The modern comics universe has had such a different take on G1, one that's significantly represented by the Generations toys, so they share a forum. A modern take on a Real Cybertronian Hero. Currently starring Generations toys, IDW "The Transformers" comics, MTMTE, TF vs GI Joe, and Windblade. Oh wait, and now Skybound, wheee!
I've really enjoyed the last two issues. Ratchet gets a good storyline in issue 5, though it's hard to reconcile the character as written by Roberts with the Ratchet we saw all the way back in Infiltration. And this issue quite rightly shows that Fortress Maximus was really messed up in the head by his Garrus-9 experiences. It's the characters that make an otherwise standard "hostage plot" compelling to read. The situation itself isn't terribly innovative, but the fact that Fort Max was finally revived after what happened to him, only to go downhill again is a shame. Here's hoping he'll genuinely recover in the long run.
Dominic wrote:Issue 6:
Roberts picks up a few loose threads from "Last Stand of the Wreckers", and even a few ideas from that series. Spoiler
Prowl is going to be in for it.
Rodimus is shown to have grown as a leader, if only slightly, Spoiler
(no longer cribbing speeches from Drift)
. The art is still more than a little bothersome though. Spoiler
Given the importance of the physical appearance of the characters Maximus attacked, the art really should have made it more clear than them being just blobs on a table.
And, Spoiler
Rung gets the "meaningful" death that I predicted back around issue 2 or 3.
All in all, the more I read this series, the more that I think that Roberts was going for a slow-burn to compliment the thematic aimlessness that Shockwave mentioned a few posts back.
Grade: B
Dom
-kinda glad to have invested in that Minibot "Encore" pack a couple of years ago...
Dom, this isn't so much an 'aimless' book as it is a character-driven book, with the 'lost in space' plotline there simply to give the characters a reason to do what they're doing. Whether than works or not is going to depend on how you like Roberts' characterization. I'm really enjoying it myself. It's a nice change of pace, and a different mix of characters than we're used to seeing in Transformers fiction.
And Rung doesn't get a meaningful death. He dies because Rodimus messed up again and let Fort Max roam free, not realizing how far gone he was, and because Swerve is a bad shot. Rung got a meaningless, stupid death.
Shockwave was on to something when he said that the book was deliberately aimless. Look at the characters. They are all screw-ups and burn-outs. They are "lost in space" on a ship called "The Lost Light". Spoiler
Rung is killed
because one fo the screw-ups followed orders from his screw-up leader. Spoiler
Note that Swerve does show reservations before pulling the trigger.
Swerve epitomizes the moral hazard. He is only as foolish as he thinks he can get away with. When he thinks that there will be consequences, he generally holds back. Remember his conversation with Skids a few issues back?
I am hoping that the Spoiler
Overlord
plot resolves itself in a less eye-rollingly stupid way than it did in "Last Stand of the Wreckers".
The whole Fort Max thing is interesting, when you realize that one of the reasons Overlord went so crazy was because he never got the fight he wanted with Megatron, and now Maximus is doing the same thing with Overlord. Cycles!
Anyway, I thought this issue was a’ight. Felt like way more padding than was necessary, in the form of the book’s trademark conversations. I know they’re a thing with this series, and Roberts at least writes them well, but when almost every scene is dragged out between multiple pages of text-drenched panels, it starts to feel a little tedious. Even the scene where Rodimus calls up Swerve and Rewind, which should be a simple little cutaway, has like two pages of conversation leading up to them getting the call, which does almost nothing but establish that Swerve is annoying and Rewind is quirky, which I had previously filed under ‘Shit I already know’. The one interesting tidbit is Rewind mentioning that he watches robo-snuff movies for…reasons to be explained later, but I hardly think that necessitated the space given to the scene. That said, the conversation in the standoff in Rung’s office is actually well done and works as the epicenter of the story, exploring basically all the issues being addressed by it, and effectively communicating the tension of the situation besides, with the payoff (Swerve’s shot) being executed extremely well (I do wonder how Swerve is going to react to this next issue). I just don’t think it necessarily needed the epic amounts of quirky banter leading up to it. Spoiler
So was Rung’s death supposed to be played for laughs or drama? There’s hints we’re supposed to take it seriously, but the stuff between Swerve and Rewind leading up to it, all I could think of was scenes like in Mystery Men where they accidentally fry Captain Amazing because no one knows what order to flip toggles in, or Pulp Fiction’s legendary “I just shot Marvin in the face” scene.
So was Rung’s death supposed to be played for laughs or drama?
I think that it was supposed to be serious. The exchange between Swerve and Rewind was funny, but had some dark over-tones. And, it served to show what kind of a 'bot Swerve was. I can guarantee that this is going to be a thing in upcoming issues. Look at it this way: Spoiler
The Lost Light has at least 3 certifiable lunatics aboard: Red Alert, Overlord, Maximus and Whirl. Red Alert is not the most sane or stable. Ultra Magnus is a serial killer in the making. And, Swerve is going to be kind of upset. And, the ship's shrink is dead. The journey of the Lost Light is going to get darker, both literally and metaphorically.
The exchange between Swerve and Rewind was a reminder that something is up with the latter, and probably hinting about something being up with the former. Swerve has said he is averse to danger/violence. So, why did he join a crew led by a guy whose work safety record is so abysmal?
Roberts is giving us a quest story featuring characters with no direction.
The art could be worse (although I'm still of the opinion that anything better than Marvel US is good, with the exception of Chaos).
This issue was interesting but I guess I would have preferred a little more follow up with Ratchet from last issue. That issue gave me a whole new level of respect for Ratchet. Couple of my favorite lines:
"You've been standing in my rest for the last 30 seconds."
"Two pieces actually"
"The only reason I can't shoot you is because my trigger finger doesn't work."
Yeah, Ratchet's officially a bad ass now.
As for this issue, I am wondering how Overlord wound up there and why no one knows it. And Maximus has gone psychotic, Swerve... it'll be interesting to see how he deals with this.
As for the complaint about all the banter... yeah, that might be filed under "shit you already know" but I file that under "shit that actually happens". Like on the tech specs they usually say shit like "Character often blah blah blah" but how often do we actually see said characters actually doing blah blah blah to warrant the term "often"? Truth is hardly ever which makes one wonder why it says often. I guess I'm just saying what's the point of assigning character traits to a character if we're never going to see those traits in action?
Having said that, I didn't get the same "padding" feel from this that Prowl did. Sometimes there's downtime and sometimes there's banter between coworkers while they're doing shit. And besides, what would we have seen otherwise? Rodimus and his crew sitting staring at a monitor with worried looks on their faces? What would be the point of that? I guess we could have seen Rodimus try some sort of batshit crazy bullshit manuevre to try to assuage the situation but we kind of saw that anyway. It just didn't work because Swerve can't hit the broad side of a barn.
I dunno, I kind of feel like this all leading up to the point where Rodimus is going to have to grow up as a leader which he hasn't done yet. He's at some point going to have to sit the crew down, say "Look bitches, I'm in charge, do shit right."
I've just re-read all the issues so far, and I"m coming to the conclusion that this is one of my favorite Transformers comics in a long time. More than the sister book (though that one's still quite good), and far more than Costa's run, which I certainly enjoyed at the time. I like the approach of "Star Trek" with neurotic, hostile, screwed up Transformers. It keeps things very interesting. The characters have personality and drive, and that's turning this book into something very enjoyable for me. It has an aim beyond just Autobot/Decepticon war, and stories of that war. A lot of the conflicts are small and personal, and that makes things a lot more relatable.
Yeah, and the fact that he notes that these little worldbuilding bits are all there deliberately (or at least there so they can be picked up on later; hopefully by him) is good too. Means they aren't just there to be little goofy asides, and are leading to something.
EDIT: OH MY GOD, you guys, Issue 7 is fucking gold. I can't even! I normally don't tend to geek out THIS much about this comic, but damn. Everything is so cool.
I'm sad that Spoiler
Black Shadow looks like he didn't make it, but given Overlord, he could always come back later.
I never thought that Roberts could make me like such a nobody character like Misfire, but then he goes and does it! I want new toys of him and Flywheels and friggin' Krok now. (I'd say Crankcase, too, but he had one before.) The idea of the Decepticons having huge-ass warships that were literally just Decepticon symbols (SYMBOL SHIPS, that sounds awesome!) is fucking awesome. The Decepticon Justice Division are so cool, and we'll never ever have toys of them. Roberts needs to stop making everything cool. Why can't we just have a MTMTE toyline?
It's so weird, though, because as much as Roberts is trying to, every little worldbuilding thing he throws in there just inches it further and further away from Furman's continuity. I just have a hard time swallowing the idea that we wouldn't have maybe seen some of this shit before. And, I mean, during All Hail Megs, the Autobots were highly under the impression that the ones in AHM, on Cybertron, were it, they were the only Autobots in the entire Universe period, and all of Roberts' worldbuilding and planetfuls of dudes are making that just...increasingly unlikely. I don't mind the disconnect, obviously, because I'm capable of enjoying things regardless of weird continuity stuff that doesn't quite match up. This is literally the only thing I don't like about this comic.
BWprowl wrote:The internet having this many different words to describe nerdy folks is akin to the whole eskimos/ice situation, I would presume.
People spend so much time worrying about whether a figure is "mint" or not that they never stop to consider other flavours.
MTMTE #7
At first pass, I actually rather liked this issue. There’s a lot of content and this issue ‘feels’ full, but moreso with story this time than just padded with characters BS-ing (oh there’s plenty of that, but it’s well implemented here, as opposed to the time-wasting such stuff in the previous issue felt like). Focus shifts a bit from the crew of the Lost Light (though we get a couple scenes with them, and it’s entirely plausible they’ll get involved later) to set up a plot about a ragtag group of leftover Decepticons and how they (eventually) wind up on the wrong side of the Decepticon Justice Division, a collection of super-patriotic Decepticon enforcers, each a new character created by Roberts with a super-cool visual cue and unique power and-
Okay, there are things I didn’t like about this issue, yeah. I’ve been forgiving of Original Characters before, I was one of the people who defended Drift, after all. But Roberts is starting to…push it here. There’s the aforementioned team of super-awesome-quirky-entertaining Justice Division members (admittedly their leader, Tarn, is pretty entertaining), but Roberts also shoehorns this dude named Fulcrum into Krok’s crew of Decepticon leftovers. Fulcrum, like Rung, is a character Roberts had previously used in a fan-work of his. And speaking of Rung, turns out he’s just *too important to die* so he actually survived getting his head blown off and will apparently come back at some point. Roberts’s fan-characters threaten to overrun the book at this point, and that’s where you can start citing such practice as a ‘problem’. There weren’t *any* established Decepticons Roberts could’ve appropriated for the Justice Division? Not even any obscure late-G1/Euro guys? Why is Fulcrum hooked up with Krok’s crew? I get that they need a ‘new guy’ to supply exposition to, but why does it have to be this guy, rather than, I dunno, Apeface or somebody? Drift was a case where he served a purpose in the story that would’ve been hard for an established TF character to fit into (arguably Catilla would’ve worked, but he’s the only one I can think of) but considering Roberts is over-writing half the original characterizations of the actual TF characters with his own anyway (guys like Brainstorm, Skids, Overlord, and Chromedome come to mind) then you wonder what the point of creating characters whole-cloth is in the first place. I’m not even sure why Roberts has to write this as a ‘Transformers’ story, since while he loved to exposit at length about transformation cogs and shape-changing addiction and stupid altmodes like legs, he sure seems to have trouble *showing* it. What do Fulcrum, Rung, and the Justice Division guys turn into, even? You can have characters spout off and talk to each other constantly about what their quirks and personality traits are, and extensively detail what their Special Powers are and how inventive a writer he is, but when it all leads to guys just blowing up and calling each other up at the last minute for SHOCKING REVEALS it comes across like you just enjoy writing about crap you think is cool about Transformers instead of just telling a goddamn story. Using actual TF characters to do it would be nice too.
You know what? I’d thought all that was just minor detractors from an issue I’d actually enjoyed, but now that I’ve gotten that all out of my system and talked about, I realize that this issue kind of pissed me off. Even with some plot elements being introduced and moved forward, it still has endless stopping-in-place so characters could discuss stuff we already knew (the war’s over and some guys don’t know what to do), insert random, self-important world-building (the bit towards the end about a period of the war where Optimus and Megatron got all super-informative about how they viewed the war comes out of nowhere and serves no other purpose than to waste a page explaining “some planets got more messed up than others and forgot about”), or build up his super-cool fan characters that Roberts just HAD to use because he’s SO DAMN CREATIVE.
Look, I *get* that the ‘point’ of this book is aimlessness and characters trying to find their place in the world, and that’s fine, you can communicate that and still tell an interesting story with a solid point to it. But 22 pages of nothing but aimless dialogue and Roberts describing elements that he’ll never actually show or use (Tarn was described as a transformation addict a couple issues back. He neither mentions that himself nor do we even see him transform in this issue), even if the dialogue is admittedly nicely written, is not worth my time or money. I’ll give this book a couple more issues, mainly because I want to see what they do with the return of Grimlock, but it’s definitely starting to get on my nerves.
EDIT: Or to put it another way...
So I read this comic, and for like four million years, I’m reading about this one spaceship called the Lost Light. And it’s not even about real Transformers characters, it’s about Rung, the main character’s Rodimus, and Rung keeps talking to the main characters. And my friends are like “Keep reading! Eventually Transformers characters are doing cool stuff all over the place! It’s awesome!” So I do. And I read about the ship getting lost, and meeting up with Skids, who goes to a bar, which is run by Swerve, and he talks to Rewind, who talks to Chromedome, who talks to Brainstorm, and they try to get information on Skids, to get the interesting fucking part of the comic! That’s bullshit, alright, it took me like four years! I didn’t see so much as Ratchet turning into an ambulance for like a hundred millennia.
Meanwhile, you go over to a comic like Robots in Disguise and it’s like BITCH DECEPTICONS COMING OUT OF THE UNDERGROUND RIGHT NOW! SHOOT ‘EM IN THE HEAD! GRAB THEIR GUNS, BLOW ‘EM UP, YOU DON’T NEED PERMISSION, PROWL GOT AROUND THAT SHIT FOR YOU! WHAT ARE YOU READIN’ PROFILES FOR, STUFF’S STILL HAPPENIN’! BITCH TURMOIL’S IN THE ROOM RIGHT NOW! HE’S ABOUT TO FIRE, HE KILLED YOUR PLANET, SHOOT ‘IM IN THE HEAD! SHOOT ‘IM IN THE HEAD!!
And then you go back to More Than Meets The Eye, and it’s a bunch of boring dialogue sequences, they’re camped out on a barren planet, it’s all anime bullshit with their hand on their hips, and they’re like “Gee, I hope we solve this mystery!”…AND NOTHING HAPPENS! Meanwhile, in Robots in Disguise, it’s like BITCH THIS AIN’T JUST EXPOSITION, AN AERIALBOT JUST EXPLODED! YOU AIN’T GOT TIME TO LOOK UP THAT OBSCURE REFERENCE, STUFF’S STILL HAPPENIN’! NOW RUN, DIRGE, C’MON, RUN! PLANET CYBERTRON’S BEING TORN APART BY POLITICAL UNREST! IT’S UP TO US!
