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His appearance here tracks from points Luceno made in THE ZENTRAEDI REBELLION (itself based on Spangler's MALCONTENT UPRISINGS), and even before that the characterization he and Brian Daley offered up in the three novels based on the Robotech Masters episodes of ROBOTECH - Leonard as anti-alien religious zealot. Spangler wrote a few stories with Leonard as one of the "villains" - THE MALCONTENT UPRISINGS, CYBERPIRATES, and MECHANGEL among them. (8) Enter our villains, chief among them future Southern Cross Supreme Commander Anatole Leonard. Good for his job and the advancement of science, bad for his relationship with his sister. Lang's response to the situation is to offer to debate his sister on the topic live on MBS - a debate he would, of course, win hands down, being the world's foremost expert on Robotechnology.
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Spangler worked this out nicely he added a singer to the cast, important for anything with "Macross" in the title, and at the same time added the character as a relative to an existing character in a way that made good sense for the plot.ĭr. That, I think, is a shrewd little bit of plotting. The Faithful discovered her misgivings and, given that Robotechnology's chief expert, he of the mysterious all-black eyes, is her brother, gave her a platform to offer those misgivings up to the world. She's been rattled by the fortress ever since the incident where the mentally unstable RDF would-be instructor Shane Gleason had a nasty flashback in the middle of the night and stole a Destroid to try and "escape" his "captors." Gloval remarked back in the first issue that the stress of living around the battle fortress had driven some people off the deep end, but Gleason's experiences during the Global Civil War had pushed him WAY over and endangered the lives of everyone on the island. Emil Lang, doing an anti-Robotechnology commercial for the Faithful, the religious group that believes the SDF-1 was placed on Earth as a new Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. (9) This first installment opens with Nina Lang, lead singer of of Absolute Zero and the sister of Dr. As I said some time ago, I'm setting aside a few slots on the calendar to talk about "War of the Believers," Wes Abbott's four-issue swan song on RETURN TO MACROSS, which Academy Comics later collected in a skinny little hundred-some-odd-page graphic novel. (10) Yep, we're taking a few steps back today to root around in the back issue bins and turn back the clock in the ROBOTECH chronology as well - back to the days before the Zentraedi invasion, when Robotechnology was all shiny and new to the people of Earth, and Roy Fokker was running around Macross Island shoving his nose into places where it didn't belong and occasionally punching terrorists in the face. By Bill Spangler (writer) & Wes Abbott (artist)
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