Seto Kaiba

Yeah, you can't blame that one (entirely) on Robotech's indie comic book licensees. When Robotech II: the Sentinels was in development, it wasn't possible to use the original Haruhiko Mikimoto designs from Macross due to copyright and the project's budget from Harmony Gold and its partner Matchbox wouldn't stretch far enough for the studio to hire outside designers. The task of coming up with new, non-infringing character and mecha designs for Robotech II: the Sentinels was handed off to Tatsunoko's internal design team at Studio Ammonite. You may remember them as the masterminds of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Presumably because Robotech was an "American series for Americans", many of the male characters picked up the stereotypical square jaw and a more angular face in general. The indie publishers who acquired the comic book license used the designs Ammonite produced for the cancelled series, so Rick's lantern jaw made its way into the comics and became much more associated with the comics because the comics lasted exponentially longer.

Is... is that the alligator from Happy Gilmore? Having just finished season one, to be honest I would call the episodic nature of the series up to the point I'm at its single biggest flaw. It's visually very impressive and the choreography and editing work is quite well done. Starting with a three episode setup and then switching to "villain of the week" just felt like the writers went "bored now!" and decided to do something else. IMO, it really hurt the season's conclusion because the idea that the Imperials were constantly hunting the child found itself on the back burner for entire middle of the season and then a greater scope villain rolls up basically unannounced for the denouement and kills everyone who's been driving the plot so far. If they'd been more serial with it, like Andor, they probably could've done a better job foreshadowing that. Big ol' exposition dump in the final episode notwithstanding, Mando's still pretty thin on character development too. Even that IG droid got more. A taciturn badass character works as a supporting cast member, and if you're going to make that the main character you have to have some other person or plot device to pick up the slack expositionally. IMO, the low point in season one is absolutely episode six "The Prisoner". Every aspect of the plot is telegraphed so hard that it was actually kind of exasperating. That may have been intended to be part of the joke, but IMO they didn't land it becuase Mando can't emote in a face-obscuring helmet.

To be fair, that's not even that far off the pretty poor-quality animation reference for Sentinels...

No worries. I'm watching the series as the suggestion/insistence of a friend, so I have a feeling bailing out now is probably not an option without enduring some reproachful glares. (That's kind of a theme with me and Star Wars... reading the Thrawn trilogy was done after enduring some arm twisting too.) The difficulty I'm having with the story is not so much what's in the story as what's not. The titular Mandalorian is just a taciturn guy in a mask who gets into a lot of fights. They haven't done anything to really explore why this cold-hearted contract killer decided to go on a John Wick-esque murder spree to rescue the child, or why the child was worth the apparently princely sum that was paid to the bounty hunter to bring him in. Or why the child's safety was more important to him than the safety of his foster family. There's not even really a sense that he has a goal right now. I assume at least some of these questions will be answered eventually, but it's rather frustrating to The story is very action friendly, but as of S1E7 I feel like it lacks a sense of direction. Mando's just kind of traveling from one fight scene to the next like the story mode of a fighting game. (I also have this repeated weird moment... Mando keeps holding scopes up to his helmet as though he were wearing a bucket with tinted glass on the front, but in other scenes he's got heat vision or something like it seemingly built in. It just seems odd to me.)

This is another version of the same fallacious argument you were making earlier about the number of comics... The number of countries your show's in doesn't matter if nobody's watching. Think of it this way, since this is a comics thread... if you're a publisher and you have orders for a total of 7,000 copies of the next issue of your comic, it doesn't matter of those orders are from one country or fifty because that doesn't change the total number of orders you received. This is why I'm looking at things like broadcast ratings/viewership shares and merchandise sales. That's much more useful and reliable data than "It aired in X-many markets with a total reach of Y-many people", because there's no guarantee that any of those Y-many people in those X-many markets (never mind all of them) tuned in. On a lark, I fact-checked this... and the only search result for "Robotech" that referred to the series as a "hit" was from the Robotech fandom wiki. Not exactly an impartial source, y'know? But yes, if you'd like I can share some articles about how network executives are struggling to come up with actual criteria to define "hit". Back in the day, it meant that a series had a dominant ratings share either in a competitive time slot or on the network's total broadcast schedule... but that was not the case for Robotech. "Critically acclaimed" and "award winning" are two others that have lost all meaning due to Exact Words, which is why they and "hit" are favorites of marketing. As long a you've got one critic willing to praise it, no matter how minor or unheard-of and even if they're on the studio's own payroll, it's still "critical acclaim". Winning an award by default as the only entrant in a category is still an award won, which is why RTSC can advertise itself as "award winning". As long as the statement is technically true or at least non-falsible, it's fair game for marketing. I would hesitate to use search engine result counts as more than general guidance. It's easy to get sites that do not actually contain relevant content (e.g. random tags in comment fields) and multiple results for a single webpage that infliate numbers.

Well, it is basically an otome fantasy series... so it's less about the conflict and the stakes of the world than Sei being surrounded by a crowd of distressingly pretty men who are all interested in her for one reason or another. It's a different kind of power fantasy from ones aimed at a male audience. (It is pretty darned tedious, yeah.)

So... I've finally found the time to sit down and watch The Mandalorian in its entirety, and I am just absolutely bewildered by this series. TBH, I feel like I missed some required reading along the way. The production quality is absolutely amazing and the action sequences are fine, but the story itself feels so thin that I'm left to wonder if part of it is missing. I'm almost done with the first season, but the protagonist and his young ward don't even have names. The child is an orphan and Mando was one, but that seems to be the totality of their relationship. Lots of shooting, but not much character development. The series also seems to kind of... expect me to not only know who the Mandalorians are but be invested in their struggle. As a casual Star Wars viewer, I'm just lost on the whole topic. They're refugees or something?

OK, that's a fair point. I had thought it was relatively self-evident given that I'm looking at quantifiable benchmarks of performance. Marketing has all but completely devalued the term "hit", but what I'm looking at in terms of Robotech's performance relative to its facing competition... that is to say, relative to the other merchandise-driven animated kid's shows that were active at approximately the same time as Robotech in the mid-1980s. The likes of GI Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Challenge of the Go-Bots, Transformers, Voltron, M.A.S.K., Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, ThunderCats, Jem, The Real Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so on. Robotech isn't at the absolute bottom of that pile, but it's pretty close. As I mentioned previously, it really is just awful luck that Robotech was running opposite basically every memorable kid's show of the mid-80's. That is Nightmare difficulty for an attempt to launch a series. In terms of impact, I'm looking at both short and long term. Did it create trends? Did it spawn copycats? Did other existing titles pivot to copy it? DId it spawn spinoffs, sequels, and/or movies? Was it referenced by other works at the time? Is it a household name? What companies picked up licenses? How established are the licensees and what is the total customer base they have? Has it had (successful) revivials? Is it still being referenced now? The answer to most of these questions for Robotech are unflattering to say the least. Again, your conclusion here really doesn't stand up to scrutiny and isn't supported by the evidence. You're presuming that because there is still a fandom now, that the fandom must have been MUCH larger in the past. What you're not account for is that Robotech's following was always a "cult" one. A small number of very devoted fans who were supporting the franchise even when what it was putting out was, to use your own word for it, crap. If you look to things like sales figures for things like comics, you see that Robotech had a small but devoted following that gradually shrank over time. At its peak, orders for the best-selling comics Robotech had were less than half what was being placed for its competitors. Still very respectable numbers by indie standards, but small enough to easily be considered "niche". Those orders got smaller and smaller as time went on and the license changed hands. Folks who were there for the Usenet days and the like attest to the same... that Robotech had a small but fanatical fanbase that gradually drifted away as discontent grew over a variety of issues like the declining quality of the comics, the difficulties reconciling licensee-created material with the TV series, Robotech 3000, and so on. We've already touched on why the volumes of merchandise don't mean anything and why the profusion of comics doesn't mean the audience was large, so I see not reason to go revisiting those points. When it comes to development by Harmony Gold, well... you also have to account for the fact that Robotech is basically a company hobby not a primary revenue stream. Harmony Gold is a rental property management firm that dabbles in television production on the side. If Robotech had been owned by a toy company the way many of its competitors were, it would have met its end in 1987 when the toy line was determined to be beyond saving. Mattel's Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors was in a similar position, with the underperformance of the toy line causing plans for a new season of the series and a movie to be scrapped. Robotech's saving grace was Harmony Gold's not being dependent on it for operating revenue, so they let it limp along when anyone else would've pulled the plug in order to make those quick grabs for some extra cash from a variety of tiny indie licensees. That's how we got the comics, the novels, the RPG, and so on. Those WERE cash grabs, and the license revocations came because they weren't producing said cash as declining quality dragged sales down with it. That's part of why, when Harmony Gold publicly disowned them in the early 2000s, they freely admitted that nobody was overseeing this licensing. Robotech 3000 was a cash grab attempt to jump on the 2000s reboot bandwagon, and that cash grab actually killed some of their other licenses (like making acquiring the Robotech 3000 rights a condition of renewing the RPG license). Where it gets really painfully ironic is the 2000s reboot of Robotech that threw out the old comics, novels, etc. and gave us the actually-not-bad DC/Wildstorm comics and later the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie" was done on the understanding that Robotech was a niche series with a very small following that needed to rethink its setting and story and business practices to become mainstream and garner a large following. Because they took it seriously and tried to do a professional job, it actually worked for a time. Funding for Shadow Chronicles was explicitly contingent upon it bringing in a large following that would draw sponsors to fund subsequent installments. If they'd funded it well they probably could've succeeded too... but they tried to do it on a hair shirt budget to maximize profits (AKA a "cash grab") and the consequences that had for the project were disastrous. With no money to hire a writer, the script was a mess and the subject of infighting among the creative team. With only minimal market research, the effort to make their new OVA appeal to mainstream anime fans amounted to little more than a cynical attempt to appeal through fanservice. The animation budget was pathetically small so quality suffered, esp. after spending big on hiring supporting voice actors with Star Trek and Star Wars credits (Mark Hamill and DS9's Chase Masterson) to their names to hopefully raise the film's profile. The end result was received incredibly poorly, and the backlash against criticism of it from Harmony Gold directly led to many remaining fans leaving the franchise for greener pastures. Robotech Academy was another cash grab... a Kickstarter cash grab inspired a failure to understand pledge metrics from Palladium's RPG Tactics game. They saw the fans cough up $1.4 million and failed to notice that was from less than 5,500 people worldwide. They (like Palladium) thought they'd found a foolproof way to print money, and it blew up in their faces almost immediately with less than 2,300 people worldwide being willing to sink even a dollar into the prospect of a new Robotech series. That's what landed us back where we are now with Robotech, with the pool of licensees reduced to outfits that are small and questionable even by indie standards (with one earning an unprecedented double cease and desist) and a comic licensee so disinterested in Robotech that they devoted an entire 24 issue series to taking the piss out of it.

I think that 7's music has been bettered since by Frontier... but I absolutely agree with the second half that they did it a huge disservice by overplaying just a few of their songs, esp. in the show's first half. It's real easy to get sick of Planet Dance when it's all you hear. It'll be interesting to see what we get, music-wise, from the next series. I think Delta's music fell down a bit because it was trying too hard to be like Frontier's instead of finding its own identity. Hopefully the next show's music will opt for more originality.

That's your opinion, but the objective benchmarks paint a somewhat more modest tale of a niche series that acquired a small but fiercely loyal following while otherwise kind of flying under the radar. I'm saying that back then not many people cared about it, and that that number is smaller now. That much is clearly indicated by the sales numbers for merchandise like the comics. What you doing here is generalizing from your own experience, without considering if the experience you had was atypical. Generating a lot of merchandise doesn't mean anything if the merchandise only reaches a very small and isolated audience or doesn't sell at all. I feel like that's a key stumbling block in our discussion here. Those small independent publishers working on the Robotech license turned out a large number of titles, but the majority of them seldom lasted more than a few issues and the circulation of even the best selling of them was never more than a few thousand copies. They did well by the relatively low standards of the small independent publishers, but not in absolute terms. Your criteria here are vague, nebulous, or just downright impossible to define. Bigger than average just begs the question of what you're using to determine average and how, the idea of a robust fandom is somewhat counterindicated by the steady decline of the Robotech fandom during the period when the comics were the dominant form of the series as measurable via the decline in sales, and this bit about inspiration is entirely subjective.

Yup... though when you think about it, the idea probably goes back even farther in production terms. When Boddole Zer's mobile fortress started "decaying" at the end of DYRL?, the explanation given is that the fold systems were running out of control after the living command computer died and were teleporting chunks of the ship into fold space. It's not even a joke... I am that bad.

Kind of disappointed with how Tearmoon Empire has turned out. The first episode definitely made it seem like it would be a more serious series, but it's every bit as goofy and comedy-focused as My Next Life as a Villainess. Definitely enjoying The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch, though it is some pretty generic slice-of-life/comedy fare. I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness is... pretty unremarkable. I'm gonna give it a few more episodes to find its feet, but it doesn't feel like it's headed anywhere noteworthy.

Hm... if that's how you feel, I'm probably not doing a fantastic job of explaining the connections in my thinking. The sales numbers don't bear out the idea that there was huge demand for Robotech. They initially sold reasonably well for indie comics, but we're still talking a per-issue circulation in the thousands rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands. This was not huge demand by any objective standard. It was the biggest title that Comico, Eternity, and Academy's catalogs had, but that's an incredibly low bar to clear for such small independent publishers. (Especially ones that were already shedding titles for various reasons.) You don't need to run out a dozen separate titles if your main title is selling well. That's something you do when you've reached saturation in your market and the book isn't bringing significant numbers of new readers in anymore and/or your existing titles aren't making ends meet. If you need to boost sales and bringing in new readers isn't an option, you produce more titles under the same banner in order to get that limited customer pool buying multiple books. None of these books were selling more than a few thousand copies, so even if readership was mutually exclusive demand wasn't substantial. It's the same thinking behind the massive crossover events the superhero comics do so often. If you can't bring in new readers, make the existing readers buy multiple books. I think what we're looking at here is fundamentally a difference in scale. Robotech may have been very impactful on a personal level for some members of the community here, but this is a small fan community and even here Robotech is a niche interest within our already niche interest in Macross. This community would almost certainly still exist without it, esp. given that Macross made it to the west in other forms than Robotech in the 80's and 90's both legitimately and in bootleg form. What I'm looking at, and what I feel most of the people here understood me to be talking about, is the bigger picture. Robotech was quickly forgotten by general audiences outside of its small "cult" fandom, pop culture rarely acknowledges its existence, it didn't really make a lasting mark on the anime industry, and what little it has in name recognition stems mainly from the legal problems it caused over the years rather than any part of its story. Acknowledging that Robotech has always been kind of an obscure, niche series is by no means a criticism of it... nor should it impinge upon your enjoyment of it.

Not really, no... but then, the term "large" is also rather subjective. If there had been a large audience hungry for Robotech, well... its ratings would have been better than the middling-at-best numbers it got, its toy line would have sold better, and that first comic book license would have gone to a more upscale publisher able to do a far better job instead of struggling indie publisher Comico Comics because the projected return on investment would've been better. This potentially could've saved Robotech II: the Sentinels from cancellation... leading to all kinds of other consequences. It's not the "sheer volume" that's telling... it's that that sheer volume of Robotech material is crap. Even when it was new, the Robotech license wasn't valuable enough to attract a major publisher. That's why the license ended up in the hands of one troubled indie publisher after another. Those indie publishers did cheaper, lower quality work because they were only expecting to sell a few thousand copies of any given book. Multiple concurrent titles was a way to wring a few more bucks out of those few thousand customers who were already buying one book. Every penny counts when your total circulation could fit into a high school football stadium, y'know? If Robotech had the kind of following that'd move 100,000+ copies a month like Superman or X-Men, the license would've been picked up by a competent publisher who could've done quality work. Because it only had a following big enough to move maybe 7,500 copies in a really strong month it ended up in the hands of indie publishers Comico, Eternity, Academy, and Antarctic Press, who did kind of mediocre or rubbish work. The same is basically true for the RPG license. Because interest in the brand was quite low, the license ended up in the hands of a small independent publisher with noticeably backwards business practices who did their best... but their best was still a pretty amateur-hour job. Actually, having the license end up in the hands of a struggling indie company with financial problems and questionable management seems to be a franchise-wide theme with Robotech now that I think on it... 🤔

In principle, it's similar to the idea that "any machine has the potential to become a smoke machine if you operate it incorrectly enough". Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II has an example of that principle in action. (See pg099) The "Shinnakasu/OTEC FWF-1000X Fold Weapon" described therein is essentially an improvised dimensional warhead made by operating a FBF-1000A fold booster "incorrectly enough". It was improvised by the crew of the General Galaxy transport ship GG Arrow in 2043. When attacked by an unknown party with minimal ability to fight back, they got creative and chucked a fold booster at the enemy that was set to activate with no programmed destination... sending the target on what was theoretically a one-way trip to fold space. While it's described as cumbersome and ineffective, it's also suggested that it was the inspiration for the later Dimension Eater weapons once a more reliable method to conduct an involuntary space fold was discovered. ... that generally means I was the one cooking, and we need to get a new fire extinguisher.

Eh... that's several layers down in the "a tiny minority of" nesting doll. Or, in more scientific terms, "the sample population in question is statistically insignificant". The point being made, and the reason the Robotech comics are the way they are, is that Robotech came and went largely unnoticed and unremarked-upon. It resonated with a small portion of its already small audience, but otherwise there was little to indicate it'd existed at all aside from merchandise returned unsold until it became a legal obstacle other better remembered properties like BattleTech, Transformers, and Macross. Ah, I stand corrected... and probably should have remembered that myself given how huge Ghostbusters was when I was a kid (via Ghostbusters II and the cartoon in question). When one is described as "heavily modified" and the other is a toy from a completely different toy line... I feel like "with a little work" is underselling it a bit. ... and if it's up to the consumer to actually bring the product's quality up to an acceptable level, well... Well, yes... though Revell's "Robotech" is a completely different and almost entirely unrelated project from Harmony Gold's Robotech. Revell's Robotech predates Harmony Gold's. It was a name shared by two separate robot model kit lines - the Robotech Defenders and Robotech Changers - which were repackaged Japanese model kits from Dougram, Macross, and Orguss. The Robotech Defenders limited comic from DC was an attempt to market the kits better by attaching a Transformers-esque storyline to them. It didn't work out, and the premise was abandoned as Revell pivoted to partnering with Harmony Gold's nascent Macross dub to save its kit line. The Robotech we know came after that and has no real relation to it save for the name appropriated from Revell's kit line.

Sitting down to a title from a couple years back... Ghost in the Shell: Arise: the New Movie. It's really irritating how Arise was done. A four part OVA, then the recut as a TV series with two extra episodes, then the movie. It's like the studio was doing everything it could to NOT tell a complete story.

Palladium's management is super old fashioned... I'd recommend reaching out to them by phone not email or a website contact page. The only way I was ever able to get ahold of them when I was looking for permission to use some of their art for review purposes years back was by phone.

Putting aside what feels like an ad hominem, Robotech's own history is the best argument that it had very little impact at all. By ratings, the Robotech TV series was an unremarkable middle-of-the-pack performer in the middle of a glut of merchandise-driven cartoons. Their competition is a who's who of the most memorable kid's shows of the mid-80's: Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Jem, Ghostbusters, G-Force, Johnny Quest, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so on. Its accompanying toy line from Matchbox was such an embarrassing failure that Matchbox abandoned the license after just two years. Its animated feature film ended up pulled from the release schedule in its primary market and quietly abandoned. Its attempt at an original TV series died in early production. The first few attempts at home video were a mess, and by the time it landed at Macek's own Streamline Pictures in the 90's the very limited praise from the hobby press was mainly for including the non-Robotech versions of the three original shows. You have to be remembered to have an impact, and Robotech was only really remembered by its small fanbase and the even-more-niche-at-the-time anime hobbyist community, with the latter group having little nice to say about it. Pop culture references to it are vanishingly rare across nearly forty years, its merchandise is nonexistent on store shelves, and three separate attempts at a revival have failed due to lack of interest: Robotech 3000, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, and Robotech Academy. Since this is a comics thread, consider that the actually-popular and impactful titles from the same period that landed comics were picked up by the major publishers like Marvel and DC. Who picked up the Robotech license? Only the struggling, small-time independent publishers who were looking for a licensed property with a built-in audience to boost their flagging circulation were interested in Robotech. If Robotech were really so impactful, its first-ever comic book licensee at the apex of the show's popularity would not have been an indie publisher plagued by disputes over the ownership of its flagship original properties and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy due to mismanagement. Nor would a second licensee have been an independent publisher so small it was consolidated out of existence along with half a dozen others by the same financial backer, nor a third and fourth so inept they would have their licenses revoked for incompetence. This site's existence doesn't mean much in terms of Robotech's impact. Sure, the oldest members here saw Robotech in '85 and that was their introduction to Macross... but you forget that there were plenty of other, later opportunities for people to be introduced to it as well like that Hong Kong dub of DYRL?, Macross II and Macross Plus in the early 90's, and the growth of the internet fansub community in the late 90's and early 2000s. This site, or a site very much like it, would still exist without Robotech. Most of us would be there. Robotech's supposed influence is massively oversold by Harmony Gold for marketing reasons. You garner a lot more interest in their position by saying your show was things like "genre-defining", "foundational", or "a breakthrough" than you do with a more honest appraisal like "commercially unsuccessful", "largely forgotten", and "often confused with a top brand of pool-cleaning apparatus, a Japanese brand of sex toy, and/or a derisive term for giant robot action movies". (And for the record, I've got a good while yet before I have to worry about 40... never mind 50. 😉)

It didn't make much of an impact in the US either. Even though the US was its home market, Robotech was just another kid's show with mediocre ratings and an unsuccessful toy line that was forgotten by almost everyone within a year or so of going off the air. It probably would have been forgotten almost entirely outside of its tiny cult following if not for the impact Harmony Gold's threats of litigation (some justified, some not) had on other properties like BattleTech/MechWarrior, Transformers, and Macross. That's why the Robotech comic license skipped the industry leaders and went directly to the smaller independent publishers. It just didn't have the brand recognition to be picked up by a major publisher. The RPG license landed at Palladium Books for similar reasons. The one market where Robotech somehow made a lasting impact was South America, which is odd given how much of its media was developed for a North American audience.

That's a fair description of any of the Gundam Build shows. I guess Meta just makes it slightly more obvious that you're watching a 24 minute commercial for MSV Gunpla.

As an engineer, I can honestly say that exploding violently has always been an unintended and undesirable operating mode for any of the propulsion and power systems I have worked on. This doesn't stop the explosions from happening, it just means we get upset and have to add notes to the FMEA when they do.

Ironically, thanks to TAS Star Trek kind of already has its own equivalent of the Protoculture in the Slavers from Niven's Known Space. Or the Precursors from TNG. Though the Precursors didn't really do anything overtly stupid, they just died out before the species they created evolved to sentience. Humans in Macross basically did exactly the same thing the aliens in the pilot episode of Strange New Worlds did... "Hmmm... FTL power system. What if we made this into a huge bomb?" Humanity discovered an alien technology for limitless clean power and the first thing they did was make it into an unreasonably powerful bomb.

While that's a reasonably sound point, it's not the one I was making. The Robotech setting and story only works because it can lean on the much stronger writing in Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA. Take it outside the confines of that firm Japanese OSM foundation and try to build on the parts of the story that are uniquely Robotech and the whole thing goes to sh*t basically immediately. Why? Because those are the weakest parts of the story. The parts that are positively riddled with inconsistencies, shot through with plot holes, nonsensical if you think about it even a little, painfully dated and cliche, or just plain bad writing. Barring a brief moment early in the development of Sentinels, Robotech has never had access to great or even good writers. If the writers have to build on that nonsense as the foundation of their story, well... garbage in, garbage out. That's why HG decided to burn the whole thing down and start over. So they could minimize the extent to which they built on that poor foundation. They made a strong start in partnership with Wildstorm. Their main problem from that point forward was that they couldn't afford to hire actual writers with their pittance of a budget, so what they ended up with for their new series pilot was a fanfic-tier script that takes entirely too much from the then-recent Battlestar Galactica remake and a second and third act outline that reads like a mockbuster version of Do You Remember Love?. Titan Comics... I'm not convinced that wasn't a pisstake for its entire run. If it wasn't, then it devolved into one with amazing swiftness. Its entire final story arc and inclusion of references to previous comics and other failed Robotech properties was one massive Take That! aimed at Robotech as a whole. The end is almost a Neon Genesis Evangelion-level deconstruction of Robotech as a whole, with each failed property presented as yet another iteration of a neverending cycle of miserable failure from which nothing is learned and nothing is gained because the same mistakes are made every time. The one and only way out? Abandoning slavish devotion to Robotech's failed concepts and ideas and striking out in a different direction. It probably would still be running if not for the licensing handover to Funimation Crunchyroll and the agreement with Big West. That's called "fanservice"... which is all this new comic line is. They've given up, now that they have to compete against Macross in the west they're just focused on publishing the feel-good stuff for the remaining fans because the alternative is trying to compete against Macross on merit... an unwinnable fight.

It's not completely nonsense, it's just so close to it as to make no odds. Clone and Mordecai are two of the titles I point to when I need to demonstrate why Robotech comics only ever retread old ground... because when you ask Robotech licensees for original content, that is the kind of garbage you get. (At least, until Titan Comics proved you could screw that up too...)