IT IS THE YEAR 2005

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Thad
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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 25, 2022 4:42 pm

IDW just put out a couple reprint collections, Best of Optimus Prime and Best of Megatron. Between them they reprint Chaos Theory, the first collaboration between James Roberts and Alex Milne, who would later go on to do Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, which Roberts would finish with artist Jack Lawrence under the title Transformers: Lost Light.

One of these days I should reread that entire run. It's my favorite Transformers run of all time, and it's dense; rereading that Chaos Theory two-parter, there's stuff literally from the first page that pays off at the end of the series.

It starts with a flashback to Megatron's origin story, the moment that led to him becoming a revolutionary: he witnesses two cops bullying an innocent bot, Rung, in a diner.

One of them is accosting Rung for spilling his drink. Rung says "I'll buy you another but I'm not sorting out the mess. I'm not a service droid."

The other cop says "Who are you, then? One of the Knights of Cybertron? The last of the Progenitors? Alpha Trion's long-lost spark brother?"

He's Primus.

It turns out, at the end of Lost Light, that Rung is Primus. He's a literal god who's erased his memories and taken on the form of a regular Autobot because he wants to live among them. He's Transformer Jesus, basically. You learn, at the very end of the series, that the cop taunting him with "Who are you, then?" all the way back at the beginning was guessing low.


Now, I don't think Roberts had that reveal in mind when he wrote that first page years earlier. But I do think he had the storytelling sense to reread those old issues and craft an ending that brought the whole thing full circle.

Going back and rereading Chaos Theory also answers one of the big questions left in the final issue of Lost Light. Megatron is finally put on trial for his crimes, and convicted. The last time you see him, he's going back to the courtroom for sentencing; he doesn't know what his sentence will be but he knows it'll either be death or life in prison. The comic never tells you what his final fate is.

But Chaos Theory does.

All the way back at the beginning, Optimus asks Megatron that very question: would you rather be executed, or imprisoned for life? Megatron answers that he'd prefer death to prison. So there's your answer.
One of the big ambiguities at the ending isn't ambiguous at all, if you go back to the start and reread it.

It's an extraordinarily well-crafted series, and I'm sure there are a lot of little details like that, early clues that you notice on a reread. One of these days I'll get around to doing one of those.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Mongrel » Tue May 10, 2022 9:00 pm

Can't uncee this now

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Büge » Thu May 12, 2022 12:47 pm

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Thu May 12, 2022 5:09 pm

Hey, all those Transformers comics I keep saying are great are in another Humble Bundle.

I've got a detailed writeup around here somewhere; maybe I'll dig it out and put it up on my blog or something.

Anyway, these bundles have been pretty frequent these past years but it's not clear if they'll continue once the license moves over to a new publisher, so this may be your last chance for awhile to snag the best damn Transformers stories ever (plus a bunch of other stuff that's maybe not the best ever but still mostly pretty good!) for $20.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Mon May 23, 2022 11:35 am

I read the "Best of Hot Rod" reprint collection and the first issue of the new "Last Bot Standing" miniseries in the same week and god damn there are a lot more Last Transformers Stories whose premise is more or less "Rodimus is the last surviving Transformer and is haunted by his past" than I expected.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Sat Jun 18, 2022 1:42 pm

I'm a little behind on the Beast Wars comic; I just read #15.

It's clear they got the memo and they know they're cancelled and have to wrap things up. #15 introduces Tigatron, Inferno, and Airazor all at once, and they're all agents of the Vok. The Vok show themselves to Optimus and Megatron and are prepared to kill them, but Optimus convinces them to grant a reprieve in the interest of scientific curiosity -- okay, you're all-powerful beings who have announced to two rival factions that you intend to wipe them out; don't you want to see what those two factions will do to try to stop you? He's speaking their language; the Vok see their victory as inevitable, so they agree to give the Maximals and Predacons a week to prepare, and agree that they won't spy on what they're doing in the meantime.

It's got some elements of the end of the first season, with a bit of the Tigerhawk story from the end of the series thrown in. It all feels a little rushed, but what could be more Beast Wars than rushing toward some kind of ending because Hasbro pulled the plug?

Interested in seeing where they go with this. And it'd sure be nice to see another similar Beast Wars series at whichever publisher ends up with the license, but I'm not holding my breath.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby beatbandito » Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:50 pm

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 23, 2022 4:19 pm

That's the best Furman script I've seen in 20 years.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 31, 2023 4:15 pm

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 29, 2023 4:05 pm

Okay three issues in I think I like Void Rivals.

"I love stories about minor characters on the periphery of the big stuff" seems to be winning out over "I hate Transformers stories that aren't about Transformers."

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Tue Oct 10, 2023 12:59 pm

First new Transformers comic, by Daniel Warren Johnson, is fine. It's the goddamn origin story again, but it has the good sense not to spend too long on the fleshlings and their fleshling problems (Spike apparently had an older brother who died, Sparkplug is an alcohlic) before they get to the giant robots shooting each other in their faces. Optimus, Jetfire, Ratchet, Starscream, Skywarp, and Soundwave all appear; Bumblebee gets shot in the face. I'm sure he'll be fine. They tease that something's happened to Megatron; we don't know what yet.

The length of the war and the hibernation on the Ark has been dramatically shortened; they say that their war's been going on for "over 100 years", presumably to tie it in to whatever larger story's going on in Void Rivals and the other shared-universe books. The most immediately obvious narrative problem this raises is...so how come nobody's found the Ark prior to now? It didn't crash-land in the middle of nowhere millions of years ago; it crashed in the American southwest sometime during the twentieth century. People would have fucking seen it fall out of the sky; didn't anybody go investigate?

Art's great, though.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Crick » Tue Oct 10, 2023 8:35 pm

I'm not usually a big Kirkman guy, but I've also been enjoying Void Rivals. The Gen 1 Transformers were before my time, I worry his Energon Universe is going to be steeped in things over my head, but after these initial issues, I'm planning on giving it a chance.

Especially interested in how they deal with GI Joe. If they try to ground it or keep it campy to avoid *various implications*

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 11, 2023 12:41 am

The thing about Transformers is it gets rebooted every few years. It's definitely a nostalgia thing, but it's a nostalgia thing where they like to throw out all the continuity periodically and start over.

I'd say pick up #1 and see if you like it. I think it's worth the price of admission on the art alone, though there are details that probably won't matter to you (Jetfire greeting Starscream as an old friend, everybody being really upset when Bumblebee gets shot in the face).

Void Rivals is Transformers-adjacent but, at least so far, mostly standalone. Jetfire's got that pointless cameo in the first issue which is basically just a couple pages' digression followed by "Huh. Well that was weird." and then a Quintesson shows up later, but at least so far none of that's been important. I expect there are more revelations to come as to how the Cybertronians' war relates to the war between the main two races in Void Rivals, but hopefully they'll keep that book centered on its own story.

I alluded to this a few posts up, but I'm kinda torn between two opposing desires here -- generally speaking, I love stories that are about minor characters on the periphery of some larger conflict (say, Marvels, or Godzilla: The Half-Century War), but OTOH I really hate Transformers stories that are focused on humans instead of Transformers. Void Rivals is kind of both, and so far, at least, the stuff I like is definitely beating out the stuff I don't.

I'd add that I'm generally a Kirkman fan; I stuck with Walking Dead to the bitter end even if I feel like that's probably 100 issues longer than I should have, and I'm enjoying Fire Power. I read his Ultimate work here and there and thought Marvel Zombies was maybe too cute, and I read the first few trades of Invincible but never got around to finishing it (pretty sure I got a complete run in a Humble Bundle some years back).

I'm not as keyed into GI Joe as some of the other folks here are; my parents and grandparents were pretty permissive as far as what I got to watch on TV, but the whole military propaganda aspect of GI Joe really stuck in their craw and they didn't want me watching that, so I only caught episodes sporadically as a kid (I'd usually catch the PSAs at the end waiting for whatever was on next to start), and never really read the comics either. I always hear good things about Larry Hama's run; I mainly know him from '90s Wolverine, which is somewhat less celebrated.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Crick » Wed Oct 11, 2023 10:14 am

Void Rivals is completely original, right? It has the vibe of an 80s cartoon updated for modern comics, but I'm pretty sure it's its own thing.

Yeah, so far, the Transformer aspect has been more or less accessible. I've always thought the idea had a lot of potential as a commentary on war, use of weapons, all that, but have always been a little unsatisfied (again, there may be IDW comics that do this, I'm not super versed in it).

I'm also not super attached to GI Joe. I have vague memories of a 90s cartoon in between Spider-Man and X-men on FOX Kids? Could've been reruns. Never had the toys or anything.

It's just a thorny idea -- as you say, basically just military propaganda -- and I'm always fascinated how people handle it. Feels lose-lose to me. You turn warfare into a campy cartoon or you touch on nuanced horrors of war but with characters like "Cobra Commander" and "Roadblock". I guess the compromise is something like Metal Gear? But only one maniac can pull that off.

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Re: IT IS THE YEAR 2005

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 11, 2023 11:01 am

Crick wrote:Void Rivals is completely original, right? It has the vibe of an 80s cartoon updated for modern comics, but I'm pretty sure it's its own thing.

Yeah, it's an original story. Its being a stealth relaunch of the Hasbro comics was a plot twist in the first issue that they kept quiet until...I wanna say it leaked maybe a week before launch?

Crick wrote:Yeah, so far, the Transformer aspect has been more or less accessible. I've always thought the idea had a lot of potential as a commentary on war, use of weapons, all that, but have always been a little unsatisfied (again, there may be IDW comics that do this, I'm not super versed in it).

The IDW run was long and a little complicated, but yeah, that's more or less what the "Phase Two" era is about. The comics written by John Barber are largely focused on how none of these giant robots who've been at war for millions of years are quite sure how to handle peacetime. The ones written by James Roberts get into how the war started and are largely about how revolutions eventually eat themselves -- Megatron's revolution is unquestionably righteous and just in the beginning, but once he gets a taste of power he becomes the same sort of tyrant he sought to overthrow. (In this version he's basically "What if Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were all the same person? And also he's Magneto.") It's surprisingly deep stuff for a comic about robots that are also cars, and I hope Skybound makes it all available again at some point.

Crick wrote:I'm also not super attached to GI Joe. I have vague memories of a 90s cartoon in between Spider-Man and X-men on FOX Kids? Could've been reruns. Never had the toys or anything.

It's just a thorny idea -- as you say, basically just military propaganda -- and I'm always fascinated how people handle it. Feels lose-lose to me. You turn warfare into a campy cartoon or you touch on nuanced horrors of war but with characters like "Cobra Commander" and "Roadblock". I guess the compromise is something like Metal Gear? But only one maniac can pull that off.

I've got a copy of the animated movie Warren Ellis wrote around here somewhere. Didn't get around to watching it when "written by Warren Ellis" was still a draw; who knows if I ever will. He seems like the sort of guy who could at least do something interesting with the premise.

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