Revisitation 118: Cops and Robbers.

23/3/2023

This week, all of Costa's trying to wrestle with big issues that are beyond his ability as a writer to manage comes to a head, as the police face all that Jazz in my look at Revenge of the Decepticons Part 4!

If you're at the Minicon this weekend, do come on over and say hello.

2 Comments

Post Mordor

24/3/2023 04:05:21 pm

Everything about this issue felt intense, I'll give it that. Milne's artwork gives an improvement to Figueroa's designs by slightly taming them. If only the coloring by Dalhouse and Fajardo wasn't so plain looking. It just doesn't bring out Milne's dynamic style like Josh Burcham does imo.

I share the sentiment that Jazz killing that cop is something that really hurts his reputation in this continuity. It was annoying seeing what happens later on in Phase 3 when humanity seemingly learns absolutely nothing from this encounter and still has a widespread problem with illegal Cybertronian arms being distributed.

As for Optimus, shooting Soundwave in the face like that felt...off to me, like some desperate attempt to play cunning here (even if it does work). Now, I know the real reason why I feel this way and it's entirely petty on my part: I keep projecting that virtuous version of the character from the past onto this completely different version who didn't have the luxury of sleeping through 4 million years of war. It's weird how later on, John Barber would feel the need to bring up Jazz killing a cop again...yet didn't have Soundwave remember that one time Optimus blew his head off when they eventually befriended one another.

One thing I've noticed in this re-reading is that both Optimus and Megatron are getting more and more unhinged at this point. What started as an intergalactic ideological conflict has now been reduced into a petty rivalry between two leaders on a single planet that would normally be insignificant to either side in this war. Needless to say, the next issues afterward are gonna be really interesting looking back.

Llama God

26/3/2023 10:36:04 am

For some reason this issue, until the last two pages, doesn't feel quite as bad for me. Maybe it's because having Prime face off against Megatron for the first time in Costa's run makes it feel like something's going on, and maybe that gives it a false sense of incident that other issues are lacking. Still, whilst it's not the best-written encounter the two of them will ever have, I do like how it doesn't go straight to fisticuffs, but is trying to inject some sense of wider stakes into the confrontation. The only real problem is that Megatron keeps talking about how Prime is desperate to learn from and be nice to the humans, something which we never saw any evidence of prior to Costa's run (with Furman's version of Prime deliberately not being quite at that point yet).

Soundwave being shot in the face kind of works as a shocking moment, in that Soundwave is generally speaking not a character that usually has a death and rebirth thing going on. (Yes, I'm going to choose to ignore Headmasters.) Although it is somewhat undercut with the reveal that he's probably okay which comes so quickly it makes it feel like an episode of Star Trek Discovery,

The Brawn stuff is also really nice. I do like that some time is spent on that, when really Costa didn't even need to bother with it, and could've just had Thundercracker show up next issue with the whole thing covered by two lines of dialogue. But it's certainly a nice little beat.

What does carry this issue, again, is Milne's art - although I'll agree with Post Mordor on this not being the best colouring his work will ever receive. (Nor the worst, mind you.) Although his humans aren't some of his best efforts this week, with Spike looking particularly poor. And it took me a second read of the issue to realise that the old man being taken away by police in the ambulance was the doctor/engineer who'd been tending to Bumblebee.

And the Jazz stuff isn't actually that bad. I mean, in the G1 comic one of his defining, early character moments is in giving a panicked Sparkplug a heart attack by shooting in his direction with a flamethrower. So, you know-

No, actually, it's terrible. I can't defend it. The stuff that's going on with the cops again, like the "radicalised domestic shooter" thread that seems to have gone away, is something that has the potential to be interesting, if handled by a better writer. It may be trying to say something, but it's not completely sure what. Especially given that Bumblebee's typical hero speech does have an effect.

But the Jazz moment has no explanation, given what we've seen to date so far. It's a badly-written excuse to set up a bit of tension and drama for no readily apparent reason. I assume that this was part of Megatron's master plan(TM) to show the humans that Autobots and Decepticons are just the same, or something. And indeed, given how Megatron similarly incinerated some humans last issue that's not wrong. Except Jazz's action are also nonsense. As you say, there's 100 other things he could've done, and he's a better trained soldier than that. If it had been, I don't know, Huffer, that might have worked, given that character's previous grumblings. Or any one of a number of other characters. Singling out Jazz just doesn't make sense, and smacks of a writer going "I'm going to be edgy and give this character some ANGST" whilst not being clever enough to think through the implications of it at all.

So as I say, it's unfortunate, to say the least, that the incident with Jazz was included given that the issue did seem to be turning things around. But Costa just had to go and undermine himself at the very end...

Revisitation 118: Cops and Robbers.

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