This was not at all what I expected, though I'd say that's a good thing.
First off, re: Impactor...shouldn't he, you know, be in jail? Grimlock apparently still needs to serve his time, so why does ol' harpoon hand get off scot-free? He's hanging out on Debris, so it's not like he's in hiding or anything.
inflatable dalek wrote:Let's talk art first. Roche is trying something different here, but it's not that Don style thing of "I went away and didn't want to come back so I'M STICKING MOVIE FACES ON CHARACTER DESIGNS THAT DON'T SUIT THEM YOU BASTARDS", it's a more pencil-ey-sketchy-(? I don't know, I'm not an artist) look that, once you get past the "Is this Roche?" block actually works very well. And it's a smart move as well, Roche basically defined the current "Look" of IDW when he came up with the character designs for DoOP and MTMTE that the other artists have stuck to for the last four years, he needed something fresh here for the book to stand out.
Is it really all that new or different, though? If anything it seems like a throwback to Marvel-style art. Either way, I really liked it! I've never been a huge fan of Roche's pencils before, but this time around I think the art looks beautiful.
inflatable dalek wrote:Of the new Autobots, Hubcap felt a bit of an Ironfist proxy, but I suspect that's deliberate wrong-footing. Stakeout seemed like fun as a desperate Ultra Magnus wannabe, but he did kind of buckle under the weight of suddenly having five years of history with Verity which felt a bit convinient.
Maybe I'm letting my own history with the character cloud my view of him here (I used him for ages in the site's RPG as a comic relief petty criminal) but I thought it pretty obvious that Hubcap had a nefarious streak to him. The line about how he got himself assigned to Debris so that he could have access to the communications equipment just screamed "up to no good!"
Stakeout seems interesting so far, but the close relationship that he's got with Verity does seem a bit like cheating to me. Not for its' own sake, but because I don't think we've ever seen a human and a Transformer actually build a friendship in this universe. It would have been great to see them
become friends rather than be tossed into it after it's already established.
inflatable dalek wrote:Kup is actually Prowl (or at least the important bits of him) wearing the Kup Pretender shell suit thing. Hence him knowing the codes and how Prowl thinks. The Prowl scene in the issue was him hidden deep within a copy of Kup's personality being tormented by his own demons.
Well, we do know that there's a "part" of Prowl inside Kup's head. We never really established just how much, or how deep that connection runs. I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility that Prowl could transfer himself there if things got tough, but I think it's just as likely that he coded in a "in case of emergency, break glass" sort of compulsion that would make Kup come looking, just in case a scenario like this played out.
Though that brings me to me biggest complaint about the story so far, which can basically be boiled down to: **** IDW Prowl. **** him with a rusty chainsaw. The character has become so tired and hackneyed that I just wish he would go away and stay gone. The story seems to be building up to another "oh, Prowl's done something evil!" reveal and I just can't bring myself to care about his newest atrocity, whatever it may be. He's turned into Dreamwave Shockwave, "secretly" behind everything, and he never gets his comeuppance because the writers have (so far) been unwilling to deal with just how abhorrent they've made him (he really should still be in jail for what he did in Combiner Wars, or at the very least stripped of his rank and authority for it, but no).
The sad thing is that the monster he's become is sort of Roche's own fault. In AHM 15 he wrote the character to be morally ambiguous, which was great. But subsequent writers have just piled on, making him do more and more awful things until the original "good guy who does bad things for the cause" idea was overwhelmed entirely. There's nothing ambiguous about Prowl these days. He's a stock villain whose time has passed, and if this series does away with him nothing would make me happier.
And those of you like ziggy who know how much I love Prowl will know how hard it is for me to say that.
zigzagger wrote:It's been five-ish years (holy ****, has it really been that long?), so seeing how the Wreckers have been managing during quasi-peacetime feels perfectly justified to me.
It only feels like a few months.
I don't think I've been as hyped for any other fiction since then, which is probably why it feels so fresh after so long. Here's hoping this series will live up to the first!
zigzagger wrote:I also agree that there was nothing miraculous about Springer's awakening, for pretty much all the reasons Terome and Dalek stated. Arcee's skepticism only helps to support this theory too.
Yeah. I immediately wondered if there was actually nothing wrong with him at all, but Prowl had him put on ice just to make his own life easier. Obviously he knew that it would be trivial for Springer to be brought back online when he needed him, because he's not the type to leave his emergency messages unedited for five years while his designated saviour is on death's door.