Rossum wrote: However, from reading what defenders say I can understand how it would be possible to enjoy it as a consciously kitschy, over-the-top love letter to the cartoon.
The problem is McCarthy seems to be pushing it as some brave new direction... If he'd come out and said "People were fed up with Furman's stories which were packaged as standalone mini-series but contained no discernable events and required you to buy other series to have much chance of appreciating them, were full of character dead ends, cheap cop-outs and were showing no sign of going anywhere interesting for the next decade, so I thought 'What do more casual people think of Transformers?', got all the original characters and just had the Decepticons invading Earth with the Autobots trying to stop them, back to basics stuff, like on the kids' show" it'd be difficult to argue - it might not be any better, but he'd be doing what it said on the tin.
However, it's the seeming insistence that AHM is some brave new world, and that those who dislike it just can't handle that, that really rankles. For God's sake, G2 basically told everyone the comic they'd been following for a decade was a sideshow, and people loved it - that's a change of direction.
I don't hold anything against AHM for the political crap, either - I'm sure an extension of the Dead Furmiverse without AHM existing would have just meant a longer wait for an equally unfulfilling conclusion, and Furman's spaffed enough pages up the wall with his wafer-thin six-issue mini-series that contained three issues of plot, the ultimately pointless nature of some spotlights (Mirage, the Wheelie PR stunt) and threads like the Reapers and the Headmaster bullshit. I hold AHM being crap against AHM.
What I really don't get is why IDW didn't just come out and call a continuity reboot for AHM - by the looks of things, it effectively is anyway, so why constrict the writers? McCarthy is not be paying much attention to Furman's stuff as it is, so it wouldn't effect him, and it'd free Furman up for whatever contractual obligation stuff IDW are letting him do. It'd also have meant the opportunity to title and promote AHM as Ultimate Transformers or Transformers Reloaded, snagging casual readers, rather than titling it "Yet Another Self-Contained-My-****ing-Arse Transformers Mini-Series".