Robotech Remix #2: Robowreck

So, let me first state that I am not now, nor have I ever been a Robotech fan. I believe I covered this with my review of Robotech Remix #1, but it bears repeating. With that being said, I really don’t have a horse in this race. No nostalgia of late nights in college watching the TV show, or playing with the toys when I was a kid, or even of following the comics that were produced in the eighties. For the first time, I’m reading a comic based on a licensed property, and doing a straight, by the numbers, analysis of it. Ladies & gentlemen, this comic………….is not good.

To be fair, writer Brenden Fletcher (whose work I do normally like) know how to construct, layout, plan, put together and script a comic story, the basics are all there and they’re all pretty solid. This story was just all sizzle and no steak. Actually, it was no sizzle and no steak. It just kind of laid there. Now, I hope I get emails from Robotech fans telling me that I’m a dumbass and this story changed their life, but I barely made it through this issue. First off, Fletcher’s trying to tell a way bigger story than he can in this comic. The list of characters in this comic is a full page long, each with intertwining storylines that connect and intersect with each other and you’ve also got the “Gilligan’s Island” story (That’s not what it’s called, but the actual term escapes me) of one character that’s stuck in this reality and has to get home to the normal Robotech universe.

I haven’t even mentioned that you don’t even get a full issues worth of story because there’s a backup feature that has some pop singer explaining how time travel can tragically alter the future or present by them even being in the past, even if they’re not doing anything. First, everybody’s seen Back to the Future, so we know that. Second, we’re not actually dealing with time travel, this is time travel’s younger brother, the multiverse. I get it. This is pretty much the Flashpoint of the Robotech universe. The story, for me, is unfortunately not that entertaining.

There are two different artists for this issue. The main story is drawn by Elmer Damaso, while the back-up strip is drawn by Naomi Franquiz. Damaso is a really good artist who draws in a beautiful manga style, while Franquiz draws in a little bit of a more animated manga style, but both fit their perspective stories. Damaso is great at drawing big, monstrous, creepy looking tech and mechas all the while keeping them believable and Franquiz has a unique ability for putting emotions on character’s faces. Her depictions in the back-up story had me actually grinning at times.

If I had anything that I didn’t really care for regarding the art in this book it’s that a few giant aliens appear in Damaso’s main story. The problem was that I didn’t realize they were giants until after a whole scene had gone by and they had to come and kneel down and talk to one of the regular-sized humans. I felt that that could’ve been handled a little bit better. Nothing that wasn’t a deal killer for me, just kind of annoying when it happened. Had I realized it right away, the scene would’ve read totally different.