Revisitation 171: Conspiracy Corner.

14/7/2024

In what turns out to be a strong weekend for writing about political assassinations, it's my look at the time everyone played Jackanory in order to save Rung's brain in my look at Shadowplay Part 1!

3 Comments

Llama God

14/7/2024 09:03:11 pm

Right then. Here we, here we, here we fucking go!

Yes, I appreciate that I've opened with this a few times now, but here we are, finally, entering a run of 12 issues or so (whatever takes us to the end of Remain in Light) which has both Roberts and Milne at the height of their powers, delivering a near-flawless run of stories, the likes of which we'd never before seen in the world of Transformers.

I wasn't an active part of the online Transformers fandom back in 2012, having not really found my niche by that point and still convinced that I shouldn't be talking about silly toy adverts too much on social media, because that's not what responsible adults do. Luckily though, I got better, and it's largely because of the strength of the writing in both this arc and the following few issues.

Now don't get me wrong - other writers will also go on to do great things with Transformers, like Mairghead Scott's run on 'Til All Are One and Barber's final run on Optimus Prime (yes, I am that one fan), but this is where things really felt like they were coming together. Whilst we've been given details of the history of Transformers before, it was always at the larger scale, with gods or slaves overcoming their masters. Roberts, on the other hand, has been dropping in the names of fictional dates and events, giving some actual flavour to Cybertron, making it feel real, and here we begins filling in a lot of those details, makign it work on both an epic and a personal level. To see our silly toy robots be treated with this sort of respect was something I'd never in all the near-thirty-years of the franchise ever expected to see. So yeah, this was certainly something special.

And it's still a great story on re-read. It does indeed build on what we've seen before, and starts to fill in some interesting details that are clearly of interest to Roberts himself. The camaraderie (at different levels) of various characters on the Lost Light is well done, and there's a decent amount of action and intrigue here. And as I say, Cybertron's past is fleshed out enough that it does actually feel at this point like a real place.

I also enjoy the obvious teasers that Roberts gives us in this issue, such as the reminder of Rung's presence there (of which there were many theories, and it actually turning out that at least more than one competeing theory could have been true) and the not-seen Roller. I will confess to being disappointed to him showing up in a following issue - I was assuming this was just going to be a running gag, and didn't realise (and neither did Roberts, it seems) that it was going to actually be something greater (yes, again, I am that one fan).

And of course Milne and Burcham are also on top form here, giving as a hyper-detailed and believable pre-war Cybertron. This really was something of a golden age.

So yeah, safe to say I kinda liked this one. And I'm still excited for what comes next.

T-Wing link

16/7/2024 02:37:30 am

I dug the fact that Barber would have Prowl tip a table and make the "PFFT" sound a couple times down the line too. While they didn't often cross their actual stories over, it was nice that being the editor meant Barber could still align some things here and there.

WillR113

5/8/2024 11:06:18 pm

In this issue we learn that the former Prowl Dent turns into a Predabot. This is actually the SECOND time this term has been used in Transformers after being mentioned in a Condor Verlag story. We may never know if Roberts was referencing this obscure German text story or if came up with this obvious idea independently....
(yes I know it's the second one, but one of my only contributions to society is buying the last few Condor Verlag comics and posting them on the Allspark for other people to translate.)

Revisitation 171: Conspiracy Corner.

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