TF Views

Yes. Didn't he write all those Titan UK movie comics or whatever? The ones where Unicron showed up...again? Already? Like six months after the movie was out? And Stockade fought him or whatever? That shows everything that's wrong with Furman.

I think it's also just the pedestal some other fans put him up on. Yes, those UK issues were good. Yes, Matrix Quest is awesome, and believe it or not, I actually liked when Unicron fought them in Marvel G1. But that's because it was Marvel G1--it was the first time. After a while, it ends up looking like all Furman can ever do is write the same story over and over in different ways.

But then, that's what all the Geewunners want, isn't it?

Yeah, pretty much. New is bad.

The old UK comics were not as good as people say they were. "City of Fear" was junk. And, some of that black and white stuff reads like a shabby parody of the silver age.

Matrix Quest was "story template #___", but with Transformers. There were some good stylistic riffs on "Classics Illustrated" and EC (disguised as a Western). But, I am not going to call that a master-work.

Yes. Didn't he write all those Titan UK movie comics or whatever? The ones where Unicron showed up...again? Already? Like six months after the movie was out? And Stockade fought him or whatever?

I almost hope Bay uses Unicron just so that UK stuff gets over-written.


Dom

Dominic wrote:Yeah, pretty much. New is bad.

The old UK comics were not as good as people say they were. "City of Fear" was junk. And, some of that black and white stuff reads like a shabby parody of the silver age.

I have to agree that the UK stuff isn't all it's made out to be. I haven't read most of it, so I'm basing this opinion on what little I have read, but when I tried to read the UK reprints that IDW put out, I just couldn't stomach the dialogue and plotting. It's so obviously written down to a younger audience and so obvious and "kiddified" in the plotting, characterizations and conversation that it's just hard to enjoy.

I'd love to have bought City of Fear and the UK Omnibus. I'd love to read "new" G1 comics that have a great reputation among fans. But I just didn't enjoy them when I tried them. I vastly prefer IDW's current output. I probably preferred Furman's storylines to Costa's, but Costa is doing a great job.

Shockwave wrote: I still don't understand why everyone thinks it's cool to bag on Furman. I mean, he is a good writer, but not every writer can just crap gold every single time. I think that's the thing that concerns me about Costa. Sure he's good now, but what about later? And I'm especially concerned to hear that he has things planned out for 50-60 issues. I honestly think that might be part of Furman's problem is that he had an idea for TFs (regardless of the fact that it amounted to little more than "OMG cosmic gibberwank") and never got far enough along to fully convey it. I think if somewhere along the line he could have completed his idea he could have moved on to others and finally let the gibberwank go. Likewise, if Costa has things planned out this far, what's going to happen to him as a TF writer if those ideas don't see fruition? Is he going to keep going back and trying to get them out there everytime he revisits the franchise like Furman does?

I hope Costa does what a good artist does: store those concepts and keep them there until he has enough raw material to make a good story down the line. If not then he's screwed.

I like Furman. That said, he's starting to remind me of Chris Claremont in that he just can't let go of X-men.

Dominic wrote:

What do they *want* exactly, from a TF comic?

Generally, they seem to want a mixture of old characters acting the same way they did in '85 or so, along with obscure characters and references that validate the when they take up page space that could be spent on showing Transformers doing stuff. obsessions of the more "devoted" fans.

New characters are bad bad bad. New ideas are bad. Humans are bad, especially

I don't think the fanbase as a whole knows what it really wants, I've seen how some of the complains they have about Ongoing had been addressed by the editors and they still are not happy, they just complain for the sake of complaining. It's too much like the sunbow cartoon, it's not enough like the sunbow cartoon. the characters don't act like themselves, the characters act like themselves. it' s like a freaking kindergarden!

Dominic wrote:Sales figures, (calling Sparky, calling Sparky), show that the general market just does not like TF. (Sales have been dropping consistently, with slight bumps that are likely due to the movies.)

Thats exactly what I was afraid of.

Shockwave wrote:I wonder if there's really that much complaining going on. It could just be that the ones that hate are just the most outspoken. Also, I still don't understand why everyone thinks it's cool to bag on Furman. I mean, he is a good writer, but not every writer can just crap gold every single time. I think that's the thing that concerns me about Costa. Sure he's good now, but what about later? And I'm especially concerned to hear that he has things planned out for 50-60 issues. I honestly think that might be part of Furman's problem is that he had an idea for TFs (regardless of the fact that it amounted to little more than "OMG cosmic gibberwank") and never got far enough along to fully convey it. I think if somewhere along the line he could have completed his idea he could have moved on to others and finally let the gibberwank go. Likewise, if Costa has things planned out this far, what's going to happen to him as a TF writer if those ideas don't see fruition? Is he going to keep going back and trying to get them out there everytime he revisits the franchise like Furman does? Only time will tell...

I'd like to clarify that I was ranting, and that I didn't mean for it to come across like I totally hated Furman. Yeah, the guy's written some dreadful stuff (especially lately), but I think he really is a *mostly* good writer. I'm one of those people that puts the UK stuff up on a pedestal (easily one of my favorite chunks of G1 fiction), I love what he did with Arcee in IDW, and I though Maximum Dinobots was amazing (and that one came out just a year or two ago, showing that Simon still has it in him). Hell, even the "Escalation" part of Furman's run I thought had some nifty stuff in there.

It's not that I thought that the "-ion" series was bad, simply that it was incredibly dull, wholly average. I just wasn't impressed by the whole thing, and I was shocked to find out that there were that many people who actually cared about where the story was going, when the whole "story" had been pretty much nothing but setup for whatever Furman had planned later down the line (Seriously, look at Stormbringer. The entire four-issue series was nothing but setup for stuff Furman was going to use in later stories. Most of his Spotlight stuff was only there for setup.). At some point, you have to finish with all the setup and world-building and actually *do* something with all this stuff. AHM takes a while to get going, I admit, but after three or four issues, it really does get going! And Costa at least had the decency to *tell* us to wait a few issues to see where he was going, and I was not disappointed with the payoff. Furman had so many dominoes stacked up, having taken so long to set them up, that he didn't even have time to knock them all down before IDW got tired of waiting and pulled the rug out from under him. Yeah, "Revelation" was a rushed, poorly-structured exercise in desperation, but it was Furman's own damn fault. How long do you think he would have taken to resolve all the stuff in that had IDW not put a gun to his paycheck and told him to Get On With It?

As for Costa and how his run will pan out, I admit that I'll be sad to see him go when he inevitably does. But notice that Costa, despite writing an actual ongoing (unlike Furman's supposed miniseries) has the story arcs work in nice, trade-friendly, six-issue chunks. There might be cliffhanger bits to explore in the next arc (see Bumblebee getting shot at the end of International Incident), but there's still a clear beginning and ending, with not too many threads dangling in front of us with no explanation. So when Costa has to step down, it'll likely at least feel like he finished some stuff and can just pass the baton, instead of being forced to rush-write the ending to some ridiculous convoluted Space Opera like Furman had to. Like I said before, the main thing that worries me about Costa getting replaced is the strong possibility that the next writer would undo all of his entertaining alterations to the status quo.

Come to think of it, maybe it's all those upheavals in that status quo that have fans mad as Costa. Heroic Thundercracker? Redesigned Megatron? Autobot Leader Bumblebee? Heresy!

'Maybe?' Of course that's why they're mad at him.

Also, don't forget that towards the end, Furman was also working on those BW comics and sourcebooks (which were terrible on every level) which I'm sure didn't heighten IDW management's opinion of his output. Given what eventually happened, I think I agree with Dom's notion that Furman was *trying* to get canned. (Now he's working on Movie prequel comics and stuff which nobody cares about anyway, so it's like a double whammy of not giving a shit!)

Furman's early UK stuff is great. City of Fear is not the example that most would hold up as the shining example of his "golden age". You have to go back further than that. Dinobot Hunt is one of the best TF stories ever written as was the follow up In the National Interest. Target: 2006 was the story that had me searching for a comic for 13 years. Crisis of Command actually had Prime doubting his abilities as a leader and I would love for someone to put together a compilation that has the whole Guardian thing in it (the one where Swoop initially got blown up). Furman was really good at actually using the characters back then instead of just giving us characters dying for shock value and cosmic gibberwank.

I do not think that Furman was tryi8ng to get fired so much as he may have been trying to see how far he could push it before something happened.

I hope Costa does what a good artist does: store those concepts and keep them there until he has enough raw material to make a good story down the line. If not then he's screwed.

It is not so much a question of Costa not having ideas, as it is a worry about him not having time to fully draw them out. My worry is that he will just burn out under the workload. (He seems to be working hard on multiple titles. Hopefully, he can keep that pace up.)

It's not that I thought that the "-ion" series was bad, simply that it was incredibly dull,

It was not even so much that it was dull. It was more a question of Furman not really having the credibility to expect people to wait around for him to do something. When IDW went down, he was slipping heavily into "the universe is exploding again" mode. And, he made a less than strong showing on the convention comics. He had also taken to hyping up his most recent work, (even insignificant filler work), as "stories he was really proud of". He was behaving like a text book hack.

Then, "Stormbringer" and BW happened.

Furman had so many dominoes stacked up, having taken so long to set them up, that he didn't even have time to knock them all down before IDW got tired of waiting and pulled the rug out from under him.

Furman did started knocking them down before IDW told him to get crackin'. He did not even show all 6 of the stages.

Come to think of it, maybe it's all those upheavals in that status quo that have fans mad as Costa. Heroic Thundercracker? Redesigned Megatron? Autobot Leader Bumblebee? Heresy!

My thoughts exactly.

Furman was really good at actually using the characters back then instead of just giving us characters dying for shock value and cosmic gibberwank.

Furman was also just starting out and knew he had to work to get a paycheck and readers.


Dom
-and he got lazy quick.

Dominic wrote:Furman was also just starting out and knew he had to work to get a paycheck and readers.
-and he got lazy quick.

Oh come on, Dom, you know it doesn't work that way. You're saying he wrote compelling stories because he knew he *had* to? He's not a robot. He wrote compelling stories back in the day because he was *better* back in the day.

The simple fact is: Furman got crap.

There's no need to analyse the motivate, because all we can do is speculate. He just got crapper as he became more popular, and I've an inkling most of his more vocal fans (if they even exist; hell, I've met the guy at a signing and no one there was even near the rabid drooling twats you describe) don't even remember In The National Interest. They probably like his more recent stuff.

...I'm gonna have to go back and check, like I keep saying, but did Furman actually KILL Swoop? How long did he stay dead? Because that kinda puts this discourse about Costa's revolutionary prominent-character-killing into a new light.

And come on, you KNOW

Spoiler

Soundwave

isn't staying dead. I can only imagine my brother had the same reaction when Swoop was killed off, heh.

Uh, how are you disagreeing with me?

Furman got lazier over time. I am attributing this to Furman knowing he had a built in following and falling victim to the ol' moral hazard of being as lazy as he figured he could get away with being.

Why is it so unusual to assume that a younger Furman who was just starting a job (and career) would bring more energy and effort to the office than a guy who had established himself? (Most people do this. It is hardly unique to any field or profession.)

Costa's revolutionary prominent-character-killing into a new light.

What are you talking about here? Nobody here is talking about how revolutionary Costa's non-killing is. He is just making sure that it is more worth-while to bring them back. (I am actually eager to read what he has planned for Sunstreaker and Ironhide.)


Dom
-pretty sure that killing Swoop was just poor planning.