Shockwave wrote:I wonder if there's really that much complaining going on. It could just be that the ones that hate are just the most outspoken. Also, I still don't understand why everyone thinks it's cool to bag on Furman. I mean, he is a good writer, but not every writer can just crap gold every single time. I think that's the thing that concerns me about Costa. Sure he's good now, but what about later? And I'm especially concerned to hear that he has things planned out for 50-60 issues. I honestly think that might be part of Furman's problem is that he had an idea for TFs (regardless of the fact that it amounted to little more than "OMG cosmic gibberwank") and never got far enough along to fully convey it. I think if somewhere along the line he could have completed his idea he could have moved on to others and finally let the gibberwank go. Likewise, if Costa has things planned out this far, what's going to happen to him as a TF writer if those ideas don't see fruition? Is he going to keep going back and trying to get them out there everytime he revisits the franchise like Furman does? Only time will tell...
I'd like to clarify that I was ranting, and that I didn't mean for it to come across like I totally hated Furman. Yeah, the guy's written some dreadful stuff (especially lately), but I think he really is a *mostly* good writer. I'm one of those people that puts the UK stuff up on a pedestal (easily one of my favorite chunks of G1 fiction), I love what he did with Arcee in IDW, and I though Maximum Dinobots was amazing (and that one came out just a year or two ago, showing that Simon still has it in him). Hell, even the "Escalation" part of Furman's run I thought had some nifty stuff in there.
It's not that I thought that the "-ion" series was bad, simply that it was incredibly dull, wholly average. I just wasn't impressed by the whole thing, and I was shocked to find out that there were that many people who actually cared about where the story was going, when the whole "story" had been pretty much nothing but setup for whatever Furman had planned later down the line (Seriously, look at Stormbringer. The entire four-issue series was nothing but setup for stuff Furman was going to use in later stories. Most of his Spotlight stuff was only there for setup.). At some point, you have to finish with all the setup and world-building and actually *do* something with all this stuff. AHM takes a while to get going, I admit, but after three or four issues, it really does get going! And Costa at least had the decency to *tell* us to wait a few issues to see where he was going, and I was not disappointed with the payoff. Furman had so many dominoes stacked up, having taken so long to set them up, that he didn't even have time to knock them all down before IDW got tired of waiting and pulled the rug out from under him. Yeah, "Revelation" was a rushed, poorly-structured exercise in desperation, but it was Furman's own damn fault. How long do you think he would have taken to resolve all the stuff in that had IDW not put a gun to his paycheck and told him to Get On With It?
As for Costa and how his run will pan out, I admit that I'll be sad to see him go when he inevitably does. But notice that Costa, despite writing an actual ongoing (unlike Furman's supposed miniseries) has the story arcs work in nice, trade-friendly, six-issue chunks. There might be cliffhanger bits to explore in the next arc (see Bumblebee getting shot at the end of International Incident), but there's still a clear beginning and ending, with not too many threads dangling in front of us with no explanation. So when Costa has to step down, it'll likely at least feel like he finished some stuff and can just pass the baton, instead of being forced to rush-write the ending to some ridiculous convoluted Space Opera like Furman had to. Like I said before, the main thing that worries me about Costa getting replaced is the strong possibility that the next writer would undo all of his entertaining alterations to the status quo.
Come to think of it, maybe it's all those upheavals in that status quo that have fans mad as Costa. Heroic Thundercracker? Redesigned Megatron? Autobot Leader Bumblebee? Heresy!
