Voltron Omnibus: what not to do

Let this book serve as a warning to other publishers. Devil's Due Publishing hit a homerun with its G.I.Joe license in the midst of the 80's nostalgia boom. However, DDP failed miserably to capitalize on a Voltron license, a franchise which arguably enjoyed a fanatical following in its day. This comic is what not to do to a license.

One major thing that threw me off during the initial run was that the covers were a strange mix of art-work, some of them pin-up-like pieces and other story-oriented. As a newcomer, I wasn't sure if this was an anthology or a new ongoing series. This confusion is fatal because a cover's purpose is to entice a potential reader to pick up the book off the shelf.

Then, DDP committed the second sin of comics publishing: inconsistent collections. The first collected edition reprinted the initial run in a small cute "pocket-sized" format. This I didn't mind - in fact, I thought it was great that I only paid a few dollars for the book. What I didn't know at the time was how much of a loss this property was going to be for DDP. However, when a second volume followed, it was, to my dismay, collected only in black and white!

Not that any of this mattered, because Voltron simply wasn't making anyone any money. The series would later wind up on the chopping block. The fans who were following cried foul when news leaked that not only was the title canceled, but there was actually one more issue that was already produced and simply not published in time before the cancellation occurred, thus leaving a glaringly unfinished plot.

DDP later appeased the loyal fandom by announcing the end-all and be-all of collections: The Voltron Omnibus. If you were desperate for Voltron material, you could at least get it here... even with the strange DDP interpretation.

This leads me to DDP's biggest comics sin of all: unexpected reinterpretation. With the likes of "prequel-mania" thanks to Star Wars and "reimaginings" by Battlestar Galactica, DDP went ahead and decided to do a bit of both. Hardcore types will recall that Voltron shares a historical niche with Robotech: it was a product of necessity, which took on a life of its own. Voltron was a reedited and re-scripted version of Japanese anime series. DDP's writers decided to mix and match elements from the cartoons and combined them with some lifted from the original anime shows. The result was a bit of a Frankenstein.

Certain characters received all-new personalities to suit the plots. Fan-favourite Sven became a jerk. The evil Drule Empire gets shuffled (Zarkon is not a renegade but a respected member of the "Supremacy"). Galaxy Garrison runs top secret shadow ops (and the Vehicle Voltron crew come across a bunch of naive incompetents). And Voltron itself is a sentient entity (but only sort of). One could live with such changes, but the moment I could no longer envision Keith's heroic "Let's form Voltron" war-cry in my mind's eye, I felt DDP had stepped a little too far across the line.

And finally, totally droving me up the wall was the horrible proofing that went into this book. DDP had the balls to promise us the ultimate collection of their material, giving it a suitably impressive title like "Omnibus." I love having hardcover treatments because I feel like it's something special. But this is for naught if the book isn't even printed correctly! Misprints occur, not once, not twice, not even three times, but I've found at least 4 errors in my copy.

Keith's family name is revealed to be Konage, but changes to Kogane everywhere else. Pages are printed out of order: Zarkon manhandles his son. But after a oddly placed image of Voltron leaving an alien planet (obviously part of the previous portion of the script), we come back to Zarkon and Lotor. This second time with Zarkon entering the Lotor's home for the first time. In one of the final pages, the art has been blown up resulting in a cut-off word-balloon at the bottom. And silliest of all, the introduction to the back-up story is full of typeset errors (question marks in place of apostrophes). I'm no professional editor, but giving a proof copy to just about anyone should have prevented these errors before they went to print!

There's also no accounting for taste. The script in an early volume-2 issue seemed to jump around in Tarantino fashion. At first I thought this was a misprint but the captions (and lack thereof) would indicate otherwise. While breaking into a Galaxy Garrison lab to recover the Lion ships, our heroes encounter the Vehicle Teams crew. Then without explanation, the action jumps to their escape. However, several pages later, the action pulls back (without any captions) and then recounts the daring fist-fight that ensued between the two crews before the escape. Without any captions, the action then leaps back to the chase scene from before.

Finally, what of the new material? The missing unpublished issue sees the light of day in this tome. Unfortunately I could start to appreciate why sales were on a decline. Throughout the final issues of the series as it began to wind down, the art chores were passed on between artists. Overall, the inconsistency was a liability. There is a distinct incongruity. In earlier issues, DDP went with the "Pat Lee" look: mechanical elements were rendered in hyper-detail. It helped offset the cartoon-look people. But as the issues progressed, that style gave way to much more roughly inked images with thick lines and is no comparison to the earlier artwork. The remaining plot to speak of seemed to me that the whole affair was an afterthought. Sometimes material left on the cutting room floor probably should have stayed there.

While I'm glad the whole thing finally got the final publication it deserved (and yes, it's by no means the worst book I've read), it's just very unfortunate that DDP didn't have Voltron blaze a new glory trail as it did in its hey-day.