The Transformers (IDW, formerly "Robots in Disguise")

[Dominic]

It is not really deep technical background. (I just happen to know a guy, so I was able to ask him. He is actually sitting a meter or two away from me.) He noted the idea of read-receipts, and I pointed out that they would not make sense in this context. (Even

Prowl got it as well, based purely on what I posted above and some text messages I sent him. If Barber has used and thought about email, he would have known that his techno-babble was dumb. The more specific techno-babble is, the more accurate and sensible it needs to be. At the very least, this is a problem with his writing.

[BWprowl]

I'm the same way with giant spiders. Knowing what I know about spiders, it always bugs the crap out of me when I see something with a giant spider in it because I know it can't exist

You need to read Atomic Robo sometime. I think it's the second issue, there's some giant ants attacking:

"This is just...you can't have giant bugs. They'd crush themselves."
"Yeah, but has anyone told them that?"

The major problem in this case is that Dom (and tangentially, me) isn't asking Barber to explain how sentient, English-speaking alien robots with liquid metal faces make sense, that's just something you gotta roll with. It's that he needed a way for Prowl to find Spike in the story, and rather than think, for just an extra minute or two, and write in a way that made sense, he used the first thing that came to mind regardless of how much sense it made or what better options there were, and just went ahead. That's a symptom of lazy writing, and it talks down to the reader by expecting them to just ignore the sensibilities of how something as ubiquitous as e-mail works. And that's a problem.

I'm heavily reminded of the part from an early episode of TFPrime, where Ratchet and Raf teleported the other two kids by 'locking onto the coordinates' of a *moving train*.

It takes maybe thirty seconds to check this shit on Wikipedia.

[andersonh1]

Or, if we wanted to be charitable to Barber (just to be nice) maybe Prowl thinks everyone around won't understand what he's talking about, and he just spouts some nonsense to make them shut up.

I claim my no-prize.

[Sparky Prime]

I wouldn't expect technobabble in other comics to be that accurate either. Star Trek, yes, I expect it to be right, and that's only because the franchise has a history of actually checking with scientists to make sure that it is right. Most other franchises don't and so most of the time it's wrong. That's why it's called fantasy and fiction. Because it's not real.

I'd have to say just because something is fantasy/fiction, that's no excuse for a writer not to check their technobabble, especially when it's already a real world technology. Not to mention, email is such a widely known and used technology, it could easily be researched in just a few minutes. And that's a big difference with Star Trek, that technology doesn't actually exist, they just use real world science or theories to make it sound plausible.

[BWprowl]

Or, if we wanted to be charitable to Barber (just to be nice) maybe Prowl thinks everyone around won't understand what he's talking about, and he just spouts some nonsense to make them shut up.

I claim my no-prize.

Aw man, is this like the idea that Han really had no idea what a parsec was and was just spouting some bullshit to impress Obi-Wan? I love it.

Or my personal favorite, the idea that Frenzy and Rumble aren't specifically blue or red, they periodically switch their colors just to screw with everybody.

[Dominic]

Yup. A "no prize" was an in-house thing at Marvel, credited to fans who came up with back-written explanations for sloppiness in a Marvel comic (retro-actively fixing the mistake, so Marvel could say they never made a mistake).


This gets back to something I posted a few years ago. TF comics are good. But, stupid stuff like this keeps them from being truly great. The more IDW is trying to push TF as a comic, the more of a problem it becomes. At this point, the book itself is getting more generic and the writer is flubbing basics like credible techno-babble.


-edit: The closest this could come to working is if Prowl were to hack the server that Spike's email was on (say, one of Google's data farms), and then go looking for activity on Spike's account. In that case, Prowl would have list of IP addresses that Spike had used. But, Barber clearly was not thinking that because Barber specified that Spike reading specific emails is what made him trackable. And, in a densely wired place like Hong Kong, tracking IP addresses (likely from internet cafes and such) would only be so precise.

[andersonh1]

Or my personal favorite, the idea that Frenzy and Rumble aren't specifically blue or red, they periodically switch their colors just to screw with everybody.

That's great! Barber needs to officially adopt it into the book.

[Onslaught Six]

I wonder if Barber writing the book AND co-editing all the damn other books has been affecting his writing. It's easy to say, "That's a lazy explanation," when you read the book, but you need to also consider that he has to literally look at and approv pages from Transformers vs. GI Joe, and that will make any man give up hope in a franchise.

[Shockwave]

Well the email thing still doesn't bother me. I just write it off as "Prowl did something" and found Spike. It's not enough of a plot point that I care about to

even finish that sentence apparently. Whatever, I'm more interested in the larger story. Like Thundercracker realizing that Soundwave and the other Decepticons don't know about the EDC's army.

[JediTricks]

As of #36, I've dropped this book officially. Sorry, but none of this feels right, none of this is compelling, none of this feels organic to where we were prior to Dark Cybertron despite that pre-DC storyline having just started with its ideas (all of which were clumsily dropped into the Windblade book). At least there's still MTMTE dealing with Transformers being more than just extensions of Earth's problems.