean some of the comics under review are on cliffhangers for a while. I may do some articles for The Clutter Reports but I need time to get some things done and hopefully I won’t get sick and ruin that time off like I’ve done before. So have a great next two weeks. Hopefully the idea I have for the next Jake & Leon can be properly sorted into four panels–the reason there’s no comic today on top of what I just mentioned–and that’s what we’ll return on.
Tell others about the Spotlight:
Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai is on the list of most popular movies among cinephiles, a rarity for a Japanese film from the 1950s given how influential it has been on even Western media. Not only has it influenced Star Wars to a degree it inspired a Western (as in cowboys with six shooters) classic, The Magnificent Seven from 1960. Tonight’s Showcase however is a science fiction series from Japan directly influenced by the Kurosawa film as well. If you haven’t been introduced to it before, here is Samurai 7.
By now you know most of this plot. Baddies rob a town blind on a regular basis and a village priestess decides to go into the city to find a samurai to defend them. She and her tagalong sister along with their bodyguard will find seven of them, as the name implies, and the series follows their trek to the village while dealing with a criminal’s posh son with a crush on the priestess. It’s all set to a sci-fi bend as the heroes include a robot as are the villains robbing the village of rice constantly. Despite Funimation’s channel on YouTube being rebranded as Crunchyroll Dubs this episode is in Japanese with subtitles. Yeah, I don’t get it either but at least it’s official. Enjoy episode one: “The Master”.
