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Episode Studies by Clayton Barr
enik1138 at popapostle dot com
V: Meanwhile, Out in Space..." "Meanwhile, Out in Space..."
V #11 (DC Comics)
Written by Cary Bates
Pencils by Carmine Infantino
Inks by Tony DeZuniga
Cover by Jerry Bingham
December 1985

A collaborator betrays the Resistance base; the Leader sends his son to Earth to learn on the battlefront.

Story Summary

Philip informs Diana and Lydia that the Leader's son, Prince Bron, will be arriving soon and he is entrusting the two of them with the boy's safety. Meanwhile, Diana has a traitorous human spy planted in the L.A. resistance and he reveals the location of the resistance base at the movie ranch.

Prince Bron's transport arrives in Earth space, with the boy prince in hibernation in a royal sombulo-pod. But the ship's pilots attack Diana's escort shuttles for unknown reasons. The transport is damaged in the battle and crash-lands on Earth, not far from its apparent targeted landing site, the abandoned movie ranch that is the headquarters of the L.A. resistance. The pilots die in the crash, but the resistance discovers the prince's pod in the wreckage and revives him at the base.

With Diana busy trying to track down the prince's ship before the Leader finds out about the loss, Lydia takes command of the attack on the resistance base. The attack on the HQ commences, the Visitors not realizing the prince is there. The base is defeated and many resistance members are captured, including Willie. Meanwhile, Donovan, Julie, Kyle, and Elizabeth escape the destruction in one of their captured skyfighters with Prince Bron. 

TO BE CONTINUED IN V #12!
 

Didja Notice? 

The cover depicts the V logo as a giant painted V on the asphalt of the street.

The resistance builds a giant V for victory out of the rubble of the Club Creole.

Donovan refers to the Club Creole as their first resistance headquarters. That's only true of the second Visitor invasion though. The L.A. resistance had several other headquarters during the original invasion of the two mini-series.

Caleb Taylor puts in an appearance on the first two pages of this issue, his first appearance since Death Tide.

Page 2, panel 6, depicts the former site of the Club Creole as being near the beach. This is about right, even given the multiple streets on which the club has been said to be located in various episodes of the TV series.

On page 6, Prince Bron's shuttle seems to have a different insignia than the normal Visitor one. Bron also has this insignia (turned sideways) on his uniform collar. Is this the royal insignia of the Leader? When Bron's sombulo-pod is found, Willie offers only that the colors of the markings indicate a high-ranking officer.
Prince Bron's shuttle

Prince Bron hibernates in a royal sombulo-pod during the long journey from the Visitor homeworld to Earth.

Diana's men who fire on Prince Bron's shuttle state that the prince will not be harmed because a royal sombulo-pod is "impervious to all harm." That seems rather hard to believe...what material substance is impervious to all harm?

As Prince Bron's damaged shuttle crash-lands to Earth, the pilots pray to Zon and say, "May Zon remain with you, your highness--" This would seem to suggest that Bron's pilots are true followers of the supposedly outlawed, peaceful religion of Zon and that, perhaps, Bron is too.

On pages 11 and 13, Bron speaks some "lizardese" (as one resistance member refers to it), though the characters do not look like the traditional Visitor alphabet.
Visitorese Visitorese

For some unknown reason, the ensign on page 12 seems to have the same insignia as Prince Bron on his uniform.

On page 19, Willie refers to the collaborator human Rolf Blake as "Hart". Hart is the name one of the resistance members seen in issues 1-6 of the V comic book, but Rolf does not look much like him. Perhaps writer Cary Bates had originally scripted Hart as the traitor here and it was later changed, with this bit of incriminating dialog forgotten! Rolf also tells Willie his loyalty lies with "our people", meaning the Visitors...was Rolf not a human at all, but a Visitor?

For some reason, on page 21, the Visitor troop transport ship seems to have a stylized "808" printed on its hull.
Visitor troop transport

On page 22, after securing the resistance headquarters, a Visitor soldier informs Lydia, "The deceased humans have already been vaporized according to standard procedure." Apparently, "standard procedure" for the Visitors regarding human kills is to leave no evidence behind.

On page 23, the Visitor soldier says "by your command" to Lydia. This may be a reference by the writer to the original Battlestar Galactica, in which the reptilian/robotic Cylon enemies of the humans were known to use the phrase with their superior officers.

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