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"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 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. |
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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.
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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