Revisitation 119: A Hearty Meal.

31/3/2023

This week, don't book your holiday on Gorlam Prime, it's totally dead, man.

Plus, Galvatron is really getting it in the neck as I look at Heart of Darkness issue 1!

3 Comments

Post Mordor

2/4/2023 07:51:10 pm

Well, here we are! In the spirit of going along with finding something to celebrate and be enthusiastic about for Revisitation, I'd like to congratulate everyone here who managed to read through this slog of an era for IDW1 up until this point, because it's definitely the last of the worst that Phase 1 has to offer!

Honestly, this is the second lowest point in IDW Transformers for me, right after the Arcee spotlight. It's too easy to go and shit on the art here, but the real downer about this mini is that we're revisiting (heh) Furman-era loose ends that should've just been left alone imo. Out of all the interesting stuff Furman came up with (Regenesis & Phase Sixers being a great highlight), I've found the Dead Universe to be the least salvageable plot point. It feels like the higher-ups at IDW didn't learn a lesson about the Dark Universe storyline when they initially canceled Furman's run at the tail-end of Revelation, only to realize how bad this other Dead Universe mini was...leading to the death of the side story mini-series format for a time.

Speaking of higher-ups, much like Spotlight: Arcee, several folks looked at this comic and thought it was acceptable for release. Someone looked at this art, and decided it wasn't an abomination to look at or they just didn't care. I'm joking about all of that of course, but one thing I think editorial did likely forget was that Gorlam Prime was renamed to Cybertron by this point, don't know why that was never brought up here. I get that in serialized comics editors make mistakes a lot, but this continuity was still only 5 years old at this point. It seems Roberts and Barber paid better attention to the earlier stuff than editorial did.

Lastly, the art: I can understand tight deadlines forcing artists to make sloppy efforts in finishing their work. But c'mon...I highly doubt Ulises Farinas simply rushed this. I really think he just wasn't capable of drawing that well, the mechanical details are fine but the faces looked like they were drawn by a middle-schooler.

Anyways, that's enough moaning from me. I'm just glad that this marks the beginning of the end for Phase 1. Still as enthusiastic as ever for what's coming up. :)

LiamKav

4/4/2023 02:18:33 pm

I've not seen anything else the colourist has done so I don't know if he deserves some blame in this. But you are right... it's interesting that the writers seem to avoid a lot of the blame even though the story is kinda... nonsense.

I get the idea that it's trying to prevent things from Galvatron's POV and that he'd see himself as a hero, but it also seems a bit too different from what his personality was before and after. He doesn't even seem to really match his Infestation portrayal here.

Llama God

8/4/2023 09:41:47 am

It's probably telling that you published this article a couple of days earlier than usual, and yet it's still taken me over a week to get around to commenting. I guess we all have our own hearts of darkness to bear. Or... something.

But yeah, it's certainly a good way of putting it that "different" makes this feel interesting. At least briefly. I guess I should address the art first, and I guess I can, in some respects, commend them for trying something different. And from the style of the story that it looks like the writers were *intending* to go for, I think they were hoping for a slightly horror-like, slightly altered-reality style to the story, to go with its kind of cosmic-horror style intentions. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't really pay off.

It was suggested to me on Twitter a while back that maybe this art was intended to be more like something that would've been seen from the Marvel era, and that if the inking and colouring had been done differently it could have worked like that. And I guess I can kind of see that. But unfortunately it still doesn't excuse the end product, which, whilst different, sadly isn't good.

The story also has potential, and I do like the conceit of seeing things from Galvatron's point of view - which is consistent with how he's portrayed in his original Furman-penned Spotlight, as some sory of tortured, misunderstood hero. Unfortunately, the execution isn't great. And as Post Mordor says, the Dead Universe stuff was really the least interesting part of Furman's storylines, so returning to it didn't excite me at all back when this was originally published.

So, it's certainly an interesting experiment. But that indeed does not make it good...

Revisitation 119: A Hearty Meal.

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