Revisitation 106: Drifting Into New Year.

1/1/2023

Happy 2023 everyone! It's the year we're finally going to get through Costa and hit the comics that everyone remembers IDW for.

But that still leaves us with some very odd times to go, starting with the long delayed feeling Drift Issue 1! Is it any good? The answer is as clear as Crystal City.

2 Comments

Post Mordor

2/1/2023 12:49:09 am

It's interesting to find out how late this mini-series arrived after the character's debut. Admittedly, I read the IDW comics in chronological order instead of by publishing order, so it felt a bit awkward to see Drift appearing so much during the All Hail Megatron era only to barely become relevant afterwards until Robert's run.

Now I kind of regret not reading this alongside Costa's Ironhide mini. It would've made a nice alternate reading instead of suffering through the main run all by itself. As a first issue, it's not much but still an enjoyable read.

One minor complaint I had was how similar the pointy head designs of Wing and Drift look, same goes for the other members of Crystal City. I often confused these two at times. Other than that, I share the praise of Milne's art here, which will only continue to become better over time.

Llama God

7/1/2023 10:15:22 am

Apologies for the late commenting on this one - it being New Year's Day when this was posted I was of course otherwise engaged. And it's clearly taken me nearly a week to recover. That's what happens when you have a toddler... But anyway, Happy New Year!

And yes, this comic is, surprisingly not awful. Which is faint praise indeed, but more than I was expecting to heap on to the architect of All Hail Megatron. I can't beat your own fast-food comparison of the two series, but this is certainly a better and more entertaining story than the ongoing's been giving us, and even if it's not particularly deep it is at least welcome.

The story itself is fine, I suppose - no surprises, so far following exactly the kind of pattern you'd expect from a rogue-loner-who-discovers-the-power-of-friendship-and-changes-his-ways-type story, but it's not bad, and isn't as Mary Sue-ish as I was fearing.

The art is also better than we've been getting on the ongoing, which also helps. And whilst Milne is indeed getting better here, this is still Milne Unrestrained, which can cause problems when figuring out what's going on at time (although not so much here, to be fair). The biggest problem will come with trying to keep track of who is who, as he redesigns Drift twice during this series and gives us a whole load of similar-looking characters with wings on the sides of their heads. He's still got a ways to go when coming up with character designs. Although if there was indeed editorial or Hasbro pressure to get this out quickly then that might explain that.

So yeah, not great, but there are worse ways to start off the new year, I suppose. Like, say, another Costa issue next week. Roll on 2024!

Revisitation 106: Drifting Into New Year.

Leave a Reply.

Author

Archives

Categories