TFARCHIVE FORUMS

http://simonfurman.wordpress.com/2009/1 ... farious-1/

Set in the movieverse, direct sequel to ROTF.

Is anyone else bothered by the notion of yet another worldwide conspiracy the Autobots and Decepticons are unaware of?

Wooo, another fractured IDW Movieverse comic which'll mean feck all when TF3 rolls around.

Even the name is diabolical.

The comics are packed with that kind of complete fail - my personal favourite is the massive weight given to Barricade as if he's some sort of uber-hardcore arch enemy, rather than a random heavy that the second film didn't bother killing simply due to having other things to do. The way the comics relentlessly miss the point about the live action continuity and just trot out a clone G1 universe with different character models is pathetic.

Alliance #1 actually tried to transfer the humor of the first movie into the comic medium.

Issue 2 drastically reduced the attempts at including humor, and by issue 3 the humor was entirely gone.

Not sure if this was Mowry working on a tight schedule or an editorial mandate.

Or that the live action movie stuff is simply impossible to transfer to a different medium. The sense of scale, wonder and detail simply can't be captured by the calibre of artists avaliable to IDW (Alex Milne ghost-drew stuff for Pat Lee without people noticing for ages - this is not the sort of thing that happens to talented artists). At the same time, the writers seem utterly incapable of striking out in any sort of fresh direction, and it's a G1 reboot (again...) dressed up in different clothes, complete with the same characters, or at best the same archetypes, we've had for decades. The narrative weight of the stories is dictated by another company who may not be entirely aware of IDW's existence. Nothing is going to happen to anyone who was in Revenge of the Fallen - at least, nothing that's going to count in two years' time.

Ironically, considering the films are partly bankrolled by a car company, the comics suffer from toy stuffing by comparison (exactly like the dire Beast Wars stuff). Instead of rounding out the core cast of the films (and much as I love the films, there's plenty of rounding out to be done), we get the likes of Stockade, Dreadwing (or was it *wind? Or does it even matter?) and others whose generic names and personalities I can't even remember getting wheeled out and taking place in another generic "TRANSFORMERS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AFTER THESE EVENTS!!!!!!" self-styled epic from the masters of self-styled epics that change Transformers forever for about three months.

I don't think live action comics are inherently impossible, but I do think you'd need Hitch, Cassady or Raymond to pull off the visuals, and preferably a writer with minimal experience of Transformers beyond the films themselves. These people will not be found ever working for IDW, let alone on a bunch of comics which plain don't matter.

The lack of humour, though, is something of a problem - we've got more Big Things Happening In The Background, because that apparently is the only possible way to do a Transformers comic now...

My personal favorite example of humor in comics:

The two Hulk issues that deal with Rick Jones' bachelor party and wedding.

EDIT: As has been pointed out to me, a problem with the insertion of so many toy-only characters is that it's not really blatant advertising. Blatant advertising would mean those characters are actually doing something cool.

Instead, they're just used as cannon fodder and wasted after a few pages.

Cliffjumper wrote:Or that the live action movie stuff is simply impossible to transfer to a different medium. The sense of scale, wonder and detail simply can't be captured by the calibre of artists avaliable to IDW (Alex Milne ghost-drew stuff for Pat Lee without people noticing for ages - this is not the sort of thing that happens to talented artists). At the same time, the writers seem utterly incapable of striking out in any sort of fresh direction, and it's a G1 reboot (again...) dressed up in different clothes, complete with the same characters, or at best the same archetypes, we've had for decades. The narrative weight of the stories is dictated by another company who may not be entirely aware of IDW's existence. Nothing is going to happen to anyone who was in Revenge of the Fallen - at least, nothing that's going to count in two years' time.

Ironically, considering the films are partly bankrolled by a car company, the comics suffer from toy stuffing by comparison (exactly like the dire Beast Wars stuff). Instead of rounding out the core cast of the films (and much as I love the films, there's plenty of rounding out to be done), we get the likes of Stockade, Dreadwing (or was it *wind? Or does it even matter?) and others whose generic names and personalities I can't even remember getting wheeled out and taking place in another generic "TRANSFORMERS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AFTER THESE EVENTS!!!!!!" self-styled epic from the masters of self-styled epics that change Transformers forever for about three months.

But how do you match up a comic that dies or thrives on story to a movie that had little or no character development whatsoever? ROTF had all action, lots of spectacle, with an attempt at an epic-style storyline that left more questions than it even attempted to answer. In some ways there's so much left open-ended after ROTF that the comics could go anywhere.

I guess I look at it a bit like any book that comes out after a movie and tries either to summarize the movie in book form, or develop it a little further. Not that I'm making an excuse for poor writing in the comics; but ROTF really didn't give them much to go on.

The failings of the Movie comics are that they try to answer the unanswered questions in the movie (what happened to Barricade, Devastator or Brawl, how did Jetfire get to Earth) so on and so forth. But they do this and introdump lots of toy characters that die within the space of issues. Reign of Starscream would've been a better story if they condensed the cast a little, although it's a good thing that they killed the characters instead of dragging them onwards.

So they didn't make a comic regarding whether Bonecrusher gets ressurected? That's lame.

praetorian wrote:Not that I'm making an excuse for poor writing in the comics; but ROTF really didn't give them much to go on.

No-one is putting a gun to their heads and making them do comics like this.

The Initiative? They're on a random name generator for the secret conspiracy organisations now aren't they?

You remember that old Shortpacked about Frank Miller and the whores? Furman seems to be like that now, but for government MiBs who are interested in Transformers. You could hold a gun to his head and he's still have to work one in... That's one of the funniest things about the IDW comics, actually - Simmons is this uber-serious badass who speaks in vague threatening fragments.

Not to mention that the movie comics doesn't really need to introduce a new secret organisation when they've already got Sector 7 (officially disbanded but ex staff members with a grudge would be a reasonable starting point) and NEST.

Cliffjumper wrote:No-one is putting a gun to their heads and making them do comics like this.

How can we be sure? It would go a long way to explaining everything.

It's probably Don Glut.

It's me actually. If the comics were constantly good what would I write about?