Transformation 329: Last Amongst Equals.

30/8/2018

This week we start our final visit to Earth and get an answer to the question we were all asking: What has Spike been up to for the last two years?

Plus find out how useful the Neo Knights are and the best way to sit in a chair.

All in my look at THE LAST AUTOBOT? PART 1!

Three weeks.

6 Comments

Charles RB

31/8/2018 04:19:22 pm

The Next Issue box with its "umm-ing" talk is great, mocking the very Spike plot the comic made you read.

Buster coming back with Spike would've made this more of a proper 'finale' for them. It's Spike that's the one who can do the robot action but it's Buster who was in #1, Buster who was the human identification figure for half the run, Buster who held the bloody Matrix.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

31/8/2018 04:41:11 pm

Thunderbirds was already go by this point on BBC2 - it had a credibility because it wasn't in a children's slot. I have a vague memory that I somehow knew the name was based on other shows as well but can't recall how.

The end of Machine Man was incredible. However it's telling that the series is now resorting to easily concluded back-up strips.

As for the main story, I guess that just crashing the Ark wouldn't have been a satisfactory conclusion so having some survivor emerge and get defeated by whoever's around on Earth (and in the long run this would have been a natural role to put the Neo-Knights in but here they're unavailable) is pretty much the logical way to round this off and in turn you need a good reason why the defender wasn't taken off to Cybertron so it pretty much has to be Spike with a reason why he's taken a back seat from it all.

I think a lot of the problem goes back to the mess of the names. Had Spike been around from the outset it will feel completely natural to feature him at the end. But instead we have a one plotline & epilogue character created to reconcile the names in the comic with the demands of Hasbro several years in and he's not even been mentioned in the two and a half years since.

Tigerbread

1/9/2018 01:56:57 pm

It's weird how actionmaster Grimlock now has the shadow of eye sockets behind his visor, where before that wasn't the case

Snowkatt

10/9/2018 05:40:55 am

Honestly, this issue and the next ( US 79 ) have always felt superfluous at best, and pointless at worst.
Instead of fleshing out the story for issue US 80,
it's a pointless diversion that adds nothing and goes nowhere.

The End Of The Road, is just dumped on the reader without any preamble, and this disaster doesn't help in the slightest.
It acts like its just another issue in a series that hasn't been axed.

So this could mean several things.
The axing came so late. it was too late to change this disaster and they had to push it out.

Nobody involved cared much anymore.

Or this was set up for the UK series still trucking on regardless and I heard rumblings about that.

But on its own, this issue is a huge misfire and the wasted space could have been used for a better swansong.
Especially galling, is Galvatron's ignominious demise.
Or the fact that this entire issue, could have been dealt with in a single page.
Just show the crashed ark and the 4 transformers dormant and possible broken beyond repair.

Felicity

1/1/2020 02:32:25 am

It might have been that Simon Furman wanted to end on a nice round number like 80 (at least for the USA) and realised he needed to pad things out for one extra issue to make that happen.

Even so, you’re right, those pages could have been used more productively.

Felicity

1/1/2020 02:46:14 am

This part does bother me. What happened to the Spike who had accepted Fortress Maximus as part of himself back in #51 (“The Man in the Machine!”)?

Also I was mistaken in an earlier comment. Spike’s best hairstyle wasn’t in his first appearance in #38 (“Trial by Fire”); it was a little after that, when his hair got spikier. Maybe in #39 (“The Desert Island of Space”) when he was visiting Sparkplug and tracing the phone call just by touching the phone wire. In any event the José Delbo version is the definitive comics Spike for me.

On the plus side, Canada gets to appear in the comic. On the minus side, it continues the depiction of Canada as a mostly-empty Arctic wasteland, where we live in igloos and portage our canoes while taking our fur pelts to trading posts. But at least the Canadian Forces appear as they try to stop Galvatron, so it’s not completely set in colonial times.

Have the Neo-Knights eaten anything in the two days they’ve been wandering around Cybertron? Have they gone to the bathroom? At least they can use the rain storms to shower and wash their superhero uniforms.

Transformation 329: Last Amongst Equals.

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