Revisitation 135:An Empty Coconut.

22/7/2023

This week, it's all over by the shouting as the Mike Costa epic concludes with Megatron shooting his load to save Cybertron.

All in my look at Chaos Part 4!

2 Comments

Snowkatt

23/7/2023 08:27:43 pm

Well at least its over that's all I can say for it.

The coda I generally just ignore, it's such maudlin nostalgia baiting garbage, drawn by my least favorite IDW artist, that I find it a pointless waste of time at the best of times.

Which more or less sums up my feelings about Costa's entire series as a whole.
How they let this garbage spiral out of control for an execrable intolerable 31 months, is beyond me.

It's on par with AHM with meaningless directionless stretched padded fluff.
And might, mind boggingly so, be even worse then AHM.
AHM at least ended after 16 months this dreck dragged on for nearly twice as long.

I only read the Coda once nearly a decade ago, and hated it utterly to the point i always skip it.
Lets see next week if my dislike for it is still founded.

Llama God

27/7/2023 01:44:45 pm

Yep, that the story is over is probably the best thing that can indeed be said about this issue.

It's clear that in this issue Costa's doing his best to put an action movie down in comic book form - which doesn't really work, because movies and comic books are two very different forms of media. The final panels, being all white or silent, are indeed very striking images. But they also give the feeling that, as someone who's purchased a comic book, you're being a left a little short-changed.

(And yes, you could argue that Neil Gaiman pulls the same trick in the conclusion of his first arc in The Sandman. Except that that worked, because it was Neil Gaiman doing the writing, and he occupies a slightly different tier of comic book writing (or writing in general) than Costa does...)

This issue is certainly a mess. The seams between Roberts' and Costa's writings are painfully visible, and should really have been reined in by the editors - although I guess they figured that by this point no-one cares. And they'd be right. But as for the rest of this, characters just do things to get from one dramatic visual plot point to the next, without much sense of warning, and it's all very much of a whatever.

There are a couple of things I do like about this issue. Galvatron's final realisation of his own inevitable betrayal by the D-Void is quite nicely done, and does underline that he was genuinely doing what he thought best all along, which makes a nice change. And I don't dislike Cyclonus' own sudden turn, since it does tie nicely into what we first learned about him - although I won't disagree that it isn't well handled by the writing at all.

As an issue of a comic, though, this is disappointing. As the climax to the story that Furman started in Infiltration #0 (well, whenever he first introduced the Dead Universe stuff, but you know), which is how this was basically being sold at the time - the end before the soft reboot - it's incredibly disappointing. There have been signs of promise in this whole Galvatron and Heart of Darkness arc, but only signs - the actual execution has been lacklustre to say the least. The only real surprise about this series, really, is indeed how long IDW let it go on for. And what I came away with, at the time, was a real sense of disappointment.

But what I didn't know at the end was the extent of what was to come, otherwise I wouldn't have been feeling the trepidation that I was right now. After all, the previous two soft reboots had given us McCarthy and then Costa, so I had no faith at all in what was coming next. But I was still buying the comics anyway, because I hate myself. And because I had hope that this continual disappointment couldn't go on forever. But that's a story for future blog posts.

For now, just one more Costa left. Just one more! We can do this!

Revisitation 135:An Empty Coconut.

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