Revisitation 99: Fine Young Cannibals.

11/11/2022

This week, in the last Revisitation of my 40th year, Megatron is feeling very middle aged as well as he looks out on how the bunch of idiots he commands are doing without him.

The answer being "Badly."

Plus, see how Prime is doing at not undermining Bumblebee's leadership at every turn.

The answer is "Badly."

All as I look at Issue 7 of the Mike Costa Ongoing!

2 Comments

Llama God

13/11/2022 05:12:14 pm

Oddly enough, this issue actually benefits from coming directly after the final issue of Last Stand of the Wreckers. Although the opening waste of space is something we've seen before, after all the chaos and fury of the Wreckers series it actually works to set up the mood for this issue because of how much it stands in contrast.

But that, of course, is purely an accident of timing, so we can't put that down to any master plan by Costa.

But, oddly, I don't mind the fact that we do open on a full page splash of nothing as nearly as much as I did in the Ironhide miniseries, and that mostly (well, completely) is because of the art. Which, coming from Su, is of course top quality, and is probably what raises this issue above the Costa standard of mediocrity. The only issue I do have with the art is how Su doesn't use the correct character models - which is especially unfortunate when it comes to Bumblebee. But I don't blame him - this is entirely an editorial issue, since they clearly didn't provide Su with any references or oversight. So I don't actually have an issue with the art, just the lack of care that from the IDW editorial team that it seems to betray.

Art aside, this isn't too bad, really. Well, for the Decepticon side of the story, which is nice and grisly. And I think when I first read this I'd not actually seen Five Faces of Darkness, so for me the depiction of the desperate and beaten down Decepticons wasn't too bad. The US Military side of the story, however, remains interest-free. I can't say I'm particularly thrilled with the promise that this is just going to keep on running...

In all, this isn't too bad, and it's the promise of Megatron's return - and Starscream's inevitable fall - that really stays with you after the issue. I guess we'll see if Costa actually delivers on that. At some point. Eventually.

Onwards...

LiamKav

19/11/2022 11:02:13 pm

And of course the same thing happens at the end of IDW1 when Su is again a fill-in artist and doesn't have all the character models, except there the robot modes are fine, it's just the vehicle modes he doesn't have. So everyone ends up a weird mish-mash of 3rd party toys and vehicle modes from the wrong series.

To be honest, this whole thing seems amazingly sloppy. How hard is it when you have an artist who's creating a character to say to them "send us over the character models you've made for them" and just keep them in a folder to send to any artists doing fill in issues?

Revisitation 99: Fine Young Cannibals.

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