Comic Review: The Death of Optimus Prime (#125)

[i_amtrunks]

I didnt read anything into it, and I must say I enjoyed the big M not being sighted or barely mentioned in the issue.

[GoktimusPrime]

Boy I'm glad I avoided this thread until I picked up this ish!

When I saw them advertising the title "The Death of Optimus Prime" way back, I thought, "Nuh, not again..." - and the beginning reminded me of when Optimus Prime delved into the Matrix and saw Cybertron's distant past in G2... but the pages lie - another story in disguise!!

I do indeed like seeing all those neutrals coming along - showing that only a minority of Cybertronians took sides in the war with the majority being pacifistic non-combatants! Until now, I thought it was the other way around - and that seems to have been the way that Cybertronians have been portrayed in other media... one big warlike race. But it's interesting here how they show the majority of Cybertronians as being civilians with a disdain toward war.

I also like how they tied in the Drift mini-series with this story -- and continuing to use another Japanese G1 character as part of the group who refuse to fight. I think it's kinda interesting see the Hasbro G1ers being the fighters, and the non-fighters being Takara G1ers (and a whole lot of generics -- hopefully they'll populate them with more Takara-bots).

The reimagining of Dai Atlas' name as "Dei Atlas" and meaning "God Map" was interesting, although implausible (the odds of a Cybertronian language-name sharing commonality with Latin and Greek... then again, Transformer names never really have sociolinguistically made sense, so I really should just suspend disbelief on this one ;p). The suggestion that "Dai" came from "Dei"... at first made me cringe because I thought, "Please don't tell me that IDW staffers actually pronounce Dai Atlas as Dei Atlas"... but now that I think about it...

* "Dai" is Japanese for "Great" (thus Dai Atlas means "Great Atlas")
* "Dai" is also pronounced as "dae" in Korean, which sounds pretty much the same as "dei"
* "Dei" of course is a corruption/shortening of the word 'deity' which comes from the Latin deus/dea.
...and if we really wanna scrape the bottom of the barrel, deus is related to the word dies which is Latin for "day", but of course is pronounces as /da'i'z/ in English -- and if we remove the final "s" it's Dai - Dai Atlas. Eeeyyyyy!

Overall, I was expecting this issue to suck, but I've been pleasantly surprised to see that it doesn't! I did deliver on the death of Optimus Prime, but in a new way that I didn't see coming. The spoileriffic title actually threw me off the scent because I thought it would literally be about him dying rather than in a metaphorical sense! Nice!

I agree with what i_amtrunks said -- hope not to see either Prime or Megs for a long time coming (though I'm not too keen about Bumblebee as Autobot leader either). I hope they do make at least one issue showing us what Orion Pax is up to though, heh.