Revisitation 82: It's Good to Talk.

24/9/2022

This week, Optimus and Spike finally have their big chat, with Optimus boldly declaring he considers Spike to be a great leader.

Something he ably demonstrates with what happens next.

Plus, learn the shocking secret of the Stunticons as I look at the Costa Ongoing issue 5!

3 Comments

Snowkatt

27/9/2022 09:33:26 am

This is honestly the point where after roughly 5 years of reading the IDW series I mentally bailed.
Logistics of comic book buying ensured I was still In, for another month of this trash.
And I was on board to see The Wreckers out, but that was it. I bailed for the next 2 years till the next soft reboot.

Words cannot convey just how much of a disappointment this comic was, and still is.
It’s boring, stretched beyond breaking point, threadbare “story”, plodding towards a conclusion that never pays off.
It’s supposed emotional climax, that lands with a dull thud.

Tone deaf characters, talking at each other, but not with each other.
Gross mischaracterizations.
Prime still suffering from shellshock.
An unlikable insufferable irritant, for a main human character.
The glacial pace of the story slouching towards an ineffectual conclusion long after everybody involved has stopped caring
Certainly the readers didn’t care anymore.
We were just looking at how this monumental trainwreck would end, because that’s what this entire series as a whole is.
A trainwreck.

A story that stop starts and lurches, as if Costa had no idea what he was going to do, or what he was working towards after Prime surrendered.

But worst of all was the utter banal predictability of it all.
Magnus bullheaded stubborn refusal to listen to reason.
Bumblebee being an ineffectual useless leader.
But worst of all, Swindle living up to his name and betraying the Autobots after all.
As expected.

I had hoped that it was not a ruse, that Swindle and the decepticons were actually deciding to make a turn for the better and forging ahead in a new direction.
That they would go through with their fancy words.
To do something new with these characters.
The war is over so what do we do now ?
A concept ready to be explored and push the series beyond what we have known.

Clearly that was beyond Costa’s scope, because all we got were the same old retreads, and variations of the same old themes.
Nothing but hot air.
The war lasted too long to just let bygones be bygones but why bother ending the Cybertronian civil warm if they are just going to retread the same old ground ?
The few good ideas Costa does have, such as Prime living in the past
Or Hot rod actually being right.
Either get scuppered or just go nowhere.

With issue 5 it became clear to me that Costa and IDW editorial had no vision for the future of Transformers
And I wanted no part of it.

The title of this issue is a reference to the second coming by W B Yeats
A gross over reach of Costa’s pretentious sensibilities.

Originally I was fully prepared to let my …dislike for this issue fully spill over on to the page.
But now that I am actually here, the only real emotion I have for it is indifference.
Ennui is somehow perfectly fitting for a comic book as thoroughly underwhelming as this.

Ice Cube

27/9/2022 03:50:19 pm

It's a shame the Stunticons didn't put Spike out of the readers' collective misery and kill him. It's impressive how a sleazy waste of page space in the most boring way Costa managed to make this asshole for his whole comic run.

The lack of quality on display is made even more jarring by being published at the same time as the Last Stand of the Wreckers.

Llama God

2/10/2022 03:38:08 pm

I'm not sure that I can add much more or put my feelings about this issue out there in quite the same way as Snowkatt did. But whilst this didn't cause me to bail as well, if Last Stand... hadn't been being published concurrently, I really might have.

Any hope that after a not-bad previous issue with Thundercracker that Costa's storytelling was actually starting to improve is immediately crushed with a terrible opening page. It's a splash-page of the outside of the airbase, and... that's it. It's a scene-setting shot. It would've been fine as the opening shot to an episode of a TV series, but this isn't a TV series, and every page counts. This does nothing, shows us nothing, is frankly boring and is a waste of space. And totally sets the tone for the rest of the comic.

Okay, maybe that's slightly too harsh - the Magnus stuff is... okay. But yeah, the conversation with Prime, presumably held back to this issue since it's the big dramatic moment, is so unimpressive that damp squibs would be insulted by comparison. And it does indeed suggest that Prime's an awful judge of character. Which isn't great.

I don't mind so much that Prime reveals that he was once just a soldier, because that can kinda be squared from his journey from police officer (which can be considered a kind of soldier anyway) to a freedom fighter (kinda) to someone who was still fighting in the army before becoming Prime. It's not *too* jarring.

The final reveal of Menasor is, however, disappointing and indeed ridiculous. I'm sure this'll be retconned at some point to be not as bad as it seems, but it doesn't seem believable that Swindle himself was capable of that. And it's disappointing because the interesting idea of Autobots and Decepticons working together post war has just been dropped in order to give us a fully predictable "surprise" and a splash page that unnecessarily takes a whole two pages. It's a nice bit of art, I guess, but given the absolute pointlessness of the opening page this just feels like a waste. Especially given the next page is 2/3rds dedicated to another large image of Menasor. So the reveal doesn't impress, it annoys.

So, basically, this one is a massive let down. And there's not much more I can say about it than that,

Revisitation 82: It's Good to Talk.

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