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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Let’s Make This Precious: A Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Retrospective Part 1: Liars A To D

Hello all you happy autobots! Pride Month continutes with something that was not a matter of if but when. See on this blog I like covering my faviorite comics of all time, stuff that really changed me as a person and how I think creatively and stuff that is a par tof my soul for better or worse. So far i’ve been covering The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Scott Pilgrim (With Volume 6 coming later this week) and New X-Men, the last one currently on hiatus due to a lack of reader. While I’m not above covering bad stuff this blog has always been about reviewing the stuff I TRULY love and really sharing why I love it. And with this being pride month and me having re-read the series recently, it seemed like the perfect time to do this.

So for you Transformers fans in the audience, a bit of my history with the franchise: I love it, having just started casually collecting some of the toys again via Garage Sales and thrift shops, with half the fun being findnig out who my new buddy is. Otherwise i’ve drifted in and out of the franchise: I grew up with Beast Wars, Beast Machines and Aramada and dropped off with Energon which at the time I thought was a me thing but it turns out no, it just plain sucks especially in the english dub. Ever since i’ve just came back every so often when a work’s pulled me in: I loved the first movie (at the time I haven’t revisited it since), and that got me to watch the 80′s movie on youtube, which has been a treasured film for me ever since, and I watched some of prime (really need to finish that) and all of animated in reruns, and most recently tv and movie wise I saw bumblebee. I do love the franchise I just tend to go in and out nad have let Cyberverse and other series stack up in watching because i’m a procatnating git. But I will always come back to these wonderful talking machines.

So what brought me here? Simple: the first five volumes came on Comixlogy Unlimited a few years back, and it seemed to star one of my faviorite Transformers, Hot Rod, who being a huge fan of the movie and that being as far as i’d gotten with G1 stuff (Since then i’ve read part of the marvel comics which are indeed awesome), that naturally hooked me, as did Cyclonus and Ultra Mags being part of it. And while I had no idea who half these people were going in, the book instantly grabbed me. It was just my kind of team book honestly: a rag tag bunch of snarky misfits who may not belong most places but belong here and go through shenanigans, heartbreak and horrors in the grand comic book style.

James Roberts talent cannot be overstated: a british writer who started with fanfic and worked his way up to being one of the biggest and brighest transformers creators period, Roberts has an unabashed love for the series that shows: you can tell he’s really enjoying getting to play with this worlds, adding tons of lore but doing it in a way tha tfeels warranted and dosen’t feel overwhelming or bogs down the text. It’s just intresting stuff that helps enrich the settnig. But he really shines at character and dialouge: he can bounce from funny to heartbreaking on a pin, and takes a bunch of forgotten characters and an OC or two and makes them into fully fleshed out discuntional, loveable characters. Roberts does what I feel the best comic creators do: take all the best of a property, explain away the worst and use it all to create something beauitful, every bit he can get his hands on. And the result is a comic that I could read a hundred times and most certainly will. So wether you’ve read the comic, love transformers but haven’t or are neither of those things but like some good sci fi, humor, character work and gay robots, I invite you to come aboard the lost light for me for this year or so long trek into one of the greatest journey’s you’ll ever take. Welcome Aboard under the cut.

Previously on The Transformers...:

So when I first read the comics I went in blind without having read the seven years worth of IDW Transformers material that came before this. They aren’t a requirement and this is very much by deisgn: the relaunch of the tranformers books into two ongoing, More Than Meets the Eye and it’s sister book by editor John Barber, Robots in Disguise, is a soft reboot, designed to help reconcile the three eras before it into a cohesive canon and welcome in new readers put off by the previous two runs bad reputation. You can hop right into MTMTE from the Death of Optimus Prime One shot and at most like me you’ll just have questions like why does Bumblebee need a cane, what happened to end the war between the autobots and the deceptions, and why don’t they just throw Prowl on a rocket into the sun? Sadly the last part would never be answered to my liking but I felt if I was going to cover these books properly I had to read what came before and see what any characters with a past were like before under previous writers, reconcile that with how roberts writes them etc. I will get into most of that as we go as my attempts to condense 124 issues worth of comics into a short recap WITH all the character stuff felt clunky. So instead here’s a quick and dirty recap of the first few years of these comics under three diffrent writers and i’ll get into any relevant past stuff as we go.

Starting with a run by Simon Furman, The Autobots ended up on earth , soon finding the Deciptcons had found an energy source that could tip the war, fighting mostly in the shadows, with ocasional looks at the war in space, with things slowly escalating before suddenly stopping all together because sales were low so Furman was pushed out in favor of a soft-hard reboot as Roberts would later call it, so the autobots fucked off to space to solve some neblous plot about evil energy and left humanity at the mercy of the tyrancial murder machines with only Hot Rod being like “wait we got some unresolved stuff here maybe someone should stay behind.”

Furman’s run is okay. It has a great hook, having the war really be about robots in disguise, some great ideas such as having the headmasters be drones piloted by humans based on Sunstreaker, and some decent art. It’s not TERRIBLE.. but it has some serious flaws: Furman tries WAY too hard to set up a full universe from scratch and do too many things at once, which backfired horribly given he was forced to rush to finish up his run, the characters who aren’t spotlighted are often dull and lacking in personality, and there’s of course his Spotlight of Arcee. Oh dear fuck Spotlight: Arcee.

Look i’d heard of this one, I wasn’t going in blind and was dreading it the whole run but it is EVERY BIT as bad as it’s rep. For the short version: Furman’s version of Arcee is a hyperviolent psychopath whose mentally unstable.. because a mad scientest forcibly converted her body from male to female. If you can’t see the problems with that, please kindly get the fuck out. There are a.. dumptruck load of problems with this. Furman clearly came up with the idea in part because he has a weird hate boner for the idea Transfomers HAVE genders or sex’s to begin with.. despite the bulk of them using masculine pronouns and identifying as men. It’s like with the Gems from Steven Unvierse: they don’t have a sex tehcnically but their all gendered female, though i’m sure some may be non binary or male and simply never expressed it because of how choking the era 2 society was or like many NB”s coming out today, they simply didn’t have the term for what they were. My point is ESPECAILLY with modern understanding of Gender, his explination is garbage and clinging to it to the point he made a character into a sociopath and an accidentally GHSTLY transphobic metaphor is inexcusable even for the time. The fact he got into a fight with Marghreid Scott, who produced the awesome Windblade and Till All Are ONe comics, over the topic despite her criticsim being 100% accurate. The two DID apparently talk things out and he apparently apologized, but it’s still a huge black mark on the man’s legacy for good reason and something that should never be just casually tossed aside. John Barber tried his best to fix this when he took over, eventually having it retconned that Arcee was indeed legit trans but the asshole who helped her transition made her hate it for kicks, which isn’t perfect but it’s stilll a BIT better.

So back to the comics: unsuprisingly abandoning Earth instead of leaving some troops there at all outside of a rouge Hot Rod bit them on the ass HARD next run, done by Shane McCarthy: the Deciptcons used the Autobots being distracted by the big evil space thing and used a mentally broken traitor to launch an all out assault on autobots across the galaxy, nearly wiping them all out. They then took over earth, but naturally our heroes eventually rebounded with the help of Kup, the most badass robot who ever lived, his mind cigar, and Drift a former decepticon samurai who fans hated because of overpromtion I wasn’t subjected to and thus objectively enjoyed him.

McCarthy’s era, the 12 issue mini series All Hail Megatron, ist. It has a great concept, if more subdued than McCarthy wanted and the accompanying Mini For Drift is truly excellent, tackling some conscious objectors to the war. But AHM itself feels like a missed opprounity with lots of padding from the infighting in both factions to som eof the human stuff. It really didn’t need to be as long as it was, but it also didn’t deserve the hatred it got, as it’s jus OKAY, nothing special but nothing terrible..

Speaking of terrible after that we get to the second most infamous part of this 7 year stretch, next to the transphobia: the Mike Costa Run and the only ongoing of this stretch of the comics: Transformers. This run has our heroes settle on earth to try and help humanity only for humanity to keep trying to murder them, not unfairly mad The Autobots up and abandonned them before the decepticon invasion.

So Optimus does the logical thing: Turn himself in and hand the keys to Bumblebee whose barely been a character up to this point because Hasbro told him to. What follows is a lot of infighting, some goverment work, some sterotyping of other countries, the predaaons working for the chinese goverment, the Decipticons mass producing Megatron’s guns as part of a scheme, Jazz killing a dude and being treated badly despite doing so for entirely noble reasons, to save Bumblebee’s life, and in general just a lot of bickering. The run is almost 80% bickering, even worse than one of i’ts succesors Robots in Disguise.

The important part of the run is after trusting Swindle in a deal that SHOCKINGLY went wrong with a trustworthy name like that, Hot Rod stole Ultra Magnus’ ship and blaste doff into space, eventually finding the matrix, and a new headache for our heroes: Galvatron, who previously allied with the evil evil thing last run, had discovered a new evil evil thing and raised an army, including Cyclonus and an army of clones of (Checks TF Wiki) Scourge called sweeps.

Naturally Optimus didn’t belivie he had good intentions and in fact later found out they were bad and went to confront him with most of the autobots, though this time a few stayed behind to you know, not make a bigger mess. On the way we got a fill in arc by Roberts that is vital to this one: Chaos Theory. It’s a flashback arc that shows Megatron’s philosphy, and how it got corrupted, going from a miner and gladiator trying to crush an obviously corrupt system to the corrupted tyrant we know now who belivies peace means everything under his robot boots. This also introduced two key characters: Rung, a psychatrist and Whirl, a highly unstable future autobot who attempted to murder megaton. It’s a good arc and one I might cover at some point and sets up a lot of important stuff about cybertronian society we’ll get into as we go.

So with that we got the big messy finale, co written by roberts chaos: Our heroes fought the big evil thing, the art was a tad muddy, and justice was had, the end result being Optimus vanishing after using the matrix to stop the thing, megatron being apparently dead, and the war ending with a restored cybertron.

Costa’s run sucked. There’s really no way to put that nicely so i’m not going to. It’s not the WORST comic i’ve read.. I mean this is an actual line in an actual published comic someone got paid for...

But at least America is so bad it’s good. Costa’s run is just a LOT of people arguing, messy art and half baked ideas. While the other two runs are just OKAY this one was a chore to get through excluding Chaos Theory. Again i’ve seen WORSE but it’s not saying this thing is good and it’s really not worth your time.

Finally we have, during the early days of the ongoing, Last Stand of the Wreckers which brought Roberts into the fold via his friend Nick Roche, who recommended him as the mini was already a lot to ask from an art perspective. It follows the Autobots special ops crew , the titular Wreckers as they invade a prison for deciptcions taken over by the tyranical, powerful and insane Overlord whose entire motive can be summed up as this but with Megatron:

That being said he’s still an objectively horrifying psycho who pits autobots against each other in horrifying combat to sate his own boredom, with only a few of The Wreckers making it out alive. Last Stand is a damn fine story, with decent art, wonderful characters and a truly gripping look at the war in a way tha treally coudln’t be told in the cartoons It also sets up Robert’s trademarks of world buildling and leaves some pieces on the board he’d later use for his run: While non of the Wreckers carry over to his run, Fort Max, who ran Garrus 9 before Overlord took it over shows up again during MTMTE as does Overlord. I would recommend this as a lead in as while you can, as I said read the books without contex it does help Overloards apparence cary more weight knowing just how horrfying and powerful this fucker is.

So now we’re all caught up as you could tell things weren’t looking good, so in 2010, in advance of this reboot, Hasbro gathered a braintrust to write the ship consitting of space guru Dan Abnett, Costa and Roberts, brought in thanks to last stand to write one of the two ongoings and co-write the last arc of the current ongoing. While only Roberts remained by the end, it was thanks to this transformers got a second shot and this books exist and while Roberts was handed the premise he turned it into something TRULY special. So with ALL THAT finally out of the way we can finally dig into MTMTE:

The Death of Optimus Prime:

The Series starts, along side i’ts sister series with a One-Shot, The Death of Optimus Prime.

I won’t be covering this one in depth as the MTMTE isues. It’s not that i’ts BAD: it sets up both mainline transformers books, this and Robots in Disguise, fine, it’s just more heavily focused on the latter. Outside of Rodimus and Drift most of the Lost Light related characters aren’t focused on. So not bad, just not a great place to introduce either character:

The issue follows Optimus as he explores Cybertron in the aftermath of Chaos: things aren’t great as the planet has gone primordial, leaving only one working city, and said city is rapidly getting overcrowded as the climax of Chaos sent a massive signal into the either welcoming all cybertronians home. As such all the non-combatants have returned to find the planet wrecked and are blaming the Autobots because their kinda stupid and RiD confuses “Conteious objector” with “asshole”, wasting what could’ve been a better story on a bunch of asshole swhininng at the autobots.

Optimus eventually reveals to high command the Matrix of Leadership, the cool powerful dohickey he keeps in his chest that makes hi ma prime, has been busted in half. But every cloud has a silver lining and it turns out the Matrix itself is a map.

Drift, a spirtual ninja and former decpeticon who studied at a hidden city of ninja, belivies this is the Map to Cyberutopia, the mythical home of the equally mythical Knights of Cybertron. The Knights were believed to have ushered in a Golden Age of Cybertron and after doing so left to form their own utopia after doing good across the universe.

Bumblbee, current leader of the Autobots and Prowl, registered asshole both object, but Rodimus, an Autobot with a penchant for running off and into trouble who recently carried the Matrix for a while, wants to go after it, feeling that since the returning cybertronians don’t WANT autobots there anymore, why should he stay when he can instead find utopia and use it to bring in a new golden age? Suprisingly of all bots Ultra Magnus, space lawman and stick in the mud agrees and while Bumblebee tries to keep him here despite him not wanting to, Optimus ends up giving both of the m half the matrix and exiling himself to give Bee a fair shot at governing with the biggest remaning symbol of the war removed.

So that’s where we are: An impulsive rouge with a penchant for leaving taking off with a spritual ninja and a grouchy but legendary officer. What could possibly go wrong? Welllll let’s see shall we? Liars A To D Part 1: How To Say Goodbye and Really Mean It We open Rodimus in his element: giving everyone a neat speech:

While the One Shot got me in the door with the trade this.. this is what hooked me. An epic speech about the wonder of the stars, an epic quest, and a chance at a new life.

Rodimus here isn’t all that diffrent from the previous three runs: He’s impulsive, has a tendency to dodge difficult issues, and his wanting to run off on some epic quest instead of staying to help people who hate him fits his previouls habit of doing a runner any time he disagreed with what was going on.. and given the times he disagreed were “Let’s leave no one on earth when one of our friends is trapped here and theirs TWO diffrent decipticon factions” and “Let’s stay on earth even though they all hate us and don’t want our help” he may be onto something.

Roberts simply builds on that adding an ego and a need to be seen. Beneath the flash he’s just someone who wants to be a legend like optimus and sees this big epic quest as a way to do that.

We’ll get into Drift and Ultra Mags in a bit for now we transition to the RID cast as Wheeljack worries about a max Exodus while Prowl, smug prick that he is assumes that “It will be a strictly non event” because he predicted it... cue hundreds of robots outside the Lost Light, our crew’s ship, the next day because Prowl’s power is THINKING he knows everything and knows what best when in fact he dosen’t know his robot ass from his robot elbow. I may not like him very much can you tell? And for the record it’s JUST this Prowl. The Animated prowl is fucking awesome.

So from here we get scenes introducing our cast. First up is Ratchet. Ratchet is the autobot’s chief medical officer, a legend and an old soul. He was most important so far in Furman’s run, being the one to bond with the humans but otherwise not having much personality other than “Doctor Man”.

Here he’s an old hand, snarky, a bit cranky and 100% awesome and 200% worn out. So in a sense he’s a lot like Animated Ratchet which naturally made me love this one instantly.

He’s doing an autopsy of a bot who wore out his transformation cog transfomring constantly in protest of autobot high command. Bumblbee is there as he needed a senence and Metalhawk, dickish represnetivie for the returning cybertronians, refused an autopsy from anyone else. So then we get this...

Okay I gotta hand it to Roberts that is some excellent black comedy, from the fact it happens with the fucking cartoon sound effect (Which Roberts himself said in an interview was hard to get down) to the term “rigor morphis”. But it also speaks to his talent for world building: we learn what happens when a transformer dies. It’s a small detail that has no baring on the plot but it’s something neat to know we really WOUDLN’T see in most cartoons as they’d hav eto downplay the death as much as possible.

Things quickly turn sad though as Ratchet bemoans the fact he COULD’VE saved the guy once: an overworked T-Cog is something he could easily manage.. but age is catching up with him and his hands are starting to go and without a smooth reactoin time a surgeon’s hands are worthless.

Naturally he picks this time to tell Bumblbee he’s leaving. Bee tries to get him to stay due to his legacy and what not , having served with every prime since Nominus, but Ratchet counters that’s the point: He’s been at this too long and with Rodimus having promised to pick up some strays along the way, he figures he can help the injured and find someone to train as his succesor along the way. Like many of the Lost LIght it’s not the destination but the journey he’s after.

Next we meet Cyclonus. Cyclonus is a masterful warrior from a time past who worked with Galvatron in his scheme, but more out of loyalty to the old ways of cybertron. But now all of Old Cybertron has been singed to hell, he’s decided to head off on the ship with Rodimus but first heads to check some life signs.

Cyclonus here is an old warrior, a hero from the past now considered a villian since he sided with the wrong guy and killed some people. He’s unapologetic, steadfast and deep in his convictoins meaning he has a sense of honor but is also blunt, stuck in his ways and kind of a dick as a result. He’s a throughly fascinating character but really they all are.

So next up to bat are Chromedome and Rewind, our unambgiously gay duo and the reason this is a Pride Month review, as most of the other relationshpis don’t form for a while. The relationship happened organicly in the writnig: Roberts intially just had them as the best of friends... but soon realized there was a wamrth and tenderness there that was anythin gbut platonic and thought “Well if robots can hate.. why can’t they love?” and Hasbro backed him. So by the time he got to writing the issues and the two stepped into Prowl’s office here, they were a couple.

Prowl is upset Chromedome is leaving. And here’s where his entitlment really shows: he’s “disapointed in him” for leaving and for “wasting” his talents. Just to jump ahead a bit, his talents are Mnemosurgery, meaning he can read memoreis and in darker days he’s deeply ashamed of, rewrite them. So yeah Prowl clearly wants someone he can use for black ops shit on board at his beck and call and to hell with his clear PTSD and reluctance to do this sort of thing again for his own safety and because his partner asked him to. It’s also telling Prowl calls rewind Chromedome’s “Best Friend” when the two are Conjux Endura, cybertronian form of romantic partners, and he knows it. Oh and just as added icing on this douche cinnamon roll, Prowl is Chromedome’s EX. So yeah if you wondered why I was so hard on Prowl earlier there’s your answer: He’s an entitled prick whose so obbsed with still fighting the war he ignores people’s personal rights and what they want. He’s sometimes effetive sure but it’s all too often at costs down the line. And to top it off he’s having two mystery bots load some cargo onto the ship.... after of course flipping a table like an angry toddler.

Those of you who hadn’t read this thought I was kidding didn’t you?

So next we turn the clock back a few million years to meet Tailgate an adorable little bot who was trying to reach the original Ark but fell in a cave and is now legless and without the ablility to transform. His internal damage report isn’t helping.

Don’t be too down on your self Tailgate my brain tells me that all the time. He prepares to dentonate some charges to escape.

Back in the present is Whirl, who is saying some tearful goodbyes to some friends who have been there for him in these trying times... some mutlated corpses of Sweeps, those robot clones I mentioned in the recap. Cyclonus finds him and takes the sight as you’d expect

Whirl responds like the irrational highly unstable bot he is and attacks Cyclonus for darring to walk in on him and his unhealthy and deranged coping mechanisms. Tellingly Cyclonus ISN’T fighting back: he’s a warrior sure but this is Whirl’s hair trigger temper and not wanting to be caught. There’s no honor in lopping off the head of some crazy asshat you happened to run into.

At the Lost Light more of our crew show up: Brainstrom, a notorious mad scientest and weapons designer who Rodimus has naturally given a specail dispensation to not reveal what’s in the briefcase he’s handcuffed to himself because that surely won’t’t backfire horribly in Season 2.

Next up is MY BOY, Swerve. Swerve is a talkative little guy who can’t shut up and is fine with that. Naturally given i’m a talkative big guy who can’t shut up and is fine with that, he’s one of my faviorites.

Screening both in is Red Alert, paranoid head of security, who next lets in Rung, his former psychologist which given Red dosen’t even remember taking therapy tells you how much that worked out. But I do LOVE the concept of the Autobots having a therapist, someone to hlep with the likely millions of years worth of PTSd and it just smacks of optimus he’d make sure that his troops mental health was a priority as much as how much stabbing or shooting they could do.

Rung’s also brought a large box of model ships with him he’s kept over the years> This will be important later, for now he just talks about how he usually stays out of danger.. only for Cyclonus rnning from whirl, or rather flying as he’s in alt mode, to knock the poor guy over. As a Therapist he should probably know better than to tempt fate. Don’t know why but he should.

We get back to our commanding officers for the voyage as Rodimus brags like a teenager about his numbers and telling Bumlbebee to eat that. Granted if he was a teenager he’d tell Bumlbebee to eat a dick, but it’s implied.

So here we get our sense of Drift and Magnus. Drift is an optimus, trying to help this voyage along for spirtual resons despite his dark past as one of teh decipticons worst murderers. He’s doing so by feeding Rodder’s ego and generally agreeing with him which naturally is the best way to get him to listen.

Magnus meanwhile is instead a hard ass stickler for rules whose best summed up by this exchange...

He has a stick shoved so far up whatever the cybertronian version of an ass is you can see it when he talks and is proud of how that stick is regulation.

It also sets up a ncie power trio Dynamic, Rodders is the id, impulsive and willing to do whatever he wants, Drift is the Ego, being willing to follow rod but pull him back when needed and Magnus is the superego who insists on regulations on top of regulations on top of regulatoins... on top of regulations.

Magnus isn’t stupid though and does have Rod pegged in his own personal terminatior analysis thing: wants to be a hero and wants to be important.

Back at the fight, Cyclonus admits that while he dosen’t WANT to fight if Whirl keeps slapping him around like a jackass he WILL kill him in self defense.. but dosen’t want to and wants to know what the hell this is about. Whirl replies it’s about the whole hanging corpses on the walls thing but Cyclonus points out he dosen’t care, he simply thought their signal was Scourge, the bot who was the basis for them, and has no intentions to tell anyone. But Whirl’s already in a murder frenzy and thinks Cyclonus is a deciptcon.. even though Cy is quick to point out he’s not.. he worked with Galvatron, who also wasn’t. Naturally logic dosen’t work on someone in a blood rage and Whirl attacks again.

Meanwhile while Tailgate struggles to activate the charage having been passnig in and out of conciousness for centuries, we catch up with Chromedome and Rewind, who are with Ratchet as the three prepare to head off with Chromedome complaning on Rewind’s alt mode. It’s a memory stick as Rewind is an archivest, even earlier recording his boyfriend fighting with his ex and recorindg everything. This is a thing they talk about a lot and the dialouge does a great job making it feel like the kind of argument a couple has, you know one of those things that just comes up all the time and isn’t anything important but it’s still a sticking ponit. It’s not a sign of any disfucntion just the petty thing that crops up.

So whirl crashes in with cyclonus and is ready to blow his head off, blaming him for the corpse thing and Ratchet trying to stop him from shooting a downed combatant. Thankfully the explosion soon happens and poor Tailgate finally escapes and collapses, thinking he’s accidnetly killed Cyclonus. It’s knocked out Whirl too. Thinking he was headed fo the Lost Light, Ratchet suggests bringing Tailgate with them, and brings Whirl and Cyclonus along too because he has to he guesses. Rewind plans to catch up.. but first after lying about saying goodbuy byes some shady discs from a shady vendor, Swindle, aka that guy I will never stop bringing up Rodimus trusting because his name is fucking Swindle what did he expect.

So while the rest of our heroes get on board, Rodimus prepares to leave and refuses a call from bumblebee so with that the ship heads of but...

Shockingly Prowl did NOT try and blow up the ship despite everyone rightfully thinking so. The Quantum Engines merely went wrong and being fancy space engines shunted them father into space than intended and sooner than intended sending a godo chunk of the crew hurtling towards a nearbye planet thanks to a hull breach> While they get the ship stable, Rodimus has them park it on the planet both to figure out what happened to the engines and to find the lost crew, though what he says. .is telling

This is partly a call back to the Furman run: Hot Rod lost a crew under his command thanks to his traitor and his ptsd over that likely has’nt gone away> The other is simply compassion: under the ego and showmanship and glorhounding.. he just wants his people to be okay. He cares about them even if he throws them into danger.

Sadly his wanting no one to die is foiled immidetly as he spots what he thinks is a metor shower but...

This really is what makes the series work: unless the situation is at it’s most dire, there’s always room for some humor to help lighten the situation: it’s never stuck in inapproriate places but in places like this it keeps things from being too dour with the scene before and the scene after, which has a mystery message sent to one of teh ships rung had that was knocked off. So while Bumlbebee mourns his actually alive friends we get some ominus foreshadowing to close out issue 1.

This is naturally all foreshadowing paying off eventually with Delphi being the series second arc, and the rest.. well you’ll have to wait and see but it’s all paid off by the end of Season 2′s first arc. Roberts does belivie in setting things up but is thankfully not a bastard with payoffs and it generally dosen’t take forever for answers. Usually if he brings a question up it’ll be answered by the next season, i.e. about one or two years, at the latest.

Part 2: Hangars On:

For starters the first issue was done by Roche, who also did most of the character design and would do covers from here on out. But he ended up leaving, though not for any bad blood with Roberts, Roberts simply has incredibly detailed scripts and it was a LOT to ask on a monthly basis, so Alex Miline took over for the remainder of Season 1. Both are awesome though I honestly prefer Miline’s work as it just has a bit more depth to it.

So we open with Brainstorm. Hot Rod WANTED to here from Perciptor in most continutites both generally the autobot science guy and boring as dirt in a glass, and in the Marvel Comics case a huge asshole who was willing to leave a man to die, So instead we get the good one who fills Rodimus in on what probably caused the generator malfunctoin i.e. one of the Duobots, a duo made up for this comic that consist of Shock and Ore. Good punning. One of them, Brainstorm cannot figure out which, I relate to as i’ve had my own issues figuring out which is which.

As for the rest of the crew their searching for all the autobots that fell to earth, only having found half of them so far.. along with Cyclonus who is just being druged up from a lake.

We cut to a new face: Skids. Well new for this continuity and this comic in paticular as he wasn’t part of the Lost Light crew that set off, Skids appears in most continuities including that time Micheal Bay turned him into a black sterotype duo which was somehow okay with the producers, and with Bay himself, and with every one who would’ve had to sign off on this including Hasbro.”SIGH”

This Skids is thankfully not terrible or horribly racist, he’s just got a bad case of amensia, taking a second to realize he’s on the run, he’s trying to hit the mode lock on the ship so he can skydive out of it, and that he’s wearing an inhibitor claw, which true to the name prevents use of transformation and internal weapons. He soon finds out WHAT’S shaping him and i’ts not promising:

Back at MedBay Ratchet is working on rung. Suprisingly Ratchet never has operated on before but Rung is honored to have seen him work and Ratchet is honored at Rung’s praise.. though ruins the moment by pounding his hand with a mallet because of what comic we’re in.

Rung does wish Ratchet would focus on the more serious cases he came in with... but Ratchet casually explains he already did Tailgate first thing. But no one knows who he is and Ratchet’s asked Swerve, as metalurgist to carbondate him. We also find out Drift bugs the hell out of Ratchet when Drift coms in.

It’s a small bit but it sets up their dynamic.. and evnetually them coming together because oppoisites attract. But that’s a wayyyys off. Point is it’s time to wake Whirl up though Ratchet isn’t happy about it.. granted Ratchet isn’t happy about many things but given Whirl wakes up by grabbing the first person in choking range that just happens to be Rung and nearly killing him soley because he came back online in a poopy mood, MAYBE Ratchet isn’t just being ratchet about this one hmm?

Rung gets him to back off though: As it turns out Rung is down to his last chance and if he does another stupid thing he goes back to prison, setting up his past as an ex con. He apparently tried to murder his old boss from the wreckers Springer who was left in a coma after Last Stand of the Wreckers. We’ll find out why later and it’s suprinslgy not “because Whirl woke up next to him and he happened to be the only chokable machine in a mile. “

Meanwhile Tailgate wakes up and Ratchet soon realizes he thinks he’s on the arc. Realizing he needs to tell him he almost does.. but let’s Swerve do it. Swerve proceeds to tell the poor guy he missed millions of years of history with all the tact he can muster.

Back with Skids things aren’t better and not realizing he has a gun in his hand, our boy has to improvise and he does so in the most tactful way he can: by throwing a dead transformer at one of the mysterious nightmare bots and then shooting it with a nearbye weapon, causing the corpse and the alive robot that wants to make Skids into one, explode. If you can think of a more bad ass way to dessecrate a corpse i’d love to hear it.

So back on the ship Rodimus talks to Cyclonus and is straight with him: During Chaos he DID turn on Galvatron at the right moment and give them precious time they badly needed.. but before that he still lead an attack that killed dozens of Autobots, something he can’t easily ignore. Cyclonus is honest in response.

Not only that but as I mentioned Galvatron THOUGHT he was stopping the death of all things. As a result so did Cyclonus until he was in the chamber realizing his boss was really unteitonally kickstarting it. While the dozens of death’s aren’t a great thing, the Autobots genuinely can’t say they wouldn’t of killed tons of deciptcons if they had to protect something from falling into their hands. But despite having valid reasons, Cyclonus dosen’t couch in them: He followed orders and that’s all he did, and that’s all an autobot would’ve done in the same situatoin: follow orders up until the point it’s clear those orders are doing more harm than good. Now Cyclonus is a warrior without a war, and simply wants to find himself and a better cybertron.. and given everyone aboard is in the same or similar boats, Rodimus accepts him on the crew... but if he lets him down, it won’t end well. Ultra Magnus is less obtruse “Screw up and i’ll demolish you”. Magnus brings whirl in to apologize which is about half hearted as you’d expected. Cyclonus responds how you would to a guy who tried to kill you for seeing something you TOLD him you weren’t going to report and then trying to shoot you in a head.

And on that lovely note we return plantside where Swerve shows his better side, taking Tailgate for a walk and getting to know him a bit better. Swerve introduces him to Chromedome and Rewind... just as Skids drops in.

Skids gets Chromedome to take off the claw and with his weapons systems back online he easily dispatches the bot and gets most of his memories back.. his RECENT past is still gone, but who he is and other important stuff like that has come back. Chromedome invites him on board as they’d found every autobot who was thrown off or what was left of them so it’s time to go. ‘

So on the ship while Swerve tries to find out Tailgate’s alt mode and become a duo with Skids, Rodimus is left with the uneinviable task of “what do I tell everyone”. Ultra Magnus and Dirft are unhelpful, Mags suggesting he be depressingly honest and Drift suggest he sugarcoat the hell out of things. Rodimus does his best to do neither and admits what happened is bad but they need to press on to their first intended stop, The Crystal City, the of ninja-knights that made drift a better person. We get some breif seinfieldien conversation as Whirl brings up an obvious if pretty minor issue: what do they cal lthemselves. Swereve suggests the cursadrecons with Rodders pointing out the obvious problem with that.

Sadly we don’t get another page of this as Red Alret calls with some bad news : there’s a spark eater on board...

Part 3: The Chaos of Warm Things

So we pick up a few minutes before the end of our last issue. The Dead guy turns out to be Shock, the other Duobot whose paying his respects.. and covering for the BLack Ops work they were both doing for Prowl, deleting SHock’s message log and trying to attach a tracer to the ship. We don’t get to find out what their whole goal as in full though as the sparkeater, a zombie like transformer comes by and rips it out of his brain. Yes transformers indeed have those.

Back at the bridge Rodimus tires to proccess the threat best he can

Hot Rod has everyone but Chromedome, Ratchet and Trailbreaker, a guy who can create force fields and gets his own spotlight issue soon enough, go find a partner and a hab suite. No reason, nothing dangerous.. totally not going to lock them in there as soon as five minutes are up. Spoilers that’s his exact plan knowing that if it were him locked up he also woudln’t stay put and their already down four. If fire emblem classic mode’s taught us anythin ga few losses seems okay at first but soon your down to ten guys and like only like.. three of them. It’s why I play with no one dying on.

Rewind naturally goes with Chromedome as if there’s something dangeorus goign on, he wants to be with him, awwww and Tailgate goes after Cyclonus as he’s the only person there he knows.

So the autopsy begins: Ratchet is less than pleased with everyone calling whatever this thing is that ate Ore Shock a Sparkeater as their a myth and he’s a scientest doctor dammit. As it turns out it removed the Brain Module to get a better shot at the spark as it’s interocnnected, as are both the Spark and Brain with the Transformation Cog, forming what scientests call Rossum’s Trinity.

Rodimus wants a second opinon... which is his code for “Chromedome use your horrifying Freddy Kruger claws that pop out of your hand to reach into this dead man’s brain”. As I said Chromedome is a Mnemosurgeon and isn’t fond of doing it, and Rewind even less so. You can even see he’s visably horrified but what he has to do.. which speaks to Alex Miline’s talent as Chromedome has neither eyes nor a mouth.

This is the last thing he wants. He knows i’ts a slippery slope to doing this again and again and again.. and knows Rewind hates him doing it for damn good reason. You can also get another clear picture from that anguish on the poor guys face why I fucking can’t stand Prowl. I have way more reasons and those reasons are why you’ll probably never see a retrospective for Robots in Disguise, but just in this series alone he’s pretty monstrous. And we have’nt even seen the worst of it yet. It takes all my self control to to not go into a long, angry rant about the prick every time the thought of him comes up. IDW Prowl is easily one of the most insufferable and unlikeable characters in all of transformers. Fuck him sideways with a rake.

So moving on from that lovely image we get another lovely image, the horrifying last moments of Shock, which are “sketchy” as in we see them in sketch form. Good pun top notch.

Meanwhile Cyclonus and Tailgate find a hab suite, though Cyclonus decides to celebrate the occasoin by aburbtly dropping tailgate. IT does say LOT though that for a deleberate loner his first response to the guy wasn’t to ignore him.. but to agree to room with him, showing that beneath the cold exterior.. lies a cold intereiror but with a tiny beating heart inside at least.

Next up is the Dawn of Something Glorious: Swerve finds what he thinks is a Hab Suite.. but is in fact a BAR. Now you may be wondering “Wait their robots how do they even have booze”. Well simple: the booze is simply another version of fuel but the fun version. And if your wondering if a robot can get drunk the answer is absolutley. They have, as we’ll learn, safeguards for this, an intake moderator chip, but those can be turned off if the user wishes.

So while Swereve is utterly overjoyed to have found his dream career, i.e. getting people so hammered they’ll listen to him all night long, Swerve decides to skedaddle up a vent, pointing out that since the last 6 months of his life and something larger from his past are missing he has carte blanche to do whatever he wants and be whoever he wants to be till those gaps are filled. Though we get a nice moment as he tries to get to know Swerve before saying “Skids and Swerve, that does sound pretty cool”. Awwww.

Back with command, Chromedome is recoling from the experince but points out tha tyeah they have a floating monstrosity.. and what’s worse is Ratchet points out before it was just waking up.. now it’s fed a bit it’s going to want more and it’s belly is full of half digested sparks, meaning if someone lasers it it’ll take up half the ship, and that it’ll go after the brightest spark. Rodimus, being Rodimus, assumes that’s him and sends everyone a huntin while he stays behind to lure it.

Naturally given the thing is highly explosive, the first person to find the sparkeater is Whirl who, as you’d expect, had locked his new roomate out as a prank, but to his credit the second he realizes something is really wrong goes out ot save the guy.. and when finding his corpse, to avenge him.

Trailbreaker prevents Whirl from killing them all, while the Sparkeater bounces and goes after the brightest spark.... Rung.

For those of you just joining us you probably don’t know why, for those of you who’ve read the entire series your probably kicking yourself realizing there were hints THIS far back.

Anyway while this is going on Cyclonus bonds with Tailgate pointing out he missed a war, a war Cyclonus missed too as he was in the Dead Unvierse, which is just as plesant as it sounds and rendered him a zombie-like creature that while looking normal could only exist in our plane for a limited time. Quite obviously he got better. SO he gives a rather biased history of the Decipticon Autobot conflict, clearly siding with the former and asks Tailgate who he would’ve chosen.

Thankfully Skids saves Rung and takes the guy with him, with Rodimus comming into apologize.. and to ask Rung to lure the thing to the engine room as Rodimus has a plan.

Love that line. So Skids does what anyone would do and rappels down an elevator shaft with Rung on his back. Downstairs Brainstorm gets cornered but Rodimus lures the creature away with Rung.. by holding him in front of him. Which would be a dick move if Rodimus real plan wans’t so heroicly batshit, to throw rung aside, GRAB THE SPARKEATER AND SLAM IT INTO THE ENGINE, THEN HAVE PERCEIPTOR ACTIVATE THE ENGINES FUSING THE MONSTER INTO IT.

In the aftermarth Ultra Magnus lectures him on the Rung thing, though Rodimus shuts that down as he’s the captain and all that, and while Ratchet fixes Tailgate’s T-Cog he makes a decision: he wants to be a Decepticon.

Final Thoughts:

Liars A To D is a great intro into the series. It gives you a good feel for the cast, has plenty of jokes to lighten the mood but not so many as to smother the work, and sets up most of Season 1′s Arcs and the character arcs for the cast at this point swimingly. It’s no wonder this series drew me in immeditly with this level of writing and it only gets better from here.

Next Month on Let’s Make This Precious: Ratchet ends up in a remote facility ravaged by a plague spread by touch. Nothing topical there! Meanwhile a new face joins the crew then procedes to cause a Hostage Situation, and we take a break from our heroes to meet an even more ragtag crew with the Scavangers.

Next on this blog: My look at the Danny Phantom Storyline Episodes leading up to Reign Storm continues as a southren douchebag somehow makes Danny’s Life even more difficult. Apparently that is possible.

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