Nov. '86 - Electric Warrior # 7

This was a very interesting series written by Doug Moench. He was no longer writing Batman and Detective Comics but still had a full workload with this title, Lords of the Ultra-Realm, and Slash Maraud. The latter two were limited series but this particular one was ongoing; unfortunately it only made it to issue 18.

The idea behind it was a future world where the richest and best of society lived in towers high above the ground. People who failed to contribute enough to society (or lacked enough money to stay in higher levels) would find themselves bumped down levels. The worst of society lived on the world's surface with nothing but what they could scrounge for food and shelter. There was another group who lived primitively but happily away from the cities. They lived in the forests and lived off the land. The set up of society is similar to the one found in David Wingrove's Chung Kuo book series.

Robots were used as security and to perform all labour for peple living in the upper towers. One of these robots gains independence and sentience and breaks from society. Finding himself in the lower levels, the Warrens, he befriends them and begins to question the whole structure of society. Meanwhile, the leaders of the upper society discover a threat to civilization coming from space and begin kidnapping people from the forest to experiment on in hopes of creating something that can combat this threat.

There were characters from all three societies that were focused on. All sides were represented by Moench. At the start of the series, it was assumed that the title character would be Warrior 9-03, the one that had gained independence. However, in this issue he gets 'killed', totally taken apart in a battle. So he was not to be the Electric Warrior for very long. I remember reading an interview with Moench where he said that he wanted this title to always be changing so that every 50 issues or so the focus of the series would be totally different. With the 'death' in this issue of who I thought was the main character he was backing up his statement. Unfortunately, the title wouldn't last long enough to see what other changes he would make.