Robotech: Invid War #4 (of 18)
"Only Survivors"
Story - Bill Spangler & Tim Eldred
Art - Tim Eldred & Fred Perry
Cover Painting - Robert Chang
Publisher - Dave Olbrich
Editor-In-Chief - Chris Ulm
Editor - Dan Danko
Published by Eternity Comics, a division of Malibu Graphics Publishing Group.
Release date - August 14, 1992
Cover date - August 1992
THE STORY
It is March of 2033. Jonathan Wolff's Orpheus Flight, a mixed team of VF-1 Veritechs and Alpha Fighters piloted by the few men Wolff knows he can trust implicitly, arrive at the burning oil fields of old Texas. Parkes, a former forager, asks how long the others think the oil fires will keep going. Gavin Murdock, formerly of the Stone Men, figures about forty or fifty years. Terry Weston, an ex-TASC pilot and former drifter, points out that the burning fields are providing the Invid with plenty of cover, but Murdock tells him the cover works both ways -- the Invid won't expect them to come in from this direction. Wolff says to cut the radio chatter so as not to draw attention to themselves, though as he thinks about it he realizes that's exactly what he did back at Vahalla ...
Speaking of which, back at Vahalla, Major Carpenter has something to show Bekka Cade -- a message from Wolff. "This is a heckuva wake-up call, I know," Wolff says on the recording, "but I think this is the best way to handle things. I've decided I can't ignore Gary Hauser's theory about where the Invid are holding Catherine and Johnny. I've put together a team to attempt a rescue. By the time you see this, we'll be on our way. Murdock, Hauser, Parkes, and Weston are going with me. I told traffic control that we were a scouting mission for the attack on Reflex Point. If you're smart, you won't contradict the story. Believe it or not, Carpenter, I am sorry. Catherine, Johhny and I will probably never be a family again, even if I can find them ... but I owe them this much." He says he'll try to rejoin the main force to attack Reflex Point as soon as he can, but if his men don't return, they'll know what happened. Bekka is outraged. "That arrogant, irresponsible ... who does he think he is??" she asks.
"He knows who he is," Carpenter tells her. "He's Jonathan Wolff."
On the outskirts of Dallas, Hauser is amazed by the energy being given off by the Invid domes among the ruins of the city. As the Veritechs approach the target zone, Wolff suggests that if they come in low and fast they might surprise their foes. However, they are soon met by a squad of Invid Troopers. Parkes and Wolff nail a couple of them, but Weston is hit from behind. Realizing he's in bad shape, he decides to ditch his Alpha at one of the domes. The plane touches the ground and skids along on its tailfins before exploding at the Invid's doorstep. Horrified, Murdock takes his VF-1 down to try and rescue Weston, but as he switches to Battloid he finds himself face to face with an Invid Enforcer.
Meanwhile, the fleet from Moon Base ALuCE II descends to Earth as a convoy and is forced to confront the Invid in space. Mecha from Vahalla arrive at Reflex Point ahead of them and launch their attack. Bekka and Carpenter, flying over Reflex Point in a recon VF-1, receive a request for backup from the attacking Hovertank and Valkyrie squads below. Bekka receives word from Captain Nobutu that the moon fleet will arrive in four minutes. However, the forces from Vahalla might not last that long. 
Back in Texas, Murdock quickly dispatches the Enforcer, surprisingly with minimal effort. Once-enslaved humans begin swarming out of one of the Invid domes, and Wolff takes this as a sign that he's done the right thing. Murdock and Hauser are ordered to get the humans to safety while Wolff blasts his way into the central Invid dome and destroys its power core. As it crumbles in upon itself, the survivors of Orpheus Flight worry for him, but his Alpha soon emerges and Parkes notes his satisfaction with their performance today. "Norvell thought I was crazy for agreeing to help you, but we did good today, Colonel," he radios to Wolff. "We saved a lotta lives!"
Back above Reflex Point, Bekka loses contact with Nobutu. Half of the fleet from the moon has been wiped out, and Nova Satori informs Carpenter that she's ordering her GMP forces to withdraw. Carpenter points out that they had an agreement. "I didn't agree to let my people be slaughtered," she retorts. "The Invid had us outnumbered from the beginning. Your so-called reinforcements from the moon don't have any real combat experience. We lost hundreds of soldiers today and we didn't make a dent in that blasted hive. We never had a chance against the Invid and your precious Colonel Wolff knew it. Otherwise, he'd be here! You've got to order a retreat now, while there's still people left to save." Against all those facts, Carpenter finds himself defeated and orders a retreat.
While Wolff's day has ended in victory, he is told by one of the freed slaves that his wife and son were transferred to another hive two or three days ago. The rumor was that they were sent to Reflex Point. "Oh, god ..." Wolff says upon hearing the news, "oh, god ... I'm sorry, Carpenter."
Three days pass. In Vahalla, an angry and betrayed Carpenter tells Wolff that he, Bekka, and the survivors from ALuCE II are pulling out and starting their own unit. He accuses Wolff of putting himself ahead of the mission. "Mission?" Wolff asks. "What mission? Letting the Invid use you for target practice?"
"That's not the point," Carpenter counters, "and you know it. The point is, you betrayed our trust. My trust."
Wolff tries to get Carpenter to accept that he's not the same guy he was on Tirol, and he's certainly not the guy the UEG and REF built up with those old propaganda films. "I'm old, I'm tired, and I let my family down when they really needed me." He tells Carpenter there will be no winners or losers in the war with the Invid, only survivors, and if he can't accept that, he should probably go. Carpenter says he'll be out in seventy-two hours.
Elsewhere, Louie Nichols finds that Wolff is currently unavailable. "Tell him it's a matter of life and death!" he urges the operator, but he's already been cut off. "Aaaah, skip it. Typical military mindset. He drags me halfway around the world to upgrade his communications system, and then he doesn't communicate. Well, I've got the message on tape. He'll hear it soon enough." The message is that the Mars Division of the REF fleet is en route to Earth. The Robotech Expeditionary Force is coming home to fight the Invid.
NOTES
TIMELINE - Jack McKinney novels timeline.
MAJOR CHARACTERS- Jonathan Wolff (next in Invid War #9)
- John Carpenter (next in Invid War #9)
- Bekka Cade (next in Firewalkers #1)
- Norvell [referred to as "Parkes"] (final appearance)
- Gavin Murdock (final appearance)
- Gary Hauser (final appearance)
- Terry Weston (final appearance)
- Nova Satori (last in Invid War #1, next in Invid War #11)
- Louie Nichols (next in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles #2)
According to
Invid War #2, Louie Nichols remained behind on Earth when the rest of the 15th Squadron took off, and will go on to hook up the hackers from McKinney's novel
The Masters' Gambit, who wind up becoming his colleagues in
The End of the Circle. (He may have already, given that in issue #3 Carpenter remarks offhand that Nichols is working for the Japanese these days.) It's also a major plot point of
Invid War that, going forward, nobody can actually leave Earth, so
this Louie Nichols won't go on to join Dr. Cochrane's crew at Space Station Liberty in
Prelude. However, that
is the next place you see the character.
It's been a point of contention ever since
Sentinels whether or not the Invid Regess developed the Invid Enforcer before or during its first appearance in the ROBOTECH TV series. Of course, the TV series leans towards their genesis occurring at that appearance, since the implication is that she's exploring the Invid's evolutionary development as the series progresses, but later sources, including the
Sentinels comics and the RPG assert that while the Enforcer is only in the Regess's arsenal, it did appear prior to the TV series storyline. Given the
Sentinels comics' track record, though, and the RPG's penchant for tossing things in for gameplay rather than veracity to the original source material, of course, I could definitely understand counting its appearance here as a flub ...
It was a little annoying that early on the only way to tell which member of Orpheus Flight was talking was by paying attention to the pilots' facial hair. Without haircuts and head shapes to tell them apart, the characters' appearances become awfully similar.
With the conclusion of this story, Wolff goes even further into the depths from which he'll never return except for that one brief, shining moment at the end of "Eulogy." I like how he addresses the propaganda films, though since Scott watched them I think they're actually Expeditionary Force-produced rather than specifically UEG produced, at least according to this McKinney-inspired course of events; the UEG and the REF didn't exactly cross paths in an organized state ever again after the SDF-3 took off -- again, according to McKinney. Of course, in the post-
Robotech.com world, I think they portray Space Station Liberty (the ONLY link between the REF and Earth, according to the narrator in the early episodes of the
Robotech Masters episodes) as having actually worked as a relay station on occasion, so perhaps in the TV series continuity it
could be the UEG that produced those propaganda films. In either case, I'm glad Spangler left that remark in, since it provides something of a context for one of the key images of Wolff we see in the ROBOTECH TV series -- and that propaganda actually appears later on in
Invid War (issue #13).
Wolff then says, "There aren't going to be any winners or losers in this war -- only survivors." This line does a good job of illustrating how Wolff's thinking is getting ever closer to his portrayal in "Eulogy." Apparently the feeling that he's lost his wife and son forever really has killed him in a sense. After all, just pages earlier, he seemed rather optimistic as he fought the Invid and helped free those slaves.
The battle against Reflex Point is portrayed later in the series as well, in issue #8. In neither instance does it seem massive enough for an attack that took this much planning on Nobutu, Wolff, and Carpenter's parts. There just aren't enough fighters, not enough chatter -- just not enough
stuff to convince me that this is a major concerted effort to destroy Reflex Point. Remember what it took in the TV series, what with the hordes of Shadow Fighters with big Destabilizer cannons and the like? At first glance, you might almost wonder why Carpenter is so angry at Wolff for bailing on the attack -- did he really think that five more fighters would have made a difference?
Then again, notice the way Satori mentions Wolff's absence; she nearly suggests that if Wolff didn't even bother to show up, naturally he must've thought they didn't have a chance in hell. And after all is said and done, he
realizes they didn't have a chance. But if he'd been there, perhaps the morale would have been better, or his kills might have prevented some of the casualties, and maybe the joint forces might have gotten out of there in a bit better shape. In any case, Carpenter had good reason to break away from Wolff, even if it's painfully obvious that Wolff's presence wouldn't have done too terribly much.
The next time we see Wolff, in issue #9, he's in really bad shape. Thinking about it, it's not much of a jump from saying that all anyone can do is survive to stealing Protoculture and trading lives for the stuff -- just a step, in fact, from saying to doing. But the Jonathan Wolff who saved the slaves from the Invid hive doesn't seem to be the same Jonathan Wolff who lectures Carpenter at the end of this issue, and certainly doesn't seem to be the same Wolff who, in his next appearance, sneaks into Carpenter's new base in search of Protoculture to steal. When the man fell, he fell hard, and he fell
fast ...
As an aside, I wonder ... is the reason we never see either of Wolff's allies in Orpheus Flight due to Wolff selling them out to the Invid down the road? I wonder.
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Labels: Invid War, New Generation
Robotech Invid War #2 (of 18)
"Salvation Run"
Story - Bill Spangler & Tim Eldred
Pencils & Letters - Tim Eldred
Inks & Tones - Fred Perry
Cover Painting - Robert Chang
Publisher - Dave Olbrich
Editor-In-Chief - Chris Ulm
Editor - Dan Danko
Published by Eternity Comics, a division of Malibu Graphics Publishing Group.
Release date - June 17, 1992
Cover date - June 1992
THE STORY
The Invid Invasion of Earth begins has begun. Their first act is to wipe out all planetary defenses in orbit, including the recently returned Robotech Factory Satellite. They then turn to planetside defenses. Communication lines between terrestrial bases are shattered by electromagnetic pulses from above, and the few remaining Southern Cross forces that rise up to stop the new menace are crushed by the Invid's overwhelming might. Watching from above, the crew of Moon Base ALuCE II, an underground base constructed shortly after the defeat of the Robotech Masters, could do only that without communications from the mother planet. In a way, the Invid overlords returned a lost sense of stability to the fractured and factionalized world. They put the survivors work in their hives, where the Invid began their Great Work.
It is now a cold, dark March evening in the year 2033 C.E. At the former United Earth Government base known as Vahalla, Jonathan Wolff's slumber is interrupted by a call informing him of a strong transmission coming from a lone fighter returning to Earth. With no sign of Invid interference, Wolff heads down to establish contact.
At the communications center, Wolff asks Major Carpenter how they're doing. "So far, so good. She's at 900 kilometers and descending," Carpenter says. Wolff radios the fighter, designated Legioss 3, and identifies himself. The transmission is kind of hazy. "What's the status of Moon Base ALuCE?" Wolff asks. Legioss 3 tells him they're holding their own, but it's a long story. She was intending on landing at Pinnacle Base, but she says Carpenter told her that wouldn't be safe. Wolff tells her that they haven't heard from Pinnacle since the night of the invasion; for all they know the UEG no longer exists. Legioss 3 isn't surprised.
At that moment, a team of Invid Shock Troopers rise through the atmosphere to attack Legioss 3. She switches her Alpha to Battloid and blasts one with her gun pod. Another one passes her by, swiping at one of her boosters and frying it. Legioss 3 jettisons the others and they detonate, destroying two Invid.
Back at Vahalla, Wolff asks if they can supply any backup, but he's told they can't do it fast enough. Legioss 3 radios back and tells she can probably lose the last of the Invid in reentry. Radio contact is lost as the Alpha descends into the atmosphere, and Wolff asks if they can figure out where Legioss 3 is going to touch down. "I think so ... grid reference
MK-41." Wolff recognizes that as the territory of the Defoliators, an anti-Robotechnology group.
The following day, Wolff, Carpenter, and a pair of foragers take a jeep out into the wastelands in order to find Legioss 3. "We need to
get in,
get the pilot, and get
out without attracting any attention," Wolff says. Norvell, one of the foragers, asks Wolff what will happen if the Defoliators get the pilot first. Wolff fears it won't be as simple as a mere trade; the leader of the Defoliators has a personal dispute with Wolff. "When I left for Tirol back in 2020, I left my wife and son here on Earth. We had split up, although we never officially got
divorced. When I returned last year, I tried to contact them ... but they had moved out of our old home. I didn't know whether they were dead or alive ... and before long, I got bogged down in trying to create an anti-Invid resistance. The remainder of the United Earth Government had moved to an underground complex in the Rockies called
Pinnacle Base. We decided to hold a summit conference there, with as many factions as we could. The
Defoliators was one of the factions. They believed that Earth would be safe if we
destroyed all our Protoculture and all our Flowers of Life." Norvell asks how this got personal. "My
son, Johnny, is the
leader of the Defoliators. He didn't arrive until
after the conference officially started. On the SDF-3, Dr. Lang had told me what to expect, but I really didn't
believe it until I
saw it. When I had left Earth, Johnny was
six. I had aged only a couple of years aboard the SDF-3, but
thirteen years had passed on Earth. Johnny was now a
man. What's more, he was his
own man."
Carpenter interrupts Wolff's story to point out that they've got company -- an old Cestus battlesuit, probably from the Defoliators. Norvell floors the accelerator, and the Cestus tries to blast them. As the foragers argue, a shot strikes right in front of them. Carpenter asks if they fight or run, but Wolff says neither. "If we surrender, we stand a better chance of being taken to where they're holding the pilot." They stop the jeep, raise their hands, and the Cestus pilot radios for another vehicle to pick them up and take them the rest of the way, as prisoners. Staring out at the barren land behind him, Wolff thinks back to his encounter with his son. "How can you
possibly believe this?" he had asked. "Protoculture is the
only weapon we've got against the Invid." "But the Protoculture is what's
drawing the Invid to Earth!" Johnny countered. "You said that
yourself! If we
destroy the Protoculture, they'll go someplace
else!" Wolff asked Johnny for his help to try and pull the factions together before the Invid, but Johnny refused. "You ran out on
Mom and me! You
left us here to face the Masters, and the gangs and metrobosses. And now you expect me to treat you like my
father! You're
not my father! I don't even know who you
are!"
Carpenter taps Wolff on the shoulder and tells him they've arrived. Their destination appears to be a temporary camp made up of a few tents and a large military transport. While the Defoliators have found the Alpha, the pilot's location is a mystery. The Defoliators lead Wolff, Carpenter, and the foragers to their transport, when Wolff suddenly recognizes one of them as Gary Hauser, a colleague of Johnny's. Wolff asks how Catherine and Johnny are. Hauser has some bad news. "John and his mother were captured in an Invid raid on
Cutlerville ... we don't know whether they're
alive or
dead." Wolff begins to tear up, but Hauser says there are more pressing concerns. "I want you to tell me
everything you know about that
Alpha." The foragers act like they're in some sort of bad comedy routine, but Hauser demands to know if the Alpha is one of Wolff's, and more importantly, where the pilot is. Just then, someone blasts the Defoliators' transport, knocking Hauser unconscious. Carpenter quickly grabs a gun and orders the team to move, when another blast strikes the transport. Wolff suddenly notices a soldier in Cyclone armor behind them -- the pilot of Legioss 3, Bekka Cade. She tells the four to get into the truck. Norvell takes the wheel and as the Alpha goes up in flames, the truck speeds away.
The following morning, with the Defoliators off their tail, Wolff and company stop the truck and rendezvous with Lt. Cade. She tells Wolff that she's sorry about his family and asks if there's anything she can do. "I'm not sure there's anything
anyone can do. Catherine and Johnny may be dead. They may be
slaves at one of those Protoculture farms. The Invid may be planning to
use them to reach
me. I've fought the Invid before.
Anything is possible." Carpenter asks if they can expect any help from ALuCE II. She tells him that's why she came down to Earth. "When the Factory Satellite started up again last year, a percentage of all the mecha produced were sent to ALuCE II as a
reserve force. We
hated just sitting and watching during the invasion, but those were our orders. But now that the situation's
stabilized a little, we want to launch a full-scale assault on
Reflex Point, the Invid headquarters. My mission is to reestablish contact with
ALuCE II and to coordinate an attack with the United Earth Government ... or what's
left of it." Wolff notices a shimmering of light in the distance and realizes what it is. He leaps out of the way and tells Bekka to look out as a shot rings out. She lowers her visor and speeds off after him. Wolff tells her to take him alive if possible.
Mere minutes later, Bekka leads her prisoner back to the truck. It's Gavin Murdock, former leader of the ex-Southern Cross unit known as the Stone Men. Wolff explains to his companions that Murdock believes Wolff betrayed him to the GMP. While this isn't the case, Wolff has no way to prove it. Carpenter asks what to do with him, and Wolff says to take his firearms from him and let him go. "I never intended to hurt him or his people," Wolff says. "Maybe
now he'll believe it." Murdock's still pretty angry. "You
are hard to please, aren't you?" Wolff says. "Suppose I gave you
another choice. Suppose I give you a chance to do something
good with all that anger ... there's a big assault against the
Invid coming, and I'm going to need
men. Men I can
trust.
You in?" Murdock hesitates for a moment, but joins up. Carpenter asks if this is a good idea, and while Wolff has his doubts, he does want to convince Murdock that he's telling the truth. "Besides," he adds, "we're going to need
all the help we can get."
NOTES
TIMELINE - Jack McKinney novels timeline.
MAJOR CHARACTERS- Jonathan Wolff
- John Carpenter (last seen in Robotech Masters #10)
- Bekka Cade (first published appearance, last seen in Invid War #6)
- Norvell
- Parkes (final appearance)
- Gavin Murdock
- John "Johnny" Wolff (last seen in The Malcontent Uprisings #9, final appearance)
- Gary Hauser (first chronological & published appearance)
Actually, while this is the last we see of the forager who has, up to now, been referred to as Parkes, the next time we see Norvell
he's calling himself Parkes; he goes by that name until the last time we see him in
Invid War #4.
Much like most of the pre-
Return to Macross work of Bill Spangler, this takes place firmly within the timeline of the ROBOTECH novels by Brian Daley and James Luceno working under the pen name Jack McKinney. The most obvious touchstone is Wolff's quote of 2020 as the year he left for Tirol, taken from the
Sentinels novels. The destruction of the Factory Satellite at the hands of the Invid early on also comes straight from McKinney, specifically their adaptation of the
New Generation TV series. At the same time, due to the date quoted by Wolff as well as the use of McKinney's "five year fold" plot point to make Johnny Wolff as old as he is compared to his father, the story doesn't work in the context of the more modern material. I've never been a big fan of the idea that the fold drives used by the Expeditionary Force keep taking five years, but Spangler and Eldred use it very effectively in this chapter of Jonathan Wolff's most unfortunate story arc.
The Cestus Battlesuit that appears here is a Shoji Kawamori creation, designed for
Super Dimension Fortress Macross when it was still in the planning stages under the title
Battle City Megaroad, back in 1980. It's actually a very early predecessor to the VF-1 Valkyrie, and is even supposed to be able to transform into a sort of Fighter mode with the cannon on the right arm as the nose of the jet. If you look closely at the art here, there's an "MPM" on the left arm, which I think stands for "Macross Perfect Memory," the artbook that Eldred and/or Spangler would have most likely seen it in back in 1992.
For the few of you who aren't aware by now, the term "Legioss," used here as Bekka Cade's callsign, is actually the proper name for the Alpha Fighter in the original Japanese TV series
Genesis Climber Mospeada, the program that was dubbed into English and rewritten to create the
New Generation episodes of ROBOTECH. Later material, most notably the novel
Before The Invid Storm, appropriates the term as the name of a docked Alpha and Beta Fighter, but here Bekka is using a generic booster pack.
This issue introduces Moon Base ALuCE II, which presumably corresponds with the base seen at the end of the ROBOTECH TV series and referred to simply as ALuCE in the
Shadow Chronicles film. Despite being equipped with Cyclones and Alphas, here it is a Southern Cross installation, as its predecessor was following its seizure by the military.
I have to give Spangler & Eldred points for their clever use of the Factory Satellite as a plot point; since it was the staging base for the SDF-3 mission, it's only natural that it might still contain machinery capable of producing Alpha Fighters. On the other hand, I'm not too keen on the idea of bringing back the Factory Satellite only to have it destroyed by the Invid. Then again, as I pointed out above, Spangler was only following McKinney's lead with that one. It does beg the question though, if the Factory Satellite met such an end, what then of Space Station Liberty? Did it just fold away (unlikely, as McKinney implies that only the REF had fold-capable ships during the Second Robotech War), or was it destroyed as well?
As an amusing aside, in the ROBOTECH TV series both Jonathan Wolff and John Carpenter are played by the same actor, Thomas Wyner.
Labels: Invid War, New Generation
Wolff enters the camp and tells them he's looking for Gavin Murdock, their leader. Murdock is surprised to see that Wolff actually came. "When the G.M.P. asked if there was a negotiator I would trust, I gave them your name as a joke," Murdock says. "I didn't really believe you were back on Earth." Wolff tells him that he's been doing a lot of this sort of work ever since he's returned, and that he's here to stop the fighting between the Stone Men and the GMP, but Murdock's men don't really believe him. "What's in it for you?" one of them asks, a sign of the times. Wolff tells them they have bigger worries -- the Invid are coming, merciless and hungry for Earth's remaining Protoculture supply. He wants to unite all the remaining power blocs so humanity will be ready to fight the Invid. However, the Stone Men are skeptical. Murdock asks when the Invid are supposed to arrive. "We don't know," Wolff says. "We could have years ... or we could have days. But either way, the Invid are coming. And when they do, they're going to make the Robotech Masters look like amateurs."
Suddenly, their lookout sounds an alarm. Mecha are approaching. Murdock throttles and decks Wolff, shouting, "YOU SET US UP!!" Assuring Murdock that Satori tricked him as well, Wolff gets up, disables a couple of the Stone Men, and escapes to his Alpha. Two GMP Gladiators and a Raidar X arrive, attacking the Stone Men's base. As Wolff's Guardian-mode Alpha launches, Murdock arrives in a Hovertank. Wolff destroys the GMP's mecha, and leaves. "He fired on his own men ... and now he's leaving!" Murdock stammers in disbelief. "What's he trying to prove?"
Wolff leaves the base in his Alpha and as he's flying, there's a crash of lightning. Soon after, UEG Command loses contact with Moonbase ALuCE before losing contact with all its other stations, including Wolff's base at Vahalla. The Invid have arrived. Wolff tries to fight the airborne Shock Troopers, but after a few quick kills, he's shot down.
Brasilia, in the McKinney/Spangler continuity, is the original home of the Army of the Southern Cross prior to its recognition by the United Earth Government and was last seen in Spangler's first ROBOTECH series, The Malcontent Uprisings. That was also where Wolff first appeared on the scene in the pre-Robotech.com continuity; since then, he's been shoehorned into the Macross Saga era as a combat pilot-turned-flight instructor on-board the SDF-1 (see Love & War).
