Revisitation 34: Prime Time.

13/8/2021

This week, learn the terrifying and definitely not going to be quickly retconned shocking history of the Primes!

Plus, how much Optimus cares about what Prowl has to say, why Omega Supreme has plugs in his dick and the most terrifying super transformer of them all as I look at Spotlight: Optimus Prime!

3 Comments

gary

15/8/2021 09:27:16 am

Hi Stuart

I really liked this one at the time and a few months later they released a 3d version that was different, but at the time 3d was the big new thing till we all got sick of the glasses

the weak spot on monstercon did feel like a bit of a easier answer but when you are only doing a one issue story you need a quick ending

I was left a bit underwhelmed but Omega in this one letter he will be scaled back up but i remember him coming off quite badly in this one

By the time Furman was doing this was there any idea that his run would be getting cut short or was he in blissful ignorance?

Stuart

15/8/2021 10:05:50 am

I believe Furman didn't know about the plans to wrap his stuff up early as late as the February of 2008 (so we'll into Devastation, which he'd certainly have finished writing by then) as that's when he did his Mosaic "canon" tease of what was to come.

IDW going "this is not canon" may actually have been the first time he knew things were going to change.

Llama God

16/8/2021 11:48:21 pm

This is certainly an oddity of an issue, in that for a Spotlight focussing on one of the better known characters, you don't really learn a lot about him. Instead you learn more about Omega Supreme and Cybertron's past. And whilst that past will later come to inform a lot of the character of Optimus Prime, and be the running theme throughout his titular series, it still feels a bit off here, and more like we're learning less about Prime himself and more like it's just extra plot setup for the main "ongoing" series. Which to be fair has been a running theme through most of the Spotlights, but here it just seems so much more obvious.

It's not a bad story, though, as they go. The reveal that the first combiner was actually Monstructor was nice, and continued to contribute to the feeling that this series was less about selling toys than it had been in the past (although this will of course change). And the unfolding revelation of Cybertron's hidden, dark past is a nice one.

The main issue, really - aside from the lack of focus on Optimus himself - is, as you say, one that's not the fault of Furman of the time, and that's how it doesn't quite gel with later continuity. If anything, that's more Barber's fault for not fixing that later, so I'll let it off here. (And you can kind of make it work if you squint and imagine that Optimus is looking at the truth from a certain point of view... and also he's still recovering from a traumatic, near-death experience, which can be distracting.)

So yeah, not bad, and Don's art is very nice here. Not quite what I was expecting at the time, but definitely one of the stronger issues of the last few weeks, at any rate...

Revisitation 34: Prime Time.

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