So Unicron has finished the Optimus Prime series (Bar Prime #25, out next week).
This was a massive 48 page issue that really felt like it was wiping the floor with almost every main G1 character, leaving the new or completely re imagined characters to carry on in the no longer published future.
I cannot say I was a fan of any of it, the deaths seemed cheap and more to remove the backstory and history of well known characters more than out of necessity, other deaths went along with the in joke that has been running in Prime for a while now: That Cybertronians love to sacrifice themselves at any and every opportunity, there were so many sacrificial deaths and fake outs it is not even funny.
It was yet another event that went out with a whimper and not a bang. I won't go into yet another "crossovers and shared universes maimed the Transformers license and hastened the end of the series" rants right now, but this event just had too many pieces, too many name calls, too many insignificant nobodies that for most of us, we don't care about in the slightest (looking at you Slide, Spike). In the end some of these made up characters became techno-babble important... I think.
I won't go into much detail for now, but I do not appreciate this series being called Unicron when it was not Unicron at all irks me. Barber weaved wonders with previous tidbits and story leftovers but in the end he could not get Unicron to be Unicron in anything but name... they may as well have had a Quintesson running the end game.
Milne did a stellar job with the art and I know Gok will find plenty of problems with the naming (there are a few mistakes I picked up, and I try to ignore them...), spelling and punctuation but overall this comic was a burnout for me. I struggled to finish, struggled to care and really I think that, more than anything proves that a reboot for the continuity (after the horrible reboot with Costa that seemed to have killed off the groundwork of Furman and the reboot of "Death" of Optimus Prime that started to bring it all back...) was much needed. The heast became too big (thank Primus it was not a return of D-void!)
I am not sad to see this series go, I am glad. Lost Light could not have kept going on alone in it's own universe, but I am sad that this and the Prime #25 will be the last of ten years of a mostly amazing series. They do not live up to standards set in the last decade.
Looking For: Wreckers Saga TPB Collection (with Requiem)