TF Views

Since we've got some preview pages, and the book itself will be out in two weeks, why not got ahead and start the discussion? If anyone buys Continuum, that discussion could go here as well.

Previews frontpaged here: http://www.tfviews.com/news/comicsandbooks/583.

Any thoughts? Spoilers do follow, so if you don't want to know, don't read.




It's always hard to get a lot of information from three pages, but there's some sort of conflict with Skywatch. The Autobots are attacked, and take heavy damage. I'm not too sure I believe that

Spoiler

Ironhide

is going to be killed off this early in the series, or even killed off at all, but that's what appears to happen here. Optimus Prime narrates the mission gone wrong.

Don's new style looks good. Better than some of the early previews had led me to believe, though seeing his work in AHM #13 changed my mind. The brief snippet of story and art has definitely got me curious about what's going on, so it's done its job properly.

I really do like the new art, but everyone totally looks like they have mustaches, and that amuses me.

Anyway, between the gunfire-heavy opening pages, the gritty narration, and the (apparent) death of an established character in the first few pages, am I the only one getting a serious G2 vibe from this comic already? I really hope it isn't all like this, since such a style is ill-fitting of an ongoing series, and because I was just getting used to really good writing in my TF comics. Eh, we'll see...

I don't mind a grim tone and open hostility between humans and Transformers after what Megatron did. That makes sense. But yeah, I hope it's not like G2, with multiple, multiple characters biting the dust. I enjoy G2 as a one-time comic series, but looking back I wonder how long things could have gone on with characters dying off left right and center. How long before half the cast was gone?

I was browsing issues of the Dreamwave ongoing last night, just to compare Don's newer style with his older art, and I think I like the newer stuff better. It's interesting to see how his style has evolved over time. The sheer amount of detail that he's put into the new look is impressive to me. I read somewhere that it took him six hours to draw a page of the old comic, so I wonder how long it takes him to draw a page of the new book?

I really like the art. Man, do I like that art.


Maybe it is a function of me being cynical, but that kind of "look how grim this is' writing" is often hard to distinguish from parody of that kind of 'look how grim this is" writing. On the other hand, some of this might also be my bias against Costa and his work on "GI Joe".

It is hardly fair to judge based on 3 pages though.

Costa's style is irksome. Choppy sentences. Evoking fragmented thoughts under pressure. Conveying emotional reactions, rather than intellectual . Much like Ralph Peters. Works sometimes.


Dom
-is going to pick up "Continuum".

This is such the example of why I hate this art style. It took me looking over the page two or three times to figure out that was supposed to be Ironhide.

The design works for the movie TFs because they were designed with this aesthetic in mind. This is just horribly shoehorning new stylism on old designs and characters and it 'does not work.'

Congrats, IDW. You won me over with AHM and lost me again at the ongoing.

The characters are still drawn with enough of their defining traits in place to be recognizable. They actually look quite a bit like some of the characters from the movie comics that were not actually on-screen. For example, Prowl's face in the movie prequels looks quite a bit like G1 Prowl's face.

Figueroa's art is clean, and detailed, enough to be able to pull this off. Some artists just wind up making the movie aesthetic look like retro-Kirby style designs.


Dom
-really wants this comic to be good.

Alright, I'm using hyperbole, but I still don't like it. I could accept the way the Movie designs looked because they were running *concurrently* to regular TF product. This kind of thing was exactly what I was seriously hoping the movie wouldn't do to the franchise, and that's what it's doing now.

"Well, okay, they look like Transtech. Or Vehicons. Awesome. Just as long as we get regular TF crap alongside it." Which we did...for two years. And now this. Sigh.

Given how static the original characters' appearances have been over the years, the franchise is about due. (Does it really dilute Batman as a character when people can say "that is a Breygoforyle/Aparro/Adams/Perez Batman"?)

Dom
-did G1 really look *that* good?

It's mostly the faces I dislike. And, objectively, I do believe the GeeWun faces look better. Does it make sense for them to move like a human's? Not really, but when it comes to TF I'm just tolerant enough to ignore that kind of thing. Incidentally, though, I've always liked characters with faceplates more...and I somewhat dislike a good chunk of G1 comics art where the TFs look more like humans in cardboard than actual TFs. Go figure!

It's really not so much that I mind that there's a subsect of TF that looks like the Movie characters. In fact, part of me would probably be interested in a new line that looked--at least somewhat--like this, as the bridge line between ROTF and the next movie. But that's only as long as we're still getting 'other' TF material. Y'know?

I'd love to be surprised. You guys seem to want this to go on, so you start reading it, and if it *is* actually good stuff, then I'll pick up the trades. (Because, ongoing BS or not--there's gonna be trades.)

Incidentally--I wonder if this is going to have any kind of 'explanation.' Don & Furman's story in Coda seem to indicate "Hell no," and eventually someone else will come on the book and they'll look like they're supposed to.

That is definitely not the character I would have gotten rid of first, but whatevs.

I dunno, the faces are a lil' distracting, but overall I'm okay with it. Is there a reason the Autobots are fighting against humans now?