Reivistation 171: Red Sky at Night.

21/7/2024

This week, it's back and forth through the histroy of a very confused planet, as Orion Pax is bludgeoned over the head with some gloating, Wheelie loses a friend but gains a zoo and Viewfinder finds the view of his own future distressing.

All in my look at Robots in Disguise issue 10!

Which I probably should have moved all the paragraphs out of order on, I've only just realised as I'm writing this. Oh well...

2 Comments

T-Wing link

22/7/2024 04:28:22 am

Some truly ambitious stuff here and rewarding for those who like their ducks in a row (like Barber obviously does) which is ironic considering NONE OF THE DUCKS ARE IN A ROW in this issue.

I don't think Livio was the best choice for art here in a story that absolutely needed visual clarity to work, but he manages to more or less pull it off. I think some of the writing for Pax/Prime is some of the most spot-on writing for MOST versions of Optimus Prime (the whole admitting he makes bad decisions when he agonizes over them for too long works really well when applied to both Sunbow and Marvel Optimus.)

I think my only gripes here are that Bludgeon, Jhiaxus, and Turmoil never really distinguish themselves as villains, here or in the future. They're all varying degrees of mad scientist (or mad hobbyist in Turmoil's case) and Bludgeon suffers for that the most, but at least here he's fulfilling his better role as someone's "dragon" or enforcer.

Llama God

22/7/2024 09:06:07 pm

Now this, for sure, was not the issue to be reading whilst deep in the sweaty grasp of Covid. Not that I had a choice, mind you - the pandemic keeps its own schedule, and I am not the master of any timeline, especially this one.

This is certainly an ambitious issue though. And if nothing else Ramondelli's art is perfectly suited for this sort of quasi-horror weirdness, and works really well here.

The story itself is certainly trying to be clever. Whether it was necessary or not... well it didn't feel like it at the time, that's for sure. When this first came out I had, for some reason, never felt the need to revist closely the details from Costa's run, so I was pretty oblivious to the points being rectified here, only having a vague memory of where we'd originally found Wheelie. And whilst clearly it was an interesting exercise, it couldn't match up to the work that Roberts was doing over in the first part of Shadowplay.

I've changed my assessment of that since then, though, if not just because the two stories are both very different beasts. But Barber is trying to do something clever, and it will eventually pay off, a lot further down the line. And that kind of long-thinking and continuity porn is exactly what I'm here for.

So yeah, certainly an interesting issue, and definitely not a bad one. But one that also requires some work. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm looking forward to following up on this... *checks schedules* ... in what's certain to feel like a whole other lifetime.

Reivistation 171: Red Sky at Night.

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