Revisitation 163: Maximum Therapy.

17/3/2024

This week, after a slight delay due to illness, it's back on the couch as Fortress Maximus is seeing purple and Whirl just wants to be liked, all in my look at More Than Meets the Eye issue 6!

3 Comments

T-Wing link

19/3/2024 02:38:57 am

This is probably my favorite single Roberts issue, and it would have been perfect... HAD RUNG BEEN DEAD FOR REAL.

It was a perfect setup... Roberts introduced his brand-new pet character, made him likeable and indelible in a very short span of time, then killed him in a shocking and tragic swerve (heh) of our expectations.

Rung goes on to do other worthy things in Roberts' run, but man, it would have remained pretty impactful if he was dead for real here. Sadly, Roberts would hit the "fake-out" death button so often over the course of his run that by the end, I could barely register anything emotionally when someone WAS actually dead.

My reaction to Mirage's stupid death was literally "Well, there's no way THAT's for real." And then it was. And then I was like "Oh...okay."

Llama God

24/3/2024 10:22:56 am

I didn't mind so much about Rung's recovery at the time, since it is commented on as being rather miraculous, and upcoming injuries and deaths are treated seriously (basically everything up to and including the Overlord incident). After that point though I'd agree that it does start going over the top, and certainly things like Mirage (and other incidents that we'll get to) don't register in the way that they should.

Llama God

24/3/2024 09:56:38 am

I really can't get on with this issue. What good's a Transformers comic if it doesn't endlessly rehash quotes from The Transformers The Movie again and again and again..? (This is a somewhat timely dig at both the last comic we read for this blog, and the recently published Skybound issue.)

I am of course kidding - this is a bloody great issue, and the point at which things clicked for me when I was reading this first time, and it started feeling like this could really be something special.

The real strength of this issue is indeed the character work, making us care for at least two characters that we've never had much to do with before really by the end of the issue (by which of course I'm referring to Rung and Whirl - Whirl has of course appeared in things over the years, but has never really had any actual characterisation to speak of). Much as it is indeed an unnecessary "bottle episode", I also don't find this offputting - we've spent the majority of the previous two issues away from the ship on Delphi, so being back there and solidifying our experiences with the ship and crew was useful. And all the foreshadowing may seem clunky in hindsight, but again at the time this just felt like more of the worldbuilding that Roberts had been doing in previous issues, so didn't feel out of place at all. Generally, this is all done really well.

Having Roche back on art duties is, of course, always welcome, and no less so here. It's a tribute to Josh Burcham's colours here though that his work doesn't actually feel jarring next to Milne's. And indeed, we do need to start talking about Burcham later, along with some of the other characters, as they really are some of the MVPs of the IDW comics. Sure, Nick does great work, but the colourists bring so much and really bring it alive, especially during this era.

So yeah, great stuff here. And certainly slightly different to what we were looking at last time on this blog. And a very welcome difference at that...

Revisitation 163: Maximum Therapy.

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