Letting the Decepticons run wild on a planet with out the Autobots there to stop them is a "more mature" TF story? Rather than the strategic conquering of the universe? When you get down to the very basics of the story, this sounds more like a fanboy fantasy to me...
O6 covered this pretty well, but it bear repeating. It was not that the Decepticons were indulging in pointless violence. It was the reason they were shown indulging in pointless violence.
In context, yes, it was pointless. Astrotrain had no practical reason, (beyond Megatron presumably telling him to go wreck things), to kill people in subway stations. But, the Decepticons needed something to do. Reflector needs something to do more than he needs to rip apart humans. (Look at him on that page. He is like a bored kid who broke all his toys.)
In narrative terms, the Decepticons committing pointless acts of violence illustrates their aimlessness. McCarthy is not writing a Garth Ennis type story where sex and violence substitute for ideas. (Aside: Ennis is the only writer Marvel has who has managed to get on my "avoid" list.)
The Decepticons being aimless is the point of the story.
You assume the new continuity would be better. Just rebooting something doesn't guarantee it'll be better than what came before it.
Fair point. As bad as things got for "GI Joe" in recent years, the new IDW series is essentially unreadable. The *only* good thing I can say about it is that it does not impact the previous comics. (What gets me is that the last 2 times they tried a sort of "we are manly and tough" angle with "GI Joe", it failed. "Reloaded" failed inside of a year. And, "America's Elite" was retooled away from that tone.)
But, the longer between reboots, the more baggage builds up, resulting in the need for "Saga" type books that exist to give summaries of long running series. (These can be incredibly difficult to read through, which arguably hurts the titles in question further.)
That art shift in Issue 9 is God-awful.
The inconsistent character models bothered me more than a dip in art quality. Given that in some cases, the character models were the only way to tell when a sequence was a flash-back, keeping them consistent was more important here than it would normally be.
It's better than Jhiaxus making Arcee have a sex change.
Normally, I would dislike that story. But, Furman actually did a good job of showing how *wrong* Arcee was. (I loved the scene where Jetfire just said "she".) And, normally, I am not a fan of a writer, (such as Johns or Morrison), writing a comic about their thougths on a character or plot-point, but Furman did a good enough job in this case that I can forgive it. (On the other hand, they could have just not used Arcee at all.)
You mean it's Transformers characters acting like some brief back of the box toy descriptions from 25 years ago? We've seen these characters depicted in a multitude of ways over the last 25 years. What's one more slight variation?
The thing is that AHM had some of the more substantive handlings of these characters in 25 years.
Not necessarily Thundercracker, but Decepticons doubting their cause and doing something about it is hardly something new. Mirage not actually being a traitor is hardly new either. Who was it that single handedly shot down a Decepticon ship in MTMTE, sacrificing his way home? And what did his comrades think of him when they figured out he was missing at the time?
But this case, it looked like Mirage really might have been a traitor. The "Spotlight" issue could have been read as implying that Mirage was either from an alternate universe, was nutty, or simply had real doubts about what he was doing. (Truthfully, if it had turned out to be an alternature universe Mirage, I would have wound up hating that issue, and possibly AHM as well.)
And, the consequences for Mirage and the Autobots were more severe than "Cliffjumper is suspicious".
Dom
-down to the comic thread.