RAC continues his look back at 2017 with his three favorite comics of the year - plus a couple of runners-up! It's been a good year for Transformers comics overall, and there've been some pleasant surprises for us. Including - and RAC was very skeptical about the possibility of this at the beginning of last year - some Shared Hasbro Universe books that turned out truly excellent. Keep reading to see the list! ...well, it's more of an article. We need a word that combines those two things...
The only stumbling point of the series in my opinion is when, at the very last moment, the fight and the chase are rendered moot as one of the characters does what the business point of this mini-series was the entire time, and brings the Visionaries into existence in the IDW continuity. It can't help but feel like a bait and switch for the people who don't have any great affection for Visionaries, but were instead invested in the comic they were actually reading. (That's an effect that will be less pronounced when reading First Strike in trade paperback form, as it was hinted at in a prologue chapter that was not particularly easy to come by and not well-promoted originally.) And then we end on a tease of the next big event, and they mean big: Unicron. Who it seems may be bringing IDW the gift of a reboot this year, which surely will please and unite a reader base already of different minds on the changes brought by the Hasbroverse!
But forget all that, as much as the comic will let you. Taken on its own (again, as much as it will let you do so) First Strike is excellent.
But as good as the writing by John Barber was, what really made this was Alex Milne and Josh Perez on art and colors. ROM Vs. was Milne's first interior work since More Than Meets The Eye folded. And John Barber gave him a ton of fun stuff to draw. Aliens! Robots! Monsters! Alien Robot Monster Hybrids! Milne said that he had a great time working on this book, and it shows. The Ultra Magnus Dire Wraith design is great, keeping the basic shape of the character while twisting it into something truly frightening. Josh Perez's colors make everything incredibly vivid and downright beautiful. The appearance of Dire Magnus, silhouetted against a sunset, clearly Ultra Magnus but also not quite Ultra Magnus, is spectacular. One day I'll need to ask Alex and Josh directly if that's a riff on a similar scene in Evangelion or just a happy coincidence.
The insight into Starscream in the final issue and Annual was a high point, which is unsurprising since Scott's two takes on Starscream (here and in Transformers Prime) are ExVee and my favorites. Being confronted with who you could have been had life not intervened, and being given occasion to live up to that person, is a powerful concept and one that took Starscream to new places. In the end, Starscream displayed the hidden decency that was represented as a part of him by both his "true" self as well as his conscience in the form of (Maybe) Ghost Bumblebee. And Windblade, who had herself come to embrace new aspects of herself over the years, accepted a new role as First Delegate of the Cybertronian Council of Worlds.
Sara Pitre-Durocher's artwork was perfect for this story. Her art has both the technical and emotional range that is key to a great Transformers comic and she gave every character personality and life. She's become one of my favorite Transformers artists in just the last couple of years. She's guesting on Lost Light soon, and I hope IDW keeps her busy. Her and Mairghread Scott both, in fact!
Till All Are One's annual presents me with a problem as a reviewer, because it's my favorite book, and now it's gone, and its ending was so satisfying that it's going to be difficult for me to go on reading these characters as written by other people. It feels, as much as I hate to say this, like A Great Jumping-Off Point For Old Readers. Maybe, hopefully, 2018 will turn me around on that - after all, First Strike and ROM vs. Transformers were both surprises to me!
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