Revisitation 116: The Low Road.

10/3/2023

This week, Magnus is driven to distraction, Thundercracker has some serious back pain and Brawn gets his favourite Christmas present: A Starscream punching bag.

Don't get trampled in the rush to read my look at Revenge of the Decepticons Part 3!

1 Comment

Llama God

13/3/2023 08:31:21 am

For me, the main thing that stood out this issue was that the initials for the pretend news network are "BNN", which is just "banana" with the vowels stripped out. I'd like to say that that was clearly some sort of commentary on the state of US "news" networks, but this is Costa writing, so instead you can just thank me for never being able to unsee that now.

The other thing worth mentioning about this issue is Milne's arrival on art duties. Whilst it's not yet his best work, he is nevertheless greatly improved from earlier issues. But what is striking about this is how seemless his work feels segueing on from Figueroa's. Helped a little by the fact that Figueroa had toned down his own designs for his return, but this is certainly less jarring than the previous switch from him to Guidi. Clearly someone was paying attention this time and made sure there wasn't a sudden change in character models - and one can only assume that was Milne himself, and not editorial. So a good job there.

The story, as you say, is lightweight, to say the least. It's quite repetitive, and there's a lot of non-dialogue panels once again. It's mainly Milne's artwork that actually keeps it going, especially as he's gotten better at handling the sequential panels and action, and can actually handle them better than Figueroa. The highlight is indeed the Starscream stuff, and as an old, old Transformers fan it was a lot of fun to see him and Brawn facing off again one on one for the first time since The Enemy Within, which was a wee while ago now, and a favourite of mine when I was myself wee.

The main downside to this is perhaps the number of human deaths in this issue - both casual (there's a lot of vehicles getting trashed which can't have gone well for the occupants) and deliberate (the humans at the end). With the dusty skull being left behind it's starting to feel like Costa might be veering back into Dreamwave/AHM "edgy" territory. Just as long as nothing like this happens again in the very near future I think we'll be okay, though...

Revisitation 116: The Low Road.

Leave a Reply.

Author

Archives

Categories