All Hail Megatron Discussion thread

[Dominic]

For the most part, I attack Marvel and DC at the editorial level. There are relatively few writers that I go after consistently. My last row was with a guy from Red 5. But, O6 knos that already.

I haven't really browsed the comics forums on TFW and this is the only other place I post so I haven't noticed it. Although now that you mention it, I might go over and check 'em out.

This is about the only place where I've seen AHM discussed in a reasonable manner. Go to just about any other forum, and you'll see some way out of proportion behavior with regard to AHM. Makes me thankful for this forum where I actually enjoyed the discussion.

Seriously, it seems like facts don't matter, and personal insults towards the creative team take the place of constructive criticism of the story itself.

The fact that McCarthy is an Aussie, and all Aussies smell bad has nothing to do with his writing. The fact that all Aussies are crooks has nothing to do with his writing. Provided his drunken lunacy does not impact his writing, it should not be an issue.

I will make fun of smelly Aussie drunkards. That is a matter of principle. But, we need to keep such things separate from our comics discussion.

Joking aside, if our discussion of AHM is "reasonable", I would love to see where the bar is being set.

I've discussed the series with a poster over on TFW2005 who is firmly convinced that AHM was not meant to be in continuity at first, and despite insistence from Casey Coller (who actually made an appearance in the thread during the discussion, so his account was firsthand) and Shane McCarthy that it was, refuses to believe either, in essence calling both a liar. I've seen McCarthy labeled as too lazy to follow continuity.

McCarthy is an Aussie. Of course.. (Sorry. Could not resist.)

Joking aside, I am a bit suspicious about the "party line" in this situation. AHM may well have been initially meant to be out of context. But, the fact is that it was clearly re-written to be in context with the rest of IDW's comics. If Coller and McCarthy are towing a line, one can hardly blame them. It is hardly that big a deal if they are.

Dom
-has Aussie friends. They are not that bad.

[Onslaught Six]

You watch yourself, sir, 86 is from EnZed. They're like the Canada of Australia.

[Dominic]

It is nothing personal. Really.

Dom
-could so totally not get away with this with some people he knows.

[andersonh1]

Joking aside, if our discussion of AHM is "reasonable", I would love to see where the bar is being set.

You should try browsing the Allspark boards, or (heaven forbid) the IDW boards. You'd think McCarthy had slapped somebody's mama the way they talk about him and the story. Trust me, the discussion here seems mild by comparison. I get the impression that McCarthy is the son of Hitler, tried to have Furman assassinated, and hates the fans. And that's the good stuff!

Ok, I made the first two up. But he does hate the fans.

Anyway, the thing I find funny is that prior to AHM, all I ever saw were complaints about Furman's story. The contrast is hilarious. And now I'm seeing nothing but people whining about the ongoing, too.

Yeah... suddenly Furman's work was the bestest evar! and why can't we have that back? Maybe after a few issues of the ongoing, we'll be hearing about how good AHM was.

[Dominic]

That was actually the pattern during the early post-Beast era.

During RiD, people missed BMac. During "Armada", people missed RiD.

Dom

[Shockwave]

Well then by that pattern Ongoing is going to kick ass compared to what comes after it.

[andersonh1]

I figured I should probably put this discussion in the relevant thread.

For example: the discarding of the six-stage infiltration protocol and the fact that none of Megatron's troops care when they did in Infiltration is bemoaned as a major discrepancy with Furman's work. When in reality, since the situation has changed and the Decepticons have essentially won the war by that point, Megatron is no longer bothered with stealth. Why slowly infiltrate the Earth's political systems and destabilize the planet when they can just conquer it by force? Particularly since Megatron needs to keep his troops busy. The context of the story provides the reason for the change in Decepticon methodology.

Even with the Autobot's out of the picture, the Transformers are supposed to be in the middle of an energy crisis, living off of artificial derivatives since energon is (or was) supposed to be such a rarity in this universe. The whole point of the Infiltration protocol was to get the planets inhabitants to do most of the work, killing themselves, making it easier for the Decepticons to swoop in and conquer the planet. Saves them on the energy they'd have to use doing all the work themselves, with or without the Autobots interference. But McCarthy pretty much threw that all out the window.

Yes, they live off of artificial derivatives. It doesn't seem to slow them down, judging by how the Autobots are able to fight during both Infiltration and Escalation. Look at Prime's fight with Megatron. Look at how Megatron takes on Starscream and beats him, even though SS is powered up on ore-13. The artificial substitutes are no impediment to the Transformers when they have to fight. Given their prowess, it's not a stretch to see Megatron make the tactical decision to dispense with subtlety and simply take on the humans, who he rightly saw as a lesser threat. And given the result, he was correct. The energon substitutes the Decepticons were using were more than adequate.

Yes, part of the reason for the infiltration was to husband resources and wear down the enemy. But it was also to avoid open confrontation with the Autobots. There's quite a bit of discussion about this during Infiltration. With the Autobots down, Megatron made the calculation that he could safely take on the humans. It's an evolution of his tactics, based on the greatly changed status quo in the war. It makes perfect sense.

An example of a deliberate misreading of the story: To quote the wiki "Worse, the people of New York react to the Constructicons by thinking they're part of a movie being filmed, rather than going "Oh no, the Machination is back!" It's not the "people of New York", it's a few people on one street who may or may not have seen the news reports about the giant robots fighting. Which, by the way, never confirmed the status of those giant robots, so the assumption that it was just movie props doesn't seem all that unreasonable. Regardless, the wiki words it in such a way that it makes the entire city seem ignorant, when that's simply not the case.

I think you're mis-representing what they're actually saying there rather than it being a mis-read on their part.... "People of New York" might be a general description but it's still an accurate way to describe the general audience of New Yorkers on the scene.

Read in context, it's clear the wiki writers are being very descriptively broad in their attempt to discredit the scene. Unfairly so. A precise description would be something like "the man on the street", which connotes a narrow focus on a small group, which is what was present when the Constructicons appeared. "The people of New York" would refer to the general population of the city, which I think amounts to about seven million.

The wiki exaggerates in order to make McCarthy look bad. Plain and simple. They misrepresent who is present in the scene.

And you're conveniently leaving out details they pointed out there. The whole point they're making with this is that the humans shouldn't be so in the dark about the existence of the Transformers. Public broadcasts would have gotten international attention. Military personnel had eye witness accounts. How is then that even the ranking military brass thought the robots were just a hoax?

And the whole movie prop thing is hard to swallow. If it was a movie where is the movie crew and all of their equipment? Forget that building a fully functioning vehicle that transforms into an autonomous robot being beyond human technology (with out the help of Transformers at least), not to mention the cost of building one would probably eat up the entire movie budget.

Think about this from a real world perspective. What are people more likely to believe? That alien robots have invaded, or that there's a human explanation behind something strange? Clearly, if it were the real world, people would rightly try to look for a human cause. And that's what happened in the scene in question. The people on the street tried to come up with an explanation that made sense to them, in the thirty seconds before they got toasted.

Had the writers at the wiki bothered to be objective rather than just assuming the worst, they might have thought of that. And about half their examples are just as easily explained. A little honestly and a little reading comprehension skill would go a long way.

Again, I'd say they got the criticisms right. It's McCarthy that should have been more comprehensive when he wrote the story in the first place.

I'm not saying McCarthy didn't get some things wrong. But a lot of the criticism of his writing borders on irrational, and is certainly dishonest.

[andersonh1]

From a thread on TFW that I started, discussing the "problems", some of which are genuine.

Previous robot encounters such as the publicly broadcast Transformers battle and Grimlock stomping through the countryside are briefly hand-waved away as the work of the now-defunct Machination. Yet Air Force representatives also state that they thought the giant robots were a hoax, which makes little sense considering that a news station filmed them and the Air Force has seen them fighting the Reapers. Worse, the people of New York react to the Constructicons by thinking they're part of a movie being filmed, rather than going "Oh no, the Machination is back!"...

First off, just because a segment of the military is aware of the existence of the Transformers doesn't mean they know anything in great detail about them. Some aerial news footage and a view from an aerial jet flyby aren't a lot of information. No one saw anything up close and personal in Devastation, so while the knowledge is out there, there's not much to go on. It's conceivable that an aggressive attempt to contain the information like the one that the FBI agent mentions could be successful in the very structured and compartmentalized world of the military.

To narrow in on the street scene and the 'movie' comment, the initial exchange only lasts a minute before the Cons start shooting. The humans are surprised, and these aren't the robots from the news footage, even assuming the individuals on the street saw that footage, which they may or may not have.

In Stormbringer, Jetfire said Cybertron was healing itself, but that it would take hundreds of years. Apparently what he meant was one year, since the Autobots (and a swarm of Insectithings) have been hanging out on Cybertron without special shielding, and haven't died yet. Much later in issue 7, the explanation given was that the storms coincidentally died down just as the Autobots arrived on Cybertron, and that living on the planet now merely causes them pain, but evidently not enough pain for them to complain about or even mention in the six previous issues, or anytime afterward. Okay then.

Jetfire was wrong.

Ok yeah, it's a genuine discrepancy between Furman's work and AHM. There's a little dialogue to try and smooth it over, but it could have been handled better. To be fair, there is a mention in issue 4, the first issue to focus at length on the Autobots, that signals won't carry in the atmosphere. And Jazz doesn't say that the storms have stopped, just that they aren't as bad.

The Swarm are wild mutant things anyway. If the environment doesn't kill the Autobots, it's not likely to kill them. Not that they'd complain.

And, to add to my answer of the time, the Ironhide mini-series took care of this plot hole.

The Great War is apparently about the Matrix of Leadership though it had no bearing on Megatron's rise to power in Megatron Origin, and nobody ever mentioned it as a motivation (or barely at all) until #6 of All Hail.

Agreed... this did come out of nowhere.

Energon was once considered a rarity, believed to exist only on Cybertron, with Ore-13/Ultra Energon being the closest thing found, and Cybertronians instead had to resort to artificial derivatives or "foul local brews", yet now Kup is able to quickly acquire a ship full of the stuff.

He does? I recall he had a small amount, nowhere near enough to get his ship up and running again. Maybe I need to go back and re-read, but I don't remember anything about a ship full of energon.

But... both Autobots and Decepticons have been on Earth for a full year since Devastation. Plenty of time for both sides to mine some Ore-13 and refine it if needed.

Bombshell was created a year ago, though featured as a plot point in Spotlight: Blaster's flashback sequences. Kickback also had a minor cameo in Megatron Origin. (Much like Blaster and Bluster, this must be... Sitback! Evidently his cousin.)

That's the problem when things are made up as they go along.

Soundwave's speech patterns have returned to the cartoon-inspired pattern from Megatron Origin, after a stint of fluent internal monologue in his Spotlight, as well as in Maximum Dinobots.

The real world explanation is of course a return to characters who act much as they did in the old cartoon. It's an appeal to nostalgia. Storywise, it doesn't fit with what we read before. There could be a reason for it, some injury or something, but if so it ought to have been addressed. Had I written the story, I'd have kept Soundwave's speech patterns normal. The same for Omega Supreme.

During Furman's run, Starscream, the Seekers and the Triple Changers were little more than an Infiltration unit, with plenty of guys much higher-up in the command structure (Banzaitron being the head of the Secret Police and everything, for one), but now it seems Megatron has little command structure beyond the aforementioned Seekers and Triple Changers, along with a few other characters from seasons one and two of the original cartoon.

At the end of Devastation, Megatron had on Earth with him Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp, Astrotrain and Blitzwing. Soundwave was on Earth, and so were Ratbat and Ravage. Most of the major s1 and s2 characters from the cartoon were already in place when Furman was writing. Admittedly, AHM sets the command structure up as it was in the cartoon rather than as Furman had written it, but many of the characters were already in place.

Verity Carlo and Jimmy Pink are nowhere to be seen.

This is not a discrepancy. They simply don't appear. While their presence is missed, with no Autobots on Earth for them to interact with, I'm not sure where they would have fit in the plot.

In a slightly jarring move, issue 7 of All Hail began chucking in and mentioning parts of previous IDW continuity that the comic had not acknowledged for a full half of its run. This included the Sunstreaker plot from Maximum Dinobots (thus blowing part of the ending for that miniseries), which was brought up in issue 7 as a lead-in for him being revealed as the mysterious traitor in issue 8... after having no focus in the previous six issues of All Hail.

I'm not quite sure where this one is going. The fact that prior continuity is overtly scarce in the first half of the story is meaningless. AHM is a 12 issue series, and continuity plays an important part in it.

[Sparky Prime]

Yes, they live off of artificial derivatives. It doesn't seem to slow them down, judging by how the Autobots are able to fight during both Infiltration and Escalation. Look at Prime's fight with Megatron. Look at how Megatron takes on Starscream and beats him, even though SS is powered up on ore-13. The artificial substitutes are no impediment to the Transformers when they have to fight. Given their prowess, it's not a stretch to see Megatron make the tactical decision to dispense with subtlety and simply take on the humans, who he rightly saw as a lesser threat. And given the result, he was correct. The energon substitutes the Decepticons were using were more than adequate.

here are indications that the artificial derivatives simply isn't as powerful as energon. Take for instance when Megatron uses the mass-displacement sequence in Escalation. He only uses it while fueled up with the ultra energon and it's implied that technology was used much more commonly a long time ago, likely before the energon shortage began. This suggests the technology is no longer used because the artificial stuff doesn't give them the same level of energy that energon once provided them with. At any rate, it would indicate they've been forced to limit their power usage. The examples you give here, how long do those bouts last? A few seconds to a few minutes at most? How long can they run at that level power on the artificial stuff as apposed energon? Well unfortunately we don't know the answer to that. But indications are that despite giving them an adequate energy performance level, they cannot do as much on the "fowl local brews" as they could with real energon.

Yes, part of the reason for the infiltration was to husband resources and wear down the enemy. But it was also to avoid open confrontation with the Autobots. There's quite a bit of discussion about this during Infiltration. With the Autobots down, Megatron made the calculation that he could safely take on the humans. It's an evolution of his tactics, based on the greatly changed status quo in the war. It makes perfect sense.

Sure, that's part of it, but again, conquering a planet would take a lot of energy. Using a strategy would be a more useful way to preserve their valuable limited energy resources than haphazardly conquering the planet as they did, regardless of confrontations with the Autobots. It makes more sense to preserve what is essentially their food supply than to waste it on mindless violence.

Read in context, it's clear the wiki writers are being very descriptively broad in their attempt to discredit the scene. Unfairly so. A precise description would be something like "the man on the street", which connotes a narrow focus on a small group, which is what was present when the Constructicons appeared. "The people of New York" would refer to the general population of the city, which I think amounts to about seven million.

The wiki exaggerates in order to make McCarthy look bad. Plain and simple. They misrepresent who is present in the scene.

I couldn't disagree with you more on this. Look at what street it is in the comic for the context. This is Times Square we're talking about here. An estimated 1.6 million people pass through it every day. Thousands of people would be there, not a small group by any means. You're underestimating the scope of the scene, not the wiki exaggerating it. "The people of New York" (which does not have to refer to the entire population of the city, rather, just a large enough group of them which would apply here) is an accurate description of the scene.

Think about this from a real world perspective. What are people more likely to believe? That alien robots have invaded, or that there's a human explanation behind something strange? Clearly, if it were the real world, people would rightly try to look for a human cause. And that's what happened in the scene in question. The people on the street tried to come up with an explanation that made sense to them, in the thirty seconds before they got toasted.

Sure, I'd probably go with a human explanation first, but again, I wouldn't think "movie prop" at all. Not with a fully operational transforming robot like that and especially not with any signs of a film crew anywhere. Being Times Square, I could see maybe a really expensive publicity stunt...

I'm not saying McCarthy didn't get some things wrong. But a lot of the criticism of his writing borders on irrational, and is certainly dishonest.

Again, their criticisms are valid, and they are not being dishonest about it.

[Sparky Prime]

First off, just because a segment of the military is aware of the existence of the Transformers doesn't mean they know anything in great detail about them. Some aerial news footage and a view from an aerial jet flyby aren't a lot of information. No one saw anything up close and personal in Devastation, so while the knowledge is out there, there's not much to go on. It's conceivable that an aggressive attempt to contain the information like the one that the FBI agent mentions could be successful in the very structured and compartmentalized world of the military.

To narrow in on the street scene and the 'movie' comment, the initial exchange only lasts a minute before the Cons start shooting. The humans are surprised, and these aren't the robots from the news footage, even assuming the individuals on the street saw that footage, which they may or may not have.

Who said anything about knowing "great detail about them"? The point they're making here is simply that the military has evidence of the Transformers existence. Certainly giant robots of unknown origin would warrant a national security risk, which would mean the high ranking military brass should know more than to think it was just a hoax.

News footage of giant robots would be pretty big as well. Likely even making international news. Even if the Decepticons don't look like the same robots from the footage, it's hard to believe someone in the crowd didn't think: 'could they be like those robots I saw on the news a while ago?'

And, to add to my answer of the time, the Ironhide mini-series took care of this plot hole.

Yes, quite a while after the fact.

He does? I recall he had a small amount, nowhere near enough to get his ship up and running again. Maybe I need to go back and re-read, but I don't remember anything about a ship full of energon.

But... both Autobots and Decepticons have been on Earth for a full year since Devastation. Plenty of time for both sides to mine some Ore-13 and refine it if needed.

At one point Kup actually does say there was a slim hope of fixing the ship but they choose to focus on fixing the near dead Prime instead and apparently have enough energon to fix everyone else up as well. Sounds like quite a decent amount of energon to me. And it's not likely it was Ore-13 because that refines to ultra energon. As far as we know, they can't get regular energon from it. It's a discrepancy as they shouldn't have any actual energon.

That's the problem when things are made up as they go along.

Or when writer's don't check to see if the character has already been used in a story...

This is not a discrepancy. They simply don't appear. While their presence is missed, with no Autobots on Earth for them to interact with, I'm not sure where they would have fit in the plot.

Honestly, I didn't miss Jimmy and Verity, but I can see a few places they would have easily fit the plot. I'm sure the military would appreciate any intelligence they could provide. Or maybe show up when Spike needed some help with his counter attack. Or they could have even been looking around for Hunter. They'd likely be trying to do something to help save the world from the Decepticons at any rate.

I'm not quite sure where this one is going. The fact that prior continuity is overtly scarce in the first half of the story is meaningless. AHM is a 12 issue series, and continuity plays an important part in it.

Continuity could have been a little more important in the story if you ask me... Anyway, I should point out the wiki page has been edited since whenever you originally wrote all of that.