More than Meets the Eye (IDW ongoing comic)

[Shockwave]

Pipes had a few lines in "Forever is a long time coming".

[138 Scourge]

Pipes had a few lines in "Forever is a long time coming".

And I've heard he's called for Danny Boy on a couple occasions, at least.

[andersonh1]

Read the issue today, and I can see quite a bit of dramatic use for the issue. It wasn't fighting just for the sake of it, and characters weren't offed just to show how deadly Overlord is, which we already knew. Roberts was restrained with the character slaughter this time around, at least after Pipes was killed in an incredibly disturbing and sadistic way. Not that being run through with a sword is any better. And for those who like Prowl the manipulative, cold, cruel Autobot, he's got more deaths on his conscience now, since he was responsible for putting Overlord on the ship for what really is a very flimsy reason.

So Pipes is confirmed dead. Magnus isn't dead by the end of the issue, though he's supposedly beyond help. I predict he'll pull through, or at least live long enough to actually see him die next issue. At last he gets some great character moments not based off the idea that he's so straight-laced that he never smiles and always follows the rules to the nth degree. He's essentially feeling survivor's guilt, even if Overlord thinks he's just posturing. And there's a way for Rewind to have survived the explosion, always assuming Overlord was tough enough to live through it. We'll see.

In a dramatic sense, which is what I was asking Dom about, the issue certainly makes sense. What happens when the crew find out about Chromedome and Brainstorm's part in all of this, and that they both knew Overlord was on board. Drift's faith didn't protect him, so how will he change? And isn't he in on the scheme? Will Fortress Maximus be allowed back out among the rest of the crew, now that Magnus is down and they need another heavyweight? There are all sorts of directions for various characters and their relationships to go after these events.

Pipes had a few lines in "Forever is a long time coming".

And I've heard he's called for Danny Boy on a couple occasions, at least.

[BWprowl]

Magnus's portrait was crossed out in the crew manifest in the back of the issue, along with Pipes and Rewind, so yeah, he's toast. Plus he was confirmed by the Necrobot to die months ago, so we knew this was coming anyway.

[andersonh1]

Magnus's portrait was crossed out in the crew manifest in the back of the issue, along with Pipes and Rewind, so yeah, he's toast. Plus he was confirmed by the Necrobot to die months ago, so we knew this was coming anyway.

I'm not buying it. Not unless we see him expire on-panel.

[JediTricks]

Dom lent me his collection of MTMTE and I've read 2 issues so far, so I'll not be reading the thread all the way through until I am more caught up, but I wanted to give first impressions. Luckily, Prowl and Dom have done most of that for me...

Foil effects on the cover! Hoohah! (I really did laugh, honestly.)

I kinda liked it, but it was silly.

Okay, I honestly really wanted to like this one. Roche blew me away back in Spotlight Kup, and hasn't stopped doing so since. And Roberts has knocked his out of the part too; he wrote 'Chaos Theory', which was my favorite comic of last year! But this first issue of MTMTE just left me...cold, somehow. I think it really is the references. Don't get me wrong, I *love* cute little nods, not just in Transformers, but in any media I'm enjoying where I also happen to be a fan of the franchise. But there is such a thing as too much, and Roberts crosses it here. Just within the first third of the book, he name-checks so many different names, places, and concepts that it stops feeling like an acknowledgement of the franchise he's writing for, and starts to feel like he's just showing off. Yeah, James Roberts could kick my ass at Transformers Trivia, I get it, can we get on with the story here? Thing is, we really don't get on with the story that much. For as dense as this issue *seems* on account of all the (admittedly well-written) dialogue flavoring things every step of the way, at the end you realize that not much has actually happened. It's really just twenty pages of characters parading by, introducing themselves, and getting on the ship, and then in the last couple of pages the actual premise rather violently asserts itself. It feels like Roberts and Roche started assigning guys to the cast, and then just couldn't quit. "Ooh, this guy should be in there too! And we gotta have this guy! And this guy!" It makes you wonder where, in the future, they're going to find time to *do* anything with all of these characters, and if it'll have been worth spending the whole issue playing show-and-tell with all of them.

Right on the money, I really liked LSotW, but issue 1 of MTMTE was too many nods and characters and references, it was way too cutesy with this.

This also brings me to the issue of this...issue as a jumping-on point, which copy in the back of the book and Roberts's letter at the end seem to imply that this is supposed to be. If that's so, it's not a very good one; this issue suffers from some seriously brutal continuity lock-out. Asterisks referencing past issues abound (I thought we were supposed to be phasing that crap out?), the aforementioned references are likely to leave new readers feeling lost and excluded, and the dozens of characters thrown at the reader would likely be a nightmare for new people to keep track of (I mean, people like us have no trouble with it, since we already 'know' who Red Alert and Chromedome and Brainstorm and Rewind are, but can you imagine how someone new to Transformers is going to react to all these guys being shoved in their face at once?). The rest of the 'plot' of this issue doesn't do a good enough job of distracting from the overbearing character-introdump either. I saw the 'plot twist' with Tailgate coming a mile away, and it mostly comes off like another disparate element that Roberts felt like he *just had* to get in there, and frankly just raises too many questions about how Tailgate survived down there that long, despite apparently not being able to get to his Energon. The surprise message at the end I'm not exactly fond of either. While it does kinda negate the 'Aimless adventures in space' concept I was worried would be the main feature of this book, it just comes off as too heavy handed a way of foreshadowing mysteeeeeeeerious consequences, and putting an ongoing story on an apparent deadline like this *in the first issue* is really not a good move, in my opinion. Despite what Roberts and IDW may say, this book comes off like it's squarely aimed at the fans, to the point that it feels like pandering. And even if you're the one being pandered too, it never feels like a good thing.

Also right, and I didn't feel that the final message negated the aimlessness of the adventures either, that still is a looming aspect to the tone. I can't say I saw the twist with Tailgate coming though, but I was distracted by a million references to things I wasn't familiar with. Of course, I was also confused by Tailgate going on about The Ark and Nova Prime, facts which don't jive with non-comics TF fans like myself, so I was constantly trying to shoehorn his reference into what I already knew by the time he jumped on the scene.

(on the flip side, I get that Whirl is supposed to seem dangerous and edgy, but he just comes off as a one-note annoyance).

Yup! Hated this twist on the character.

Also, if Roberts and Roche had been painting Prowl as an overly pragmatic, but ultimately well-intentioned character, then they push him into full-on heel territory on this one.

Spoiler

I'm sorry, but you don't just up and try to murder 200 guys because they were going to leave the planet. That doesn't actually solve the problem, and it just makes you look like a colossal dick.

This is how I felt about it as well, even though it turns out not to be the case in issue 2 where they cheat their way out of it (seriously, that thing with Ore too close to the engine is a ripoff, makes no sense in the context provided, why would the engine be fluxing while they're merely leaving the atmosphere?). This is overly ham-handed in the way they deal with it, it sets a bad tone where they're not really going to pay off on these characters we're leaving behind since their motivations are more than meets the eye but their characters aren't.

Roche's new art style looks like shit. There, I said it. Yes, I know that he has to grow and experiment. But, it is going to be an ordeal for us all while Roche gets to the next level. Right now, the book is hideous to look at. (I cannot even tell who some of the characters are.)

Yeah, I hated the art style, the character designs and the coloring both fell flat on their face from the outset. I got entirely lost on whether I was looking at Ratchet or Prowl or Red Alert for half the book, and it was kinda important to the story to know which one was saying what. The characters are WAY too stylized, and the surroundings are poorly defined at times. I hated looking at this issue. Issue 2 is a little easier to swallow but has its own horrible art, like the shuttle exploding from the water in a pull away, that took 3 passes to understand and even on the 3rd pass I basically had to hope I was right and continue from there. Issue 1 throws a lot of characters at us in new styles and never relents on confusing the eye while downplaying distinct characteristics, and pushes home a skinny anime character styling that never once feels true to the brand.

Post here and nowhere else cause the rest of the fandom are dicks and you guys aren't.

I think we've found the board's new slogan.

Yeah, but you can't say it, it's not diplomatic. You can know it, but ya can't say it.

So, is this Lost in Space or Star Trek, configured for the Transformers universe? Either could work, and I enjoyed this issue more than Costa's run, which was quite good. Yeah, it's geared more towards the fan and less towards the casual reader, but I suspect it's mainly fans reading the thing anyway. And I love my chrome foil logo on the cover.

This is definitely feeling like Lost in Space for TF, not Star Trek where the goals are common to every member of that society. Here we're given a goal that's contrary to the interests of one party (Prowl and BB) a vague goal to the other party which immediately gets sidetracked on launch.


So, stuff not touched on, issue 1 has HORRIBLE tone, I hated this tone. Where the humor mix for LSotW was acceptable because of the characters using it and the situations, and the ability to TURN IT OFF at some point, MTMTE can't control itself, it's mixing serious and humorous and modern USA speak together all too much in a situation that should have some weight to it but instead is lost drifting in the clouds. I get it, you guys think "comic book needs more comic" but there's a time and place for that stuff which ain't ALL OVER THE GODDAMNED PLACE the way it is in the book.

[Onslaught Six]

Maaaaan, I don't understand how everyone doesn't just think this is the coolest thing ever. Maybe I just get it.

[BWprowl]

Maaaaan, I don't understand how everyone doesn't just think this is the coolest thing ever. Maybe I just get it.

Aw come on, I've explained my opinion on several occasions. But simply put:

Robots having adventures in space: Could be cool
Robots sitting around on a spcaeship talking about race-specific minutae and referencing trivia for issues at a time before plot points that really should have asserted themselves earlier finally coming to fruition: At once boring, jerkily-paced, and generally frustrating to read.

Why Roberts can't write more issues like the Ratchet/Pharma story arc is beyond me. That one had 'fun' dialogue and backstory-jamming and overt character parades, but actually managed to have shit *happen* during the whole thing.

[andersonh1]

Maaaaan, I don't understand how everyone doesn't just think this is the coolest thing ever. Maybe I just get it.

Aw come on, I've explained my opinion on several occasions. But simply put:

Robots having adventures in space: Could be cool
Robots sitting around on a spcaeship talking about race-specific minutae and referencing trivia for issues at a time before plot points that really should have asserted themselves earlier finally coming to fruition: At once boring, jerkily-paced, and generally frustrating to read.

I tend to agree. I generally enjoy this series, but there is too much "nothing" and witty banter happening, and not enough actual, meaningful drama. I appreciate the dense read and fun dialogue, but a little more substance thrown into the mix would improve things considerably. It's a question of balance, and the balance is a little skewed in favor of talk and world-building, and not enough towards drama.

[JediTricks]

I decided to just read all the issues Dom sent, 1-12, and I think they mention Ironfist more than they mention the Knights - their main goal! BWP's assessment is right on the money, they sit in space and do nothing, they aren't even living up to their intentions. A whole year goes by and the pretense of the story, the very framework which moves these characters, is less important here than a minor character who isn't even in the book. Even Star Trek Voyager stuck to its pretense of getting home each episode, and that wasn't a great series. MTMTE remains tonally broken and occasionally wildly uneven, most of the time remaining that modern internet-speak flippancy with occasions to actually take itself seriously maybe 1/6th the time. Then there's the quarter of a year in publishing time that they spend IN A FLASHBACK!!! The "heist" with Orion Pax was cute I guess but 3 issues? Fuuuuck no it wasn't worth a whole season of issues. That killed what little momentum was going on, it buried the Red Alert story, it strangled out Skids' material (love him or hate him, there was something building, then it just fizzled, not unlike... everything else), it buried what went down with Fort Max, everything in this series gets put on the back burner so they can go dick around with references and even more obscure characters. There's a hint of compelling material with the characters, yet only 1 token Decepticon-type, so when they raid the hostage-taking Decepticons there's no resonance to that at all, this is supposed to be a blended species or at least working on it, but you wouldn't know that from the material presented here. And the "we're lost" angle is dumped so quickly that it has no weight at all, they're not lost, they simply didn't bother looking at a chart apparently.

Then there's the outright flaws, BWP points out way back that the solution in issue 2 is a cheat, Roddy pushes the Sparkeater into the engine, yet the ship doesn't explode. The color-changing with Senator Shockwave was so downright confusing that it lost me half an hour of research just to figure out who this new character was, the coloring was SO different from the previous issue that it was unrecognizable. That on top of the already confusing and uneven art style. And are these Transformers anymore? You wouldn't know it from the present-day story, nobody transforms at all, there are no disguises, and even Tailgate's issue with transforming is forgotten.

And they have elements involved which seem compelling or controversial - Swerve shooms his face off, Chromedome and Rewind are asexual gay partners, the monoformer religious movement hinting at greater effects, a guy being sad that he's a leg - but none of that resonates at all because there's another inside reference to make, another joke, another shocking thing that ends up being no big deal.

Part of me wants to see where issues 13-15 end up going, maybe I'll throw a few bucks at my local comic shop (I already ordered the RID collections 1-3 on Amazon since Dom sent me issue 5 and they seemed to deliver on the ideas they're intending to even while Sky Byte appears on the scene), but I will do it knowing it's a guilty pleasure from my connection with some of these characters rather than a truly compelling story.


PS - as for Drift, I have no idea what they intended with the character, but they've made him way too happy and bubbly and toadying, and it's too much, it's not true to the character, there's no honesty there.