Revisitation 52: Happy Birthday.

24/12/2021

Yes, this weekend is the one anniversary of this ridiculous project. Thanks for making it so far!

And what better way to celebrate a year, and Christmas, that with a fresh start? All in my look at the latest comic based around (checks notes) Megatron, in All Hail Megatron Issue 1!

6 Comments

gary

26/12/2021 07:51:57 pm

Merry Christmas Stuart and all the best for the new year

Thanks for this

Gary

Stuart

30/12/2021 08:10:22 am

Thanks for the kind words, Gary.

LiamKav

4/1/2022 06:29:11 pm

AHM is the only bit of IDW1 I never read. I fell off of Furman's run early on and got back in with The Death of Optimus Prime. I went back and finished Furman's stuff and (for some reason) I decided to read all of the Costa stuff, but I've never read this. And now I don't want it to be my final memories of this continuity so I guess I never will.

Llama God

6/1/2022 01:43:30 pm

My parents always told me that if you can't find anything nice to say, then you shouldn't say anything at all. But then, like all parents they were also massive hypocrites. And now that I'm a parent myself, I shall also embrace this path of hypocrisy. Besides, f I didn't then I'd have nothing to comment on...

An admission, to start with: Much like yourself I've just re-read this and found it to be... not bad. Probably because I read it still in a post-Xmas holiday glow, or maybe because I know that it's not the end of the IDW-verse now, and that there's better to come. It does what it sets out to do, which is to give us a clean(ish) slate, with some accessible, action movie fun.

Nevertheless, back in the day I loathed this for displacing Furman's more detailed plots (no, not you, Reapers) and basically disregarding any loyalty that I might have felt towards the series as a reader. And I still loathe it, for similar reasons. Whilst it's a bit of popcorny, blockbuster fun, that wasn't what I wanted from my comics - we already had blockbuster films for that, comics needed to be something else. And of course comics companies don't have to cater exclusively to me (which is just as well), but even so it was still disappointing, to say the least.

Even ignoring the whole page of nothing happening, the writing really isn't great. It's just full of slightly-edgy wish fulfilment and cliches, and does literally nothing new or interesting. And ending on Optimus Prime being "dead", again, was just lazy. He'd only just had a near-death experience in the -ations, and he got better than that, so this isn't just lazy, it also has no sense of peril or drama. "Disappointing" is putting it mildly.

On the plus side, Guidi's art is nice, although it's a shame he mostly doesn't get to work with the -ations designs.

But really, this left a sour taste in my mouth, and if it weren't for the ongoing Spotlights wrapping up Furman's story and my own sense of completism I might have given up with the comic right here. I'm glad, because of what came later, that I didn't. But this was the start of my questioning it.

But to just address one of your points: "Because obviously how movies do giant robots is to build giant robots." I mean, they don't. But they should. They SHOULD. It's the only obvious way to do it...

Stuart

6/1/2022 01:55:20 pm

That's how the robots will get you.

JeremiahEcks

19/6/2025 05:09:43 pm

Well let me buck the trend and say... I loved this and if not for AHM, I would never have gotten into IDW Transformers.

I'm notoriously easy to please when I am invested in something but getting me there is tricky. I'd not intended to start collecting IDW in the first place, thinking it was like Armada or Bayformers - characters sharing names but nothing to do with the classics (i.e. lazy). I accidentally picked up Stormbringer in Hachette form and... I didn't really like it as it had issues for me personally that left me cold. The Shock/Sound/wave issues were better but not enough.

AHM on the other hand... well. My comic book store ordered it in by accident but when I read it... LOVED it. I didn't really have Furman's stymied ideas gumming it up so I was able to enjoy it as it was intended to be - a jumping on point to please older Geewunners like I cos play as.

And it got me.

I'll post more as we go but in short, I read this issue and I was hooked, lined and sinkered, without needing Unicron to do it.

Revisitation 52: Happy Birthday.

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