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.

[andersonh1]

Transformers/G.I. Joe #5
"Trenches"
John Ney Rieber, Jae Lee

Finally! The Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow fight is over, but only because a shark mangled Storm Shadow. Snake Eyes didn't actually win. Storm Shadow dies, and Snake Eyes climbs to the top of a cliff (despite the fact that he ought to be exhausted after his long fight) and kills Ravage. We cut to Flint under interrogation by the Baroness and Dr. Mindbender. After a bit off torture, we're back to Beach Head trying to stay alive vs. Frenzy. He tries the old "cover him with oil and fry him" trick, by cutting the oil line on a plane and having his men fire and cause it to explode. Frenzy is damaged but not dead. It's all rapid-paced cutting between characters and scenes as the writer tries to keep up with the size of the cast and the various plotlines. And it keeps going as we cut to Lady Jaye in an aerial dogfight with Wild Weasel, which she wins with superior flying skill.

Cobra Commander orders all the civilians in the area taken to the harbor to be used as human shields. GI Joe members with the Autobots regroup and determine who's alive and who is missing. Snake Eyes returns to the group, and there's clearly some history between him and Scarlett, though we're not told what it was. Meanwhile the Autobots are almost completely useless here, with Optimus agreeing to help get the Joes across the water, but that's it. Prowl and Hound debate who actually started the fight while Optimus insists that this isn't their world or their fight. They won't fight unless they have no choice. It's the sight of Cobra's slaves that changes Optimus's mind and brings him into the fight, something Megatron understood would happen and mocks Cobra Commander for causing.

The Joes and Autobots start planning a way to rescue the slaves so they can attack the enemy, but while they decide that Superion is probably the best option, Cobra Commander orders Shockwave to fire at Superion, damaging him badly. Cobra Commander rants and insists that he is a god. No one can defeat him. To be continued...

So why are the Autobots even in this series? It's a six issue miniseries, and it's only at the end of issue 5, when it's almost over, that we get a full mobilization and commitment of the Autobots to fight. It's a waste of so many good characters, and maybe the massive cast of characters is the main problem here. There are just too many Joes, Cobras, Autobots and Decepticons to possibly make them all work in six issues. I still think the fight between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow went on too long and took up too much time that could have been spent showcasing other characters. Most of the characters have no real personality based on what I see in these pages, and anything they have comes from knowing them from other series (or not at all, in the case of most of the Joes). It's good to see a few plotlines get some resolution, but the whole thing has to be resolved next issue, and that's a tall order at this point.