Dreamwave G1 read-through

[andersonh1]

I didn't mean to take over a month to get the next issue reviewed. Slacker!

Transformers/G.I. Joe #4
"Wolves"
John Ney Rieber, Jae Lee

Zartan is a terrible "master of disguise" because he doesn't know the plan or the right radio to use. So he's found out for the fake he is within a page. Flint outfights him pretty easily, but Zartan has Soundwave as backup, so Flint is captured. Cobra wants him because he knows G.I.Joe's battle plan. The rest of his team go to a contingency plan because they've been compromised. Meanwhile Grimlock and the other Autobots take on Rumble and his artificial earthquake and Optimus actually gets a line. Scarlett gets weirdly flirty lines with Bumblebee ("don't tell me you've never been driven before") which are fairly awkward to read. She jumps over Rumble and drops a grenade on him, killing him. Bumblebee is impressed.

Roadblock helps encourage Grimlock not to fall into the crevasse Rumble created, while Prowl and Hound each get a line! I'm being a little sarcastic here, I know the cast of the book is huge, but so many Autobots barely get to do anything. They've all just stood around for the three issues they've been awake, other than Bumblebee and Grimlock, and they had to be motivated by one of the Joes. We do finally get some action as the Aerialbots merge into Superion and rescue Grimlock and Roadblock as they start to fall. The Joes are really impressed by the massive Superion and glad they're not meeting him on the battlefield. That is a nice moment, and sells the sheer size and power of a combiner.

Back to Snake Eyes, still hunting Storm Shadow. These guys were in the same clan, and Storm Shadow took Snake Eyes voice and damaged his face, ruining his future with Scarlett. He's got nothing left. The action is a little hard to follow here as the panel to panel storytelling isn't entirely clear, but it looks like Snake Eyes must push Storm Shadow off the cliff into the ocean, where a shark attacks him. So four issues of fight, and it's not Snake Eyes himself who defeats Storm Shadow? That's disappointing.

Starscream and Destro are plotting, and we learn that they planned for the Autobots to be awakened so the forces loyal to Megatron could be weakened in the fighting. Meanwhile the two of them have created another combiner, Bruticus. Beach Head is at the airfield and encounters Frenzy, and Lady Jaye (I think, still don't know the Joe characters well) is attacked in the air by Wild Weasel.

There are lots of plot strands that get touched on in this issue, and it looks like at least one of them, the Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow fight, is finally about to be resolved. The revelations about Destro and Starscream make sense and tie a lot of this together. The Autobots are once again just about useless to the plot while the Joes do all the work and get most of the page time, so it's not really a balanced series that gives the casts of both franchises equal weight. But there are some good moments, and I like the friendship between Roadblock and Grimlock. That's the type of thing I'd like to have seen more of, not that there's much time in six issues to develop it. It's a parallel with the working relationship between Destro and Starscream, human and Transformer allying to achieve their goals, but someone's going to stab the other guy in the back soon.

I hadn't been commenting on ads, but there's a nice mini-poster dead center in this book for the Energon series that features Optimus Prime running down a Cybertron street, straight at the reader. It's the version with all the drones for limbs from that line. It's got that soft background, outlined figure in the foreground look that some of Dreamwave's books went for, and I like it quite a bit. The back cover advertises the first issue of the ongoing series with that wonderful Don Figeroa art. Man, I loved that series. I wish it had continued.