Opinion: Bottom 5 Moments of IDW's Transformers Run

[SharkyMcShark]

To be fair to AHM, McCarthy was originally told it would be a complete standalone run that was an alternate universe take on Transformers.

IDW were being indecisive about what to do with the -ation series and decided late on in the process that AHM would actually serve as the next part of the main continuity.

Also the DonFig Ongoing Bayverse G1 mashups were absolutely epic. I'd love a toyline done in that style.

[i_amtrunks]

To each their own but I think there will be few general things we can get a consensus on as pretty bad, the constantly delayed books and disorderly releases (and re-releases) of grade collections that collected multiple arcs or series together.

As for a bottom five, I won’t go into too much detail as I have already done that numerous times over the years.
5:The Don Figueroa / Transformers soft reboot era. Art was a shambles, too many names being dropped because no one looked right in robot mode, too many characters acting out of character and a very hard read most times. It wasn’t till Nick roche have a hand that we started to get back on track.

4: AHM: As Sharks alluded to, as a stand alone this would have been a fun little mini series like Hearts of Steel. As a pseudo retcon reboot (sensing a theme?) after all the ground work had been set by the Furman “-ations” and Spotlights this was just a massive backwards step that the Coda and numerous other titles kept trying to fix with very little success. Plus Drift... who may have ended up half way tolerable by the end but again needed a lot of work and that terrible Stone miniseries that was so boring I can’t even remember the tile to get him to a point where he became more than a joke...

3: Unicron or dead zombie planetformer... meh what a massive boring letdown that really told a mediocre small story that did nothing but allow them to wipe the slate more or less clean. Sadly another theme coming...

2: Events: Bar “Death of Optimus Prime” IDW failed every event they tried. Either they were bloated and silly like Dark Cybertron, were used to tie into the hasbroverse like Zombies/dvoid, were just plain useless like Megatron Origins or were a massive disappointment like Inicron and all the other Hasbroverse stories.

1: Hasbroverse: when it started by killing Kup in the zombies “combined universe” then they tried it again in Action Man... every new series that was part of the forced Hasbroverse needed a transformer in it that they then wasted or made useless. Then they ruined the main stories incorporating all the other mini series events (visionaries anyone???). All ending in the death of the entire universe and series. It was a slow sinful death Brough about by a boring event that also made the last year of the Prime book full and difficult to read (to the point where I no longer bought the issues) killed off the decent Windblade series and just generally left a bad taste in the mouth.

Sadly it is good bye to the IDW verse, Furman had an intriguing and different story to tell that Jame Roberts and Nick roche lovingly continued with Barber doing a most commendable job trying to tie it all Back together after McCarthy and Costa had done their best to kill it off.

I won’t be buying the new series but I’ll give it a read, it will have to be more Wreckers or Lost Light in style and not have any “big hasbro events” in the near distance.

[BigTransformerTrev]

To be fair to AHM, McCarthy was originally told it would be a complete standalone run that was an alternate universe take on Transformers.

IDW were being indecisive about what to do with the -ation series and decided late on in the process that AHM would actually serve as the next part of the main continuity.

4: AHM: As Sharks alluded to, as a stand alone this would have been a fun little mini series like Hearts of Steel. As a pseudo retcon reboot (sensing a theme?) after all the ground work had been set by the Furman “-ations” and Spotlights this was just a massive backwards step that the Coda and numerous other titles kept trying to fix with very little success. Plus Drift... who may have ended up half way tolerable by the end but again needed a lot of work and that terrible Stone miniseries that was so boring I can’t even remember the tile to get him to a point where he became more than a joke...

Well there ya go, its interesting to read that pretty much my fav comics were disliked by so many others. Shows we've all got our own tastes

I think I just fell in love with the AHM series when the Decepticons first invaded a city and you got to see both the 'Robots in Disguise' concept with the Constructicons rumbling into the city square and Skywarp transforming into a robot and scaring the hell out of a pilot who thought he was chasing another jet. Also the scale, like with the office furniture shaking as Megatron strode down the street and all you could see was his chest through a 3rd story window. Plus it is always good to see the humans get their arses handed to them

Gotta admit I didn't care much for the Autobot side of the story with them stuck on Cybertron. The only cool bit was Omega turning up and decimating the Insecticon swarm.

[KELPIE]

Not included in my list but probably should be included somewhere, would be how difficult this series was to catch up on, will be to re-read and will be to recommend.

With all the constant soft reboots, miniseries, starts and stops of ongoing, splits across titles and then the eventual hasbroverse.

What to read when and in what order is just way to confusing for anyone not reading at the time of release.

Also, for the people asking about hasbroverse, that was Chris Ryall going to Hasbro and pitching it. Hasbro loved the idea, so IDW went with it.

Basically it was a way for IDW to bump up other series sales and get more use out of their Hasbro contract. Oh and Ryall is a massive ROM fan

[KELPIE]

Also, for the people asking about hasbroverse, that was Chris Ryall going to Hasbro and pitching it. Hasbro loved the idea, so IDW went with it.

Basically it was a way for IDW to bump up other series sales and get more use out of their Hasbro contract. Oh and Ryall is a massive ROM fan

Well, now that Ryall is back and in charge of IDW, we can probably expect some kind of Hasbroverse attempt again?

[FatalityPitt]

If no one minds, I might just share my thoughts about the IDW comic run in this one post (save myself from answering two threads).

Be warned, there's some spoilers!

Things I liked:

Breaking down Autobot/Decepticon stereotypes - One of my favourite things about the IDW comics was that it really emphasized that not all Autobots are good, and not all Decepticons are evil. A character can be a Decepticon and still be good and honorable. One of my favourite moments was during the All Hail Optimus arc where Soundwave read the minds of the humans and surrendered because he realised his actions were doing more harm than good. It was a simple moment, but it really drove home the point that Soundwave was not a loyal Decepticon because he wanted to kill Autobots and rule the universe, but more because he thought he was doing the right thing, and he never intended to be evil. Then of course there's characters like Getaway - who demonstrated that just because you're a white Autobot car who hates Megatron (who, like Soundwave, never set out to be evil in the beginning); doesn't mean you're incapable of betrayal and murder. Even Optimus Prime himself had flaws (he tricked people into believing in the Matrix, which was really just a pulse generator).

Character depth and development - There's way too many examples to name, but some of the characters that really stood out to me were Starscream, Megatron and Slag. Starscream started off as Megatron's untrustworthy lackey (typical of G1 Starscream), but he got given what he wanted (became ruler of Cybertron), and after that he got put in interesting situations that taught him the error of his ways. In the end he sacrifices himself to stop Unicron, and doesn't complain about Optimus Prime taking the credit when he visits Bumblebee in ghost form. Then there's Megatron, which I can talk about until next Sunday, but I really like how IDW decided to make Megatron into an Autobot (unthinakble right?!) and the way it was justified. I thought it was well-done. As for Slag, we usually stereotype him as being a short-tempered delinquent, but in the IDW comics they show him as not only intelligent, but they provide some pretty compelling reasons as to why he doesn't trust authority (especially Optimus Prime).

To sum up, there's a lot of complexity and depth in each character, and after reading their backstories, it's easy to understand why they behave the way they do. Also, they're not simple black and white characters; there's varying shades of grey.

Things I disliked:

Forced social progressiveness - The Chromedome/Rewind relationship was quite touching and well-done, definitely a high-point of the series. But then they later introduced more same-gender relationships (Onslaught/Blast Off, Lug/anode, Ratchet/Drift, Arcee/Aileron, etc.) which started to come of as cliche and unnecessary. I felt some of them we're out of character; like the Onslaught/Blast Off affair. G1 Blast Off to me is someone who's aloof and arrogant, and doesn't seem like the sort who'd want to get romantically involved with anyone, let alone someone who transforms into a land vehicle. think the story could have been written just as well without the romance.

Very WORDY DIALOGUE - Especially in MTMTE/Lost Light, I thought the dialogue was too long. Because of my short attention span, I found myself needing to re-read almost every sentence.

Artwork - Was a a bit hit or miss for me. I like a clean and simple manga style, but sometimes the character proportions looked too cartoon-ish for my taste. Sometimes the artwork and designs of the characters looked too busy.

[GoktimusPrime]

Yeah. The thing about Chromedome x Rewind and Tailgate x Cyclonus is that their relationships felt more organic. These characters fell in love with each other but it just so happened that they are same-gender because 99% of Cybertronians are masculine. The same-genderness was incidental and thus felt unforced. They didn't make a deal of it.

Subsequent ones as you've mentioned have not been so subtle (although I personally never noticed Drift and Ratchet as a couple; I thought that they'd just become good mates). I also didn't mind Blast Off's thing with Onslaught so much, as it explored the realm of unrequited love and the fact that they were both masculine was, again, incidental. While Blast Off is aloof and arrogant, he never had a disdain for ground-based modes (unlike Powerglide who pities anyone who can't fly). But remember that Blast Off's G1 profile, as written by Bob Budiansky, also states:
"But his happiness is an act, a disguise he uses to hide his long-distance lonliness. His aloof and superior manner is a front that prevents the other Decepticons from knowing his true feelings."
So... yeah, IDW Blast Off's persona is pretty G1 accurate.

[bowspearer]

Things I disliked:

Forced social progressiveness - The Chromedome/Rewind relationship was quite touching and well-done, definitely a high-point of the series. But then they later introduced more same-gender relationships (Onslaught/Blast Off, Lug/anode, Ratchet/Drift, Arcee/Aileron, etc.) which started to come of as cliche and unnecessary. I felt some of them we're out of character; like the Onslaught/Blast Off affair. G1 Blast Off to me is someone who's aloof and arrogant, and doesn't seem like the sort who'd want to get romantically involved with anyone, let alone someone who transforms into a land vehicle. think the story could have been written just as well without the romance.

I'd actually describe it more brutally:

Woeful universe building in favour of patronisingly misogynistic, racist and homophobic tokenism!

And yes, when a writer decides that female characters, same-sex characters and characters from racial minorities don't deserve the universe building required to make them fit within established cannon, then they are essentially treating characters from those groups as nothing more than their genitals, the genitals of their partners and the colour of their skin.

So much for MLK's famous remark of:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

This was what turned me off IDW in the end: forced social progressiveness, which I consider to be blatantly shallow and tokenistic and utterly devoid of any kind of the quality universe building required for representations of any kind of quality. What really highlighted that for me was Mairghread Scott's disgusting and baseless "misogyny" attack on Simon Furman and the way universe building took place under the initial Furman run as opposed to how later stories in the run completely contrasted it in quality.

I loved the Dead-Furmanverse; ok, so Revelations was a bit rushed and the pacing should have been handled better, however from a universe-building perspective, there appeared to be a clear and concise bible there, whether one was actually written down on ink or not. I especially loved the way Arcee was handled as such a tragic and idenitifable character. Furman realised that with how he was approaching Cybertronian xenobiology, female Transformers weren't a natural fit, so of course, he makes gender one of the experiments of the Josef Mengele of the IDWverse Cybertron - Jhiaxus. That then profoundly affects Arcee in a way where you both want Jhiaxus to die a bloody death and want Arcee to find her peace. It was something which drifted more into harder science fiction and was a fascinating idea. In fact, the interesting flip side was that the only reason that the rest of the Transformers were male, canonically speaking is because Arcee's RNA was modified to female, which by point of difference, automatically made every other Cybertronian male; had Arcee been made male for example, then it would have made every other Cybertronian, including Optimus Prime and Megatron, female.

Likewise the whole Gorlam Prime idea was brilliant regarding the Dead-Universe and I honestly think it's some of Furman's best work ever.

In fact one of my criticisms of Bayformers has been that it would have been much better had it adapted the Dead Furmanverse.

Sadly what we got under Scott and Roberts was a massive drop in the quality of universe-building and the baseless nastiness from Scott towards Furman was a dark foreshadowing of that.

Scott's criticism of Furman was essentially that in making Arcee an experiment gone wrong, he was somehow treating women as "abominations" and thereby being misogynistic. The fact that the Transformers weren't even human to begin with and had a radically different form of reproduction to humans (making her entire criticism of Furman both baseless and unintelligent), didn't even seem to register with her.

I'd argue that one of the big danger with writing for alien races is that people anthropomorphise too much, to the point where the author forgets that they are writing about an alien race and whether the interactions and events happening to those characters even makes sense. A great example of this being done right was way back in Marvel Issue 1, when Bob Budiansky had the Autobots having the lightbulb moment that it was humans, and not machines which were alive on Earth. A romantic scene between men and women on the big screen was a complete anathema to the Autobot scouting party observing the drive in was another great example of this.

Contrast that with IDW as of around the end of Dark Cybertron. It's all well and good to want to give certain groups representation and discuss certain issues, but it needs to fit with the race or established universe you're dealing with; we have the issues around gender and sex we do, because were a species which is bisexual and bisexually reproduces.

A species which androgynous, for example is going to have different sexually based social issues than those we do and in fact an interesting question science fiction has posed and has done well with posing, is what happens when two species with entirely different biological sexualities and therefore sexual norms and customs based around those sexualities interacts; a great example of this is the Star Trek TNG episode "The Outcast", which though not seeming to please either side (some attacked the way Soren was treated at the end of the episode while failing to recognise how unfavourably it was portrayed, while others such as Jonothan Frakes felt it didn't go far enough).

Therein lies the problem. It's almost like the whole thing came about the egos of the writers first and universe building and respecting existing stories dead last. There was no credible attempt at universe building which made the Transformers being a bi-gendered species a possibility (which by the way, puts the universe building of the IDW comics at a level which is inferior to the continuity nightmare which is the Sunbow G1 cartoon), and therefore makes all their attempts to address issues like gender representation, same-sex relationships, marriage (heterosexual or same sex), etc essentially a square peg they've tried to ram into a round hole. Heck even the introduction of a multiverse with different versions of some characters, would have been sufficient universe-building to make the issues and representations they wanted fit with the IDW-verse.

Likewise when they redid M.A.S.K. they wanted racial minorities more represented so they rewrote the character of Matt Trakker, rather than simply having this be a "sequel" set 30 years later after the original M.A.S.K., which could have been one of the earliest initiatives off-shooting from the Skywatch program and have "Matt Trakker" be a codename at this point, which now belonged to the son of Hondo MacLean. Heck, if you really wanted to make things interesting, you'd have had something horrible happen to Scott Trakker and in a massive fall from grace and stab to the feels with a serrated knife, have him become the new "Miles Mayhem".

And yes, I am saying that minorities deserve to be given quality representation as opposed to tokenistic representation; any argument to the contrary is simply patronising bigotry.

Skillful writers build universes which fit the stories they want to tell and the issues they want to raise like a glove to the extent that they feel inevitable when they do arise. Ameteurish writers ignore universe building and the existing source material and much like a child terribly failing at putting a puzzle together, they try and mash issues and characters into a universe they they simply aren't designed to mesh with. Sadly, with IDW in the later half of its run, universe building was very much amateur hour.

That's not to say that there weren't some interesting ideas in there - the ideas about hotspots, natural vs "aided" birthing of transformers (ie forged vs constructed cold) and functionalism were brilliant ideas - in fact I don't think the whole functionalism issue was ever used to its full potential (ironically to make many of the social commentaries they were trying to make).

However it is abundantly clear that either the writers storytelling ambitions exceeded their universe-building abilities or they were unable to get far enough out of the way of their own egos to make use of the universe building abilities they had.

[i_amtrunks]

Well there ya go, its interesting to read that pretty much my fav comics were disliked by so many others. Shows we've all got our own tastes

I think I just fell in love with the AHM series when the Decepticons first invaded a city and you got to see both the 'Robots in Disguise' concept with the Constructicons rumbling into the city square and Skywarp transforming into a robot and scaring the hell out of a pilot who thought he was chasing another jet. Also the scale, like with the office furniture shaking as Megatron strode down the street and all you could see was his chest through a 3rd story window. Plus it is always good to see the humans get their arses handed to them

Gotta admit I didn't care much for the Autobot side of the story with them stuck on Cybertron. The only cool bit was Omega turning up and decimating the Insecticon swarm.

AHM was actually a good comic in terms of switching things up and the art was nothing but pure nostalgia and fan love. The story itself was a nice twist, the reason it made my list was because it was shoehorned into what already come before and made absolutely no sense with what came before or really the tone and vibe of what came after.

Pull out the twelve issues of AHM as a stand alone maxi series and it would be fine. Minus Drift of course!