TF Views

I missed "The Ascending" when it came out, but I ran across it in trade paperback form at Books a Million on Saturday. So I sat down and read the thing. After hearing Dom and others trash it, I was prepared for it to be terrible, but surprisingly it wasn't that bad. Rather enjoyable actually, if way too rushed.

For those who haven't read it, the story picks up not long after the first mini series left off. A large group of Maximals and Predacons are trapped on prehistoric Earth, led by Razorbeast and Ravage respectively. Magmatron is trapped in some sort of limbo thanks to Razorbeast messing with his attempt to transwarp back to Cybertron. Magmatron is free to travel in time and has seen Cybertron's doom in the not too distant future, and is determined to stop it. On Earth, the Predacons have learned that Optimus Primal's group of Maximals are about to leave Earth, and have stepped up their attacks on Razorbeast's group in order to obtain the devices that will put them back into normal time so they can take the Autobot shuttle and escape themselves.

That's a lot of plot in just the first few pages, and that's the main weakness of the miniseries in my view, if I can skip ahead a bit here. The story in "The Ascending" doesn't really unfold at a natural pace. It's very rapid and very forced, and too much plot is crammed into too few pages. There's a lot going on that just happens. Characters are thrown into the mix without much explanation as to who they are or what motivates them. The story just about works despite that, but an extra couple of issues to let the story breathe would have really benefitted this mini series.

I've never seen any of the Japanese Transformers series, including their version of Beast Wars. So the introduction of characters and concepts from those series interested me, even if I have no idea how accurate the inclusion of such elements is. Characters like Longrack or Break, or the introduction of Angolmois are all elements that added something new to the story. Also novel was the inclusion of Botcon exclusive character Shockaract as the main villain. Unfortunately, beyond the fact that he's a stock-standard megalomaniac who wants to become a god by absorbing Angolmois, he doesn't make much of an impression as a character. I keep coming back to this, but more time to explain and develop the character would have been very beneficial to the story.

One thing I did enjoy quite a bit was the exploration of the increasingly chaotic situation on Cybertron as the tension between Maximals and Predacons continues to grow, fueled by the Angolmois as well as the natural rivalry between the two groups. It's implied that the confusion in the aftermath of the riots is one of the things which allowed Megatron to take over prior to Beast Machines. Now I love that particular TV series, but the idea that Megatron was able to conquer the planet by himself with the help of a virus has never been particularly credible to me. If it was that easy, the Decepticons would have done it millenia ago. But if Cybertron was already weakened thanks to massive social unrest, then it makes Megatron's subtle takeover slightly more palatable.

The story focuses on a few main characters which it really has to do in order to make sense. It would be impossible to write for and follow 25 main characters, so the story focuses on Magmatron, Ravage, Razorbeast, Lio Convoy and Shockaract, with a few others getting secondary roles. This means the vast majority of characters are reduced to cameos in the background, or in fight scenes. The art is very busy. My overall impression was that it was easy to follow at first, but became more and more rushed as the story went on. I'm generalizing of course, but that's my memory of what I read.

Overall, I thought the effort put into the series was pretty good. It has flaws which I've detailed above, but is generally still an enjoyable read.

It's only enjoyable if you aren't horrified by the rape of the Japanese concepts, or the retrocontinuity, or the cruddy plot, or Shockaract being in it for no reason.

The thing is, I'm *not* opposed to these comics using those concepts and such, but only if they'd done so *correctly,* and only if this was 'explicitly' a new continuity. Instead, it tries to fudge around it for fear of disturbing The Mighty Beast Wars That Everyone Liked (Even Though It Kind Of Was Just Average). It's like the Movie--why use Angolmois if you're not gonna use it right? But the Movies are at least explicitly DIfferent Continuities--if nothing else, for how different all the robots look. This book, on the other hand, tries to pretend it's part of the original BW continuity, and then goes around trying to make all these BS assumptions about it that make no sense.

Razorbeast.

Ties Ravage up.

With rope.

And just leaves him next to the important temporal thingies he needs to screw everything up.

Razorbeast is an idiot who deserved to die and this comic is terrible. Shokaract goes from wanting to attain godhood to apologizing and killing himself after being shown one panel of flash-forward.

Honestly, it's better to just read 'Reaching the Omega Point'. It's pretty much the same story, but mercifully shorter, and (only slightly) less terrible.

Y'know O6, somehow I had it in my head that you were above hating things because they were popular. You like Kenshin, after all.

Onslaught Six wrote:It's only enjoyable if you aren't horrified by the rape of the Japanese concepts, or the retrocontinuity, or the cruddy plot, or Shockaract being in it for no reason.

Well, as I said I've never seen the Japanese Beast Wars and have only a passing familiarity with them, so how the elements were used doesn't bother me.

Shockaract is in it for a reason... he instigates the destruction of Cybertron as part of his attempt to ascend to 'godhood' by collecting Angolmois, which is what prompts Magmatron to do what he does to try and stop him. Shockaract is the main antagonist, and as such drives the plot. What the story needs is a better explanation of who he is and what drives him. As I said, he comes across as nothing but a stock, cliched megalomaniac. His characterization is paper thin.

BWprowl wrote:Razorbeast.

Ties Ravage up.

With rope.

And just leaves him next to the important temporal thingies he needs to screw everything up.

I agree, that was a stupid mistake on the character's part.

I would say that Razorbeast should have been smarter than that, and that this was an instance where the plot drove the character's actions. The fact is that in terms of the plot Ravage needed to get the temporal technobabble things so he could meet with Magmatron, and rather than come up with a more natural way for that to happen as the plot unfolded, Furman just had Razorbeast make a dumb mistake. Again, I think the plot really was crammed into four issues and needed more space to develop properly. This incident was a prime example.

On the other hand, it's not as though we haven't seen characters in Beast Wars do dumb things before. Most of Cheetor's life in season one consists of doing dumb things. Though admittedly Razorbeast should be more competent than that. He's not the rookie Cheetor was at the time.

Shokaract goes from wanting to attain godhood to apologizing and killing himself after being shown one panel of flash-forward.

Apparently he was unaware that Unicron was using him. Given the ego that probably went with his megalomania, is it that suprising that finding out he was a pawn instead of on his way to godhood hit him pretty hard?

I think O6 does not hate things that are popular so much as he hates things that are popular and unduly worshipped, such as the BW cartoon, which correctly rates as about average.

Razorbeast.

Ties Ravage up.

With rope.

And just leaves him next to the important temporal thingies he needs to screw everything up.

I swear, sometimes Furman writes things that stupid to see what he can get away with.

Dom
-well at least IDW ain't making any more.

If BW is at the 'Average' level, I'd be curious about what makes it to 'above average'. Beast Wars pretty much blows all its contemporaries out of the water. Hell, there's not too many shows I can think of *now* that reach the same level of quality. Even Animated pulled its punches in a lot of the action scenes, and had overly cartoony voice acting (granted, the voice acting thing goes along with Animated's "thing", but still). At least Beast Wars came across like it respected the intelligence of anyone who watched it.

Dominic wrote:I think O6 does not hate things that are popular so much as he hates things that are popular and unduly worshipped, such as the BW cartoon, which correctly rates as about average.

Yes. Kenshin is actually realtively low-key and obscure these days, incidentally--it's like being a fan of TMNT at this point. It *was* huge, in 1988, but now it's kind of just there and quiet.

But yeah, I definitely don't hate things just because they're popular. I was right there on the Bleach bandwagon when it started. And then it, y'know, started sucking.

BWprowl wrote:If BW is at the 'Average' level, I'd be curious about what makes it to 'above average'. Beast Wars pretty much blows all its contemporaries out of the water. Hell, there's not too many shows I can think of *now* that reach the same level of quality. Even Animated pulled its punches in a lot of the action scenes, and had overly cartoony voice acting (granted, the voice acting thing goes along with Animated's "thing", but still). At least Beast Wars came across like it respected the intelligence of anyone who watched it.

BW is no better than most of the other cartoons of the 90s, in terms of writing. It shows, because a lot of those writers 'also wrote for those shows.' I recall at least one episode of the Hulk cartoon that Bob Forward wrote. People only shoved so much praise onto it because it was 'more competant than G1.' It's the same thing with Animated--people praise that show as if it's the Second Coming of Rodimus Prime simply because it didn't suck as much as ArmEnerTron.

And just as one example of a cartoon that makes it to Above Average: Samurai Jack.

I swear, sometimes Furman writes things that stupid to see what he can get away with.

Keep in mind, this was the same time Furman was writing the mainline book and everything. If anything, I'd suspect Furman was doing that specifically 'for' that reason--to see if he could get away with it and get a nice paycheck from it. And judging Furman's *current* status on TF books, I'd say his experiment paid off--his stuff sucked, and he was pulled off the mainline books and given something more side-story that he could actually do something good with, like Maximum Dinobots.

It's like Wacky Delly.

A fair review, andersonh. You detailed most of my problems with the story and characters. Too much in too little space is what it boils down to. Beast Wars (the cartoon) worked because they gradually worked new characters into the setting one or two at a time and developed their guys. Beast Wars (the comic) avalanches wave upon wave of paper-thin characters on top of us all at once with little-or-no introduction for most of them and no reason to care who they are. It also doesn't help that it was yet another of Simon's famous Unicron epics, which came at a time when I felt we were being overloaded with Unicron.

Overall, I felt IDW's attempt at telling two Beast Wars stories (The Gathering, The Ascending) were extremely rushed and showed little faith or understanding in what made the show work. The show made excellent use of quiet moments and slow as well as fast pacing where appropriate. The comics, as you noted, were crammed full of action and rarely stopped for anything else. It's like when you're listening to the radio. A song has started, but there's no lyrics yet; just music. But sometimes you got the DJ talking non-stop. It's like they're afraid that our attention span's so short, that if there's a quiet moment, we'll turn the channel. Tangent.

Dead air is proven to cost listeners. If I am listening to a station that is quiet too long, I will change it (if only on the assumption that the signal is gone). And, if I am skimming, and I cannot hear a station because it is dead air, then I will skip it. (This is true for most people.)

But, there is a huge difference between running a constant stream and simply running noise.

I see the comparison you are making. IDW's BW comics had nothing to say, and they said this nothing loudly.

Dom