Revisitation 146: Skywarp Gets Some Stick.

14/10/2023

This week, Ratbat thinks he's Billy Big Balls, but is only the distraction as he's easier to pin down than most politicians. This and Starscream tries honesty as policy in my look at Robots in Disguise issue 2!

2 Comments

T-Wing link

16/10/2023 06:07:52 pm

Upon the original reading, I remember most of us had already sussed out that Arcee was Prowl's shadowy collaborator from her silhouette last issue (which is weird, since she has a totally new design in this series), but it was still good to see her show up here.

I also remember being taken off guard by her abrupt murder of Ratbat, and in a good way. There may have been a liiiii-ttle bit more gas in the tank for the idea of Ratbat being in charge here, but Barber definitely made the right call not pulling his punches here. While issue one impressed me, issue two assured me that RID was going to be just as engaging a read as MTMTE was turning out to be.

Llama God

19/10/2023 01:54:57 pm

This issue really mirrors MTMTE #2, in that great as their first issues both were, it's in their second issues that they both assume the form that they'll (largely) take for the remainder of their run. And, also as with MTMTE, that's certainly not a bad thing.

I do love this issue. As I've said before, MTMTE is about a group of people who are essentially running away from having to deal with the problems they find in their new world. This series is about those left behind, and what they're actually going to do in dealing with those problems, and this issue shows that we're going to get an appropriately intelligent, nuanced story of that - something that I would have never expected to find in a Transformers comic. Autobots behaving with questionable morals (if not unsurprisingly, given the traumas of the previous few million years), Decepticons maybe doing the right things (if maybe for questionable reasons), how those caught in the middle are going to cope, and a hefty dollop of intrigue - this issue really does have everything.

The main concern I had when initially reading it was the return of Ratbat to being "Senator" Ratbat - this felt jarring since we've never had this (or indeed any) characterisation of him apart from in Megatron: Origins, and that's not a series you'd expect any sane writer to want to invoke. However, the fact that he's quite quickly removed from the picture immediately alleviated all of those concerns - this was clearly not going to be a series that was going to let anything drag on for too long. And his death isn't just for shock value, either - it reveals a lot about what's going on with both the Autobots and Decepticons.

Arcee's return is also very welcome. Although at the time we didn't know where her character was going to go, the fact that it wasn't a reset was certainly welcome, and made her an interesting character, without all the accompanying unpleasantness of her previous appearances.

And of course there's also Starscream, who will also go on to have one of the more significant arcs in the IDW-verse. Here shown to be the same, scheming character that we know or love, but certainly with a more interesting spin and a few surprises.

All in all, this was great stuff, and I'm looking forward to more nuanced takes on politically tense situations, full of interesting characterisations.

Once we're done with next week's Autocracy, that is.

Revisitation 146: Skywarp Gets Some Stick.

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