That's absolutely not true, STL. Again, maybe it's a you-had-to-be-there thing, but if you hadn't been (necessarily) preoccupied with sucking dummies, soiling nappies and learning to walk during those years you'd probably have noticed the overexposure and be as tired of those characters as I am and many others are. (I'm focussing for the following on the '84 and '85 Transformers, since those are the years I've been bemoaning and the main ones in All Hail Megatron [except the Autobot movie cast, who were also overexposed in the eighties, so they're basically the same anyway]. When it comes to 1986 as a whole then that's great - no one would like a series focussing on Pipes and the '86-non-Wheelie-minibots more than me, but let's face it - they're not the 1986 characters McCarthy is using.)Originally Posted by STL
Okay, so it's a bit of a tautology to say it, but the '84-'85 characters were the only Transformers for the first two years of Transformers. The writers didn't have anyone else to use. And so they used them. A lot. They got to be in innumerable cartoons, comics, colouring books, picture books, read-along audiobooks, sticker books, paint-by-number books - they were everywhere. And then - decades later - Dreamwave and All Hail Megatron come along and do it all again. The later G1 characters never got anything like that level of exposure. Heck, Pat Lee actually thought G1 was the 84-85 characters and that G2 was "those introduced in the Transformers
movie and beyond". Then again, he also thought his 'favourite character' - Sideswipe - died in the movie and that the Transformers cartoon was so popular that it was only a matter of time before they made the toys. And this is what $#!*s me. They put the franchise in the hands of people like him and McCarthy - people who know bugger-all about Transformers and don't seem greatly interested in broadening their horizons beyond the little they do know. Transformers is at its best when it's in the hands of people who lovingly investigate everything they can about its history. People like Bob Forward, Larry DiTillio, Marty Isenberg, Derrick Wyatt, Simon Furman - people who clearly care about what they're writing. McCarthy couldn't even be bothered to read the IDW comics that came before his one, let alone explore the rich tapestry of Transformers history beyond the most obvious and easily-accessed material. Furman's sales figures might be bad at the moment, but this is a man who managed to sustain readers of a toy franchise comic book for decades. if you put the comics in the hands of someone who doesn't care about the characters then the figures will only continue to drop and the people who make up the long-term (and not just transient) fanbase won't be there anymore. McCarthy is capable of good work, like Spotlight: Blur and the AHM Autobots on Cybertron. He's also capable of utter bilge, like just about everything that's happened on Earth so far. If the G1 comics had been given to someone who didn't care about the characters in the way Furman still does; if Beast Wars had been given to hacks who didn't care what had gone before; if Transformers Animated hadn't been given to people who lovingly researched and homaged all aspects of the past then the Transformers franchise and fanbase would be a very different place to where it is today. I know I wouldn't be here. And I might not be one of those statistical readers of the IDW comics unless McCarthy or whoever ultimately replaces him learns to love the Transformers universe as a whole.
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