So, I just finished reading this (the whole bunch at once), and yeah...a bit of a mixed bag. What it did well it did very, very well, but what it didn't do well was not good. And unfortunately gets worse the more I think about it.

Spoilers btw.

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Tarantulas was great. Really well done. I loved Tidal Wave. Carnivac and friends were pretty sweet too, and the beasties' design was also very, very good. Up until the end, it was well-written, and I was genuinely interested to see where it was going.

But.

It kind of seems like it was trying too hard, and - in contrast - the story didn't really take advantage of the already ample resources it had. Tarantulas' designs/inventions are/were revolutionary by Cybertronian standards, but they all just get blown up with his base/the Noisemaze. Prowl's glimmers of conscience are potentially a really interesting topic/character trait/narrative feature, as is the relationship between Prowl and Mesothulas, but neither ever really gets explored in all that much depth. The biggest thing that annoyed me, though, is that the series seemed to just throw away a lot of significant stuff for not all that much impact. Kup/Prowl's mind-link thing? Nup, it's gone now, and the only real consequence is Prowl getting punched again. Hey, Guzzle's still gunning for Kup for his pals all getting killed, he's been waiting all this time for his revenge, and...oh, wait, he's dead. Verity Carlo's dying from radiation exposure, from the Wreckers' previous mission to Garrus-9, and...oh, look, she's better now! Thanks, creepy scientist guy, I sure didn't want to see how something like that might have gone down with the tight-knit Wreckers, especially not their feeling-responsible-now leader Impactor. And Springer...Springer. Springer's mysterious new origins just didn't 'feel right'. Springer isn't a minor character, he's a major character from the G1 cartoon series and one of the major Wreckers. He has a well-established personality and role, which just doesn't work with the cheerful-looking tabula rasa we see in the comic. The TPB notes say that the original draft was going to have Prowl kill Ostaros, and that Nick Roche rewrote it after the editor pointed out that Prowl doing bad things wasn't shocking anymore. That left him with Ostaros as a loose end, and he tied it up with Springer. But it just feels forced somehow, and also sort of messes with a pretty iconic character. I really think the potential of an artificial Cybertronian could have been put to better use, and that Springer was sort of a poor fit for the smiley little protoform. Heck, Roche could have used Stakeout, which would have added to the tragic aspect of how he wrote Tarantulas.

It's less that it was bad and more that it had so much potential, which ultimately just got wasted in a rush to wrap things up and/or for the sake of having a plot twist. I can't help but feel that trying for a better story and more consistent characterisation with bit less 'significance' and/or shocking reveals would have resulted in a better comic all around.