More than Meets the Eye (IDW ongoing comic)

[JediTricks]

Do you see Thundercracker anywhere in the panel with Skywarp's weapon firing? Do you see Thundercracker being hit? No to both accounts? Hm, isn't that interesting. If Skywarp's weapon was still aimed directly in Thundercracker's face like the first panel there shows, then Thundercracker should be right there, getting his head blown off by Skywarp's weapon in the panel when the weapon fired. Yet, he isn't anywhere to be seen. There is no "Pavlovian response" to not accept a "clear chain of events", when it's what we don't see on the page in the first place, that should be there if that "clear chain" of events played out as you suggest. We have no idea how close Thundercracker is to Skywarp when he actually fired the weapon, nor where it is aimed. That makes the scene purposefully ambiguous. And that's hardly comics turning fans against their own intellects. It's a pretty common storytelling technique for misdirection. Haven't you ever seen a crime drama pull the exact same thing? You think you know how something will play out, based on a "clear chain of events", but things can still change up until the very last second that can have a profoundly different impact on the outcome.

There are no panels showing Skywarp moving away from Thundercracker, no panels showing Skywarp changing his feelings on the matter, no panels suggesting his aim changes, so every instance you suggest there is whole cloth outside the fictional narrative presented. The closest you can come to making that argument is that the giant blast from his cannon is not shown connecting with anything but that doesn't say anything, it is that occams razor thing of being more likely that it is either an example of artistic license or Skywarp's shot knocked Thundercracker over or even took his head clean off.

Your argument is that the chain of events is so open to interpretation to the point of saying that the chain of events which is on the page as A > B > C > D can also reasonably include L, P, T, and X. Is there anything there to lead you to believe that LPTX is intended there? No. Is there anything in the tone of the book which suggests that it's fluid enough and likely enough to screw the reader over in such fashion that LPTX could be intended there? No. So either you are making it up wholesale under the line of "anything can happen", or you are conditioned by the comics industry to distrust the fictional narrative itself.

Occam's razor? The simplest explanation is that they moved somewhat between the two panels it took to get from pointing the weapon and firing it. Or do you think Thundercracker wouldn't back off from a gun pointed in his face in the second or two it took Skywarp to say "Betrayer" and then fire?

That's not Occam's razor, that's not the simplest explanation, you actively have to convolute more things into the moment to make that outcome happen. The simplest explanation is that what you see in those panels is what is seen - a gun in someone's eye, the attempt to make explanation, and then a stupid soldier angered by misunderstanding the complex nature of the situation into firing on someone he sees as a betrayer. Anything else just cannot be the SIMPLEST explanation because it's not shown there.

But, if you look at comics as "one big thing", you have to reconcile tonal and stylistic differences across decades. (For example, howw can you really reconcile Byrne and Morrison on a book like "Superman"?)

And that's the publisher's cross to bear, they have to weigh how much the audience will follow the title vs how much they'll invest in the artist of the time.

The implication is that Magnus was fond of Verity.

Yes, that much is clear, the backstory of that would have been nice, that's a lot of meaning to imbue in someone who is just fond of another.


I have to stop here, just got an urgent family matter call I have to go help with, I'll return for more conversation later on this thread.

[Shockwave]

I have to stop here, just got an urgent family matter call I have to go help with, I'll return for more conversation later on this thread.

Hope everything's ok.

[JediTricks]

Hope everything's ok.

Thanks. Got them to the ER, now hopefully they can keep the fever down to do the procedure.

[JediTricks]

Not sure I see it. The Wreckers are a "do anything" team. The DJD is more of a "specific purpose" team.

Yes, but both are "the cruelest, the toughest, the meanest" extreme, both have revolving memberships, both travel place to place fucking shit up, both are intended to be too cool for school, and both are dedicated to the cause... in their own hardliner sort of ways.

The Ironhide thing is much less retarded than it sounds. Costa was setting up for something that he did not get a chance to fully exploit. But, the "Ironhide' miniseries is worth a read, if only to see what might have been.

And, regardless, I would not call Ironhide's death and return a "cheat", as the death was written to facilitate the (planned) return, which was going to tie in with Costa's "change" theme.

WTF, it's only a cheat if it's on accident? No. A cheat is a cheat. Tracking down the miniseries is difficult, my local shop is so small they have very little IDW back issues. As it is I'm still struggling to find RID 12-15 and I haven't even received the Annual or 10-11 yet.

The problem is that too many readers not only expect this sort of writing, they seem to accept it, even *want* it.

Not sure where blame for that lies though, as comic companies could step up their game and stop rewarding the most backwards ass elements of the fandom.

My argument is that it's with the publishers all the way who are so hungry for readership that they do these things over and over, they devalue fictional life by making it so easy to replace, and then they don't have the balls to stick with their choices because there's gold in dem dar hills. The mark of a solid editor/artist/creator/writer is the ability to ignore what the fans think what they want and create something they didn't know they wanted.

I literally showed the above panels to my girlfriend, with no context, and asked, "What's happening here?"

"The black dude shoots the blue guy in the face."

"You think he survived that?"

"Probably not. I dunno, can Transformers survive being shot in the face?"

"Usually they don't."

"...oh god, they made that guy survive, didn't they?"

"Yeah."

"Why do you read this shit?"

Damn well said, and you picked a great gal there for calling out shit for being shit.

"Probably not. I dunno, can Transformers survive being shot in the face?"

"Usually they don't."

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/File:BurningChro ... ndwave.jpg

He survives.

Megatron practically shot Starscream in half at the end of Infiltration, all the way back at the beginning, and he survived. Sure, he got immediate repair work, but he had to live through that pretty horrible injury for the repairs to be of any use, correct? Sunstreaker had his head removed entirely from his body, and he survived. There are two early IDW examples of a Transformer surviving what should be fatal injuries: beheading and massive chest trauma. Just where is Starscream's spark located anyway? How did that shot from Megatron miss vaporizing it?

From the Wiki writeup on the issue and following issue, it appears he only barely survives because Megatron is shown taking him to get repaired immediately. And your Starscream example is the same thing, taken to get immediate repairs. None of that happened for Thundercracker, nobody is shown taking him for repairs, there's a level of narrative consistence absent with AHM's TC scene.

So am I. From the sequence as written and drawn, the following things are very obvious:

- It's clear that Skywarp confronts Thundercracker
- It's clear that Skywarp is angry and Thundercracker is trying to reason and justify his actions
- It's clear that Skywarp takes a shot at Thundercracker after pointing the gun at his face

The result is left to the reader's imagination. Why? Why don't we see it happen? Why isn't the shot and Thundercracker's death shown to us, if that's what McCarthy intended? I remember reading that sequence for the first time and my reaction was not "He just killed Thundercracker". It was more along the lines of wondering whether Thundercracker had been killed or not, precisely because it wasn't shown to me.

You forgot step 3, where Skywarp makes his intentions clear by angrily shouting that Thundercracker is a betrayer to the cause.

This is left to the imagination only within limited terms, there is a reasonable level of expectation in that chain of events and an infinite number of UNREASONABLE levels of expectation - maybe the Starship Enterprise came back in time and beamed Thundercracker up, maybe Skywarp got so angry he accidentally transported across the city and fired without realizing it, maybe Thundercracker is actually Waspinator and cannot be killed, maybe Skywarp fired a rainbow cannon that did no damage at all. All of those examples are "possible" because this is a fictional tale, but none of them are REASONABLE given the chain of events presented and a lack of after-effects shown in THAT content. If you were reading a book instead of a comic, there'd be no question what happened if the "victim" in the scene didn't appear anywhere later in the book. If it was a TV show or movie, that's the same thing, those are reasonable dramatic expressions in killing a character to not show the body, and yet the ONLY literary medium that asks its audience to ignore a clear chain of events is the comic book because the comic book has broken the literary contract with its audience, and continues to break that contract every time they kill a notable character in one book only to bring them back in a later-published one.

The idea that you need to be hand-held, led to a dead body and graphically shown it to be dead and INCAPABLE OF EVER GETTING BETTER is a symptom of the problem that comic books have created, it is precisely because you are familiar with their cheap ripoff tricks that you must require proof beyond proof that a character is permanently dead in that medium, where any other media is allowed to show a chain of events that clearly leads to a character's death without graphically showing the murder and after-effects of the murder.

It is NOT clear how that confrontation ended, no matter how often you insist that it is.

That's wrong, it is clear because the content doesn't touch on it again, it is the end of Thundercracker's story in AHM, so the clear statement up to the end of the AHM series is that he's dead, to use my earlier example that panel took his story from A to D through B and C, not through L and 7 and T and Pi. Anything published after must be a retcon by its very definition, "retroactive continuity", and most non-comic-book folks I know consider retcons to be a total cheat because the original material expressed one idea and the later material asks them to throw the original out the window.

Transformers have survived worse, and readers are well aware of that. There's no automatic reason to assume the shot was fatal. For a human, it would be. For a Transformer, not necessarily.

That's where this all started though, up until then it was pretty rare to survive that level of damage without a cheat bringing them back to life. Now we have MTMTE where nearly every issue has a fake death on those levels and it asks the question "what WILL kill a Transformer at this point, and how will we be able to believe a character has been killed if there's not a graphic depiction of their spark being extinguished?" It's a ripoff, even the G1 cartoon didn't pull that shit lightly and it's considered pretty fucking stupid.

And here's a new slant on that question, if that level of violence won't kill a Transformer, why the fuck do they bother with lesser weapons in wartime? Why have they built proportionally large arms that still aren't enough to have a reasonable chance of stopping their enemies? Is the real reason the Autobot/Decepticon war lasted millions of years because they were too stupid to build more effective arms?

[andersonh1]

If you were reading a book instead of a comic, there'd be no question what happened if the "victim" in the scene didn't appear anywhere later in the book.

There are only two more pages in the book! Neither of which feature either Skywarp detailing the result of his firing at Thundercracker, or showing what happened. Ongoing #4 shows Thundercracker falling, on fire, and badly damaged, but his face looks pretty decent. The big gaping hole in his chest indicates that he did indeed attempt to dodge the blast since Skywarp was aiming at his face, but didn't hit it.

If it was a TV show or movie, that's the same thing, those are reasonable dramatic expressions in killing a character to not show the body, and yet the ONLY literary medium that asks its audience to ignore a clear chain of events is the comic book because the comic book has broken the literary contract with its audience, and continues to break that contract every time they kill a notable character in one book only to bring them back in a later-published one.

Comics have certainly cheapened death, I'd agree 100%. But this is a case where Thundercracker did not die. We don't see what happens here, and we do see it later on in the ongoing.

I showed my wife the page and asked her what happened to Thundercracker. She said "I don't know, they didn't show it." I asked if she would assume he was dead or assume he survived, and again, she said there wasn't enough information to make a guess. She's not a comic book reader like I am, so she's not conditioned to expect certain conventions of the genre. She found the sequence inconclusive.

The idea that you need to be hand-held, led to a dead body and graphically shown it to be dead and INCAPABLE OF EVER GETTING BETTER is a symptom of the problem that comic books have created, it is precisely because you are familiar with their cheap ripoff tricks that you must require proof beyond proof that a character is permanently dead in that medium, where any other media is allowed to show a chain of events that clearly leads to a character's death without graphically showing the murder and after-effects of the murder.

Very true. Which is one reason that you shouldn't assume that Thundercracker died in that sequence. You should know better than that.

That's wrong, it is clear because the content doesn't touch on it again, it is the end of Thundercracker's story in AHM, so the clear statement up to the end of the AHM series is that he's dead, to use my earlier example that panel took his story from A to D through B and C, not through L and 7 and T and Pi. Anything published after must be a retcon by its very definition, "retroactive continuity", and most non-comic-book folks I know consider retcons to be a total cheat because the original material expressed one idea and the later material asks them to throw the original out the window.

For the facts of the situation to be changed via retcon, they have to be established first. And Thundercracker's death was not established. Hunter's was, just two pages later. Odd that one character is confirmed dead and gone, but the other is left ambiguous, if the intent was to kill both.

Here's a question: suppose Ongoing #4 was written by McCarthy rather than Costa, and was actually AHM #20, assuming the numbering continued from the Coda issues. And we get the exact same story of how Thundercracker was shot down but survived. Would you consider it a retcon, or a cheat? Wouldn't it be a case of leaving a character's fate hanging, only to reveal it later on down the line? I've seen television episodes and movies that pull that same trick, some of which were written by different writers in the case of tv series. It's a dramatic device.

[Shockwave]

maybe the Starship Enterprise came back in time and beamed Thundercracker up to the TARDIS, aboard the Death Star where Harry Potter and Twilight Sparkle magically repaired him.

[Onslaught Six]

maybe the Starship Enterprise came back in time and beamed Thundercracker up to the TARDIS, aboard the Death Star where Harry Potter and Twilight Sparkle magically repaired him.

"Headcanon."

[Sparky Prime]

There are no panels showing Skywarp moving away from Thundercracker, no panels showing Skywarp changing his feelings on the matter, no panels suggesting his aim changes, so every instance you suggest there is whole cloth outside the fictional narrative presented. The closest you can come to making that argument is that the giant blast from his cannon is not shown connecting with anything but that doesn't say anything, it is that occams razor thing of being more likely that it is either an example of artistic license or Skywarp's shot knocked Thundercracker over or even took his head clean off.

Just because they didn't actively show Skywarp or Thundercracker move somewhat between panels doesn't mean they couldn't have. They were certainly in a heated moment where things happened quickly after all. And what I'm suggesting is not outside of the presented fictional narrative at all. You're overlooking that Thundercracker's head should be right up next to Skywarp's gun barrel in the panel where we see the weapon fire, if the events played out exactly as you're suggesting. Yet, Thundercracker is no where to be seen in that panel. At the very least, even if Thundercracker's head was taken clean off, we should still see his upper torso there. We never see Thundercracker actually take the hit. How can you say that doesn't say anything? That's a significant part of the scene, given that leaves the scene ambiguous as to what actually happens to Thundercracker when all is said and done.

Your argument is that the chain of events is so open to interpretation to the point of saying that the chain of events which is on the page as A > B > C > D can also reasonably include L, P, T, and X. Is there anything there to lead you to believe that LPTX is intended there? No. Is there anything in the tone of the book which suggests that it's fluid enough and likely enough to screw the reader over in such fashion that LPTX could be intended there? No. So either you are making it up wholesale under the line of "anything can happen", or you are conditioned by the comics industry to distrust the fictional narrative itself.

No where have I suggested "anything can happen" in this scene. I'd say my argument is more like, given what we see with the chain of events and with it cutting short of actually showing us the final outcome, that the outcome itself can either be X or it can be Y. And given the scene rather abruptly ends before that final outcome, that isn't so fluid as you suggest. If they intended it to be so certain that Thundercracker dies, then why leave any room for doubt at all? Unless of course they intended for us to think X, yet allows for Y to be the true outcome, as is revealed to be the case later on. Your argument appears to be only based on how you perceive the chain of events playing out to the point you're not even looking at the fact they didn't actually show us the end of that chain and the implications of it.

Let me illustrate another example... I was watching "I, Robot" the other day that happens to have a somewhat similar scene. There is this scene were Sonny (the robot) is ordered to be destroyed for killing someone. Calvin (a scientist who works at the company that makes the robots) sets up the procedure, while the scene shifts back and forth between her and Spooner investigating an old robot storage facility. Finally Calvin applies the nanites that destroys the robots positronic brain. Little later however, we find out Calvin had actually switched Sonny with another NS-5 robot off screen, in order to fake Sonny's destruction. We're meant to think he's dead, just as everyone in the narrative does, but SURPRISE! he's not and returns to help save the day.
Or haven't you ever seen shows where a character will get a gun pointed at their face, you think they're about to get shot in the face then go to commercial? And once they come back from the commercial somehow the person who has the gun pointed at them is able to wrestle the gun away. Pretty sure practically every crime drama does something like that at some point.

Once again, this is a common narrative trick intended to make the audience think one event happened while something else actually happens within reason of those same events. It's not something conditioned by the comics industry at all.

That's not Occam's razor, that's not the simplest explanation, you actively have to convolute more things into the moment to make that outcome happen. The simplest explanation is that what you see in those panels is what is seen - a gun in someone's eye, the attempt to make explanation, and then a stupid soldier angered by misunderstanding the complex nature of the situation into firing on someone he sees as a betrayer. Anything else just cannot be the SIMPLEST explanation because it's not shown there.

I'm not actively convoluting anything here. We don't see Thundercracker when Skywarp fires his weapon, and as such we don't see what actually happens to Thundercracker in that scene. And then we find out Thundercracker did in fact survive just 4 issues into the Ongoing. The simplest explanation for Occam's Razor, given that evidence from the comic itself, is that they moved somewhat between panels. If anything, that's less convoluted than your trying to brush it off as "artist interpretation", or that Thundercracker's head was taken clean off, to which we have no evidence in the comic itself to support those claims.

From the Wiki writeup on the issue and following issue, it appears he only barely survives because Megatron is shown taking him to get repaired immediately. And your Starscream example is the same thing, taken to get immediate repairs. None of that happened for Thundercracker, nobody is shown taking him for repairs, there's a level of narrative consistence absent with AHM's TC scene.

My point I was that they can and have survived that type of damage, and worst, despite O6 saying they usually don't survive. Doesn't matter if they get immediate repairs, point is they still survived it. But since you mention it, I'd also have to point out, again, we never see where Thundercracker took the hit or see how badly he was damaged by it in the first place. All we see is what the Ongoing actually shows us, where it would seem he wasn't hit in the head,seeing his head doesn't have any significant damage at all. Perhaps he was hit in the chest seeing as his cockpit is trashed. And the damage he took apparently was something he could manage on his own until he was repaired by some other Decepticons that find him sometime later.

Comics have certainly cheapened death, I'd agree 100%. But this is a case where Thundercracker did not die. We don't see what happens here, and we do see it later on in the ongoing.

I showed my wife the page and asked her what happened to Thundercracker. She said "I don't know, they didn't show it." I asked if she would assume he was dead or assume he survived, and again, she said there wasn't enough information to make a guess. She's not a comic book reader like I am, so she's not conditioned to expect certain conventions of the genre. She found the sequence inconclusive.

For the facts of the situation to be changed via retcon, they have to be established first. And Thundercracker's death was not established. Hunter's was, just two pages later. Odd that one character is confirmed dead and gone, but the other is left ambiguous, if the intent was to kill both.

Exactly.

[Dominic]

My argument is that it's with the publishers all the way who are so hungry for readership that they do these things over and over, they devalue fictional life by making it so easy to replace, and then they don't have the balls to stick with their choices because there's gold in dem dar hills. The mark of a solid editor/artist/creator/writer is the ability to ignore what the fans think what they want and create something they didn't know they wanted.

But, readers reward bad behavior. I personally know readers who will actually say something to the effect of "it was aweseom when they killed off __________, and I cannot wait for them to bring _________ back." The cliche is what they want.

It is hard to blame publishers for playing to that.

None of that happened for Thundercracker, nobody is shown taking him for repairs, there's a level of narrative consistence absent with AHM's TC scene.

It is actually a problem with Costa's run with the ongoing, not with McCarthy's "All Hail Megatron". (Just a clarification)

WTF, it's only a cheat if it's on accident? No. A cheat is a cheat. Tracking down the miniseries is difficult, my local shop is so small they have very little IDW back issues. As it is I'm still struggling to find RID 12-15 and I haven't even received the Annual or 10-11 yet.

It is only a cheat if the author is back-writing to undo something that was never meant to be undone. In this case, Costa killed off Ironhide specifically to allow himself to bring back Ironhide. The "Ironhide" mini series was being advertised immediately after, if not simultaneously to, Ironhide's death in the comics. Costa did not have to back-write over his own stuff to make that work.

It is similar to "Final Crisis". Anybody who says that Batman died in "Final Crisis" did not read the book. Morrison wrote Batman's apparent death knowing full well how he was going to reveal it as a hoax. He even went so far as to plant a few clues in story *and* to show Bruce Wayne alive and well towards the end of "Final Crisis".

The idea that you need to be hand-held, led to a dead body and graphically shown it to be dead and INCAPABLE OF EVER GETTING BETTER is a symptom of the problem that comic books have created, it is precisely because you are familiar with their cheap ripoff tricks that you must require proof beyond proof that a character is permanently dead in that medium, where any other media is allowed to show a chain of events that clearly leads to a character's death without graphically showing the murder and after-effects of the murder.

To be fair, it is not *only* comics that have this problem. This kind of half-assery finds its way in to other mediums as well. And, it is not obligatory in comics, even if it is common.

And here's a new slant on that question, if that level of violence won't kill a Transformer, why the fuck do they bother with lesser weapons in wartime? Why have they built proportionally large arms that still aren't enough to have a reasonable chance of stopping their enemies? Is the real reason the Autobot/Decepticon war lasted millions of years because they were too stupid to build more effective arms?

"Transformers are morons" was a theme in Costa's run actually.

Ongoing #4 shows Thundercracker falling, on fire, and badly damaged, but his face looks pretty decent. The big gaping hole in his chest indicates that he did indeed attempt to dodge the blast since Skywarp was aiming at his face, but didn't hit it.

And, that was an obvious back-write by one author following the work of another.

Here's a question: suppose Ongoing #4 was written by McCarthy rather than Costa, and was actually AHM #20, assuming the numbering continued from the Coda issues. And we get the exact same story of how Thundercracker was shot down but survived. Would you consider it a retcon, or a cheat? Wouldn't it be a case of leaving a character's fate hanging, only to reveal it later on down the line? I've seen television episodes and movies that pull that same trick, some of which were written by different writers in the case of tv series. It's a dramatic device.

It would come down to what McCarthy would have been planning. Writers have pulled half-assed back-writes of their own work, such as the return of Jean Grey in "X-Factor". Nobody on the X-books planned for that when they killed her in "The Dark Phoenix Saga", despite the fact that some of the same people were still working on the X-books when Grey came back.



Dom
-tries to avoid comics that pull this kind of stunt.

[andersonh1]

Ongoing #4 shows Thundercracker falling, on fire, and badly damaged, but his face looks pretty decent. The big gaping hole in his chest indicates that he did indeed attempt to dodge the blast since Skywarp was aiming at his face, but didn't hit it.

And, that was an obvious back-write by one author following the work of another.

So we saw Thundercracker take Skywarp's shot in the head then? No, we didn't. We didn't see Thundercracker get hit ANYWHERE. We don't know where Skywarp's shot hit, based on anything seen in AHM. There's no "back-writing" here, no going back by Costa to change what McCarthy wrote and Guidi drew.

Again, the facts have to be established before it can be a retcon. If we had seen Thundercracker take the hit in the face, and then the ongoing series showed him with a chest wound, that would be a retcon and I'd be in agreement with you here. But as things stand, AHM leaves open the question of where Thundercracker was hit, and Ongoing answers that question. End of story.