Transformers!

[anarky]

Sunstreaker really got the brunt of it. He was deactivated in #4 and not revived until #75, by which point there were way too many characters getting the attention.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

In my excitable and passionate youth, I once tried to catalog all the TFs in the comics and their storyarc over the 80 issue run. I didn't get very far. But I did notice the trend of Megatron and Optimus being complete idiotic douches for most of the entire series. Fuckin' Bob Budainsky.

[anarky]

Circuit Breaker would make a good MK/MAX title. This woman, who worked for Tony Stark had a break with reality and thinks she worked for G.B. Blackrock and fought giant ass robots in a skimpy circuit board outfit. So now shes in this asylum and doesn't know if what she remembered was real or not.

Hope you don't mind, but I sorta borrowed this in the CBR Urban Legends responses.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Hey hey! Maximum Dinobots by Furman and Roche comes out next week! Supposedly bridges the gap between Revelations and AHM. Finally get to see what happens to Sunstreaker. I have a tingly sensation in my weewee.

[anarky]

So, you still following this, Rollo?

I essentially gave up after All Hail Megatron. It was a fucking joke. Aside from being amazingly badly written and inconsistent with the stuff that came before, it just isn't much fun to watch the Decepticons actually destroying everything on Earth while the Autobots sit around and cry.

I've noticed Furman's name isn't on anything forthcoming. I ordered the paperbacks of Last Stand of the Wreckers and the new ongoing to see if the franchise can be redeemed, and, if they suck, that's it for me.

I hope they are aware of how they botched thing things, such as how their planned relaunch with All Hail Megatron was supposed to re-energize the series but sold less than the previous series.

[Rollo Tomassi]

I'm still reading it. It's alright, nothing amazing. But it's comfortable.

Furman is working on a Movie-verse series right now.

[anarky]

Holy shit. I got the first paperback of the ongoing, and, well, holy shit.

There is actually a guy getting a paycheck to write this shit? Fuck, vynsane.com characters are more consistent than the "Transformers" in this abortion.

Hot Rod and Prowl are completely different characters from the earlier series. Prime is a putz. Swindle is ridiculously transparent. Bumblebee as leader, fuck, man, don't make me laugh. Oh, wait, you didn't, because there's nothing funny.

Ultra Magnus is apparently a big joke to this douchebag, and this new "hip" Spike Witwicky is more deserving of a suckerpunch to the groin than the original cartoon Spike and his retarded son ever were.

Also, showing the Don Figueroa covers with bastardized G1/movie hybrid looks across from the variant Wildman covers with the classic characters only highlights how not ready for primetime Figueroa is. I have no idea why TF fandom thinks he's so good.

I found myself almost wishing Rob Liefeld were writing and drawing this book. Because at least then you could make fun of it.

[Ran]

I wandered into a thrift store. They had a rack of comic books from what looked like the 80s and 90s. There were a bunch of Transformers books marked for between $2 and $4. It looked like they has the 1st Aerial Bots, Devestator, Jetfire, and Dinobots issues. Another cover I recognized was Shockwave writing "Transforers are dead" on a wall. Are any of those worth picking up for that price?

[Rollo Tomassi]

The Shock wave issue was #5.
The first Devastator was 11 or 12.
First Arialbots was around 21.
First Dinobots was issue 8 and has a special place in my heart because it was one of my first comics ever.

A lot of those early issues were reprinted and sold in drug stores in bagged 3-packs along with old GIJoe books. Without checking to see if their first prints and in good condition (and in a thrift store, that is circumspect) I wouldn't drop $2-4 on them. But $2 is not unreasonable even for some nostalgic/historical reading.

[Ran]

There was also covers with Omega Supreme, Blaster fighting some robot, and Circuit Breaker. All of them were in plastic bags with cardboard backs so I didn't really check them out. But, I was just looking at the covers on ebay. On ebay, I noticed some have a bar code in the lower left corner and others have Spider-man's head. I know there wasn't any covers with bar codes at the thrift store. There may have been some with Spider-man or possibly a Transformer head.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Comics with UPC were newstand editions that were sold thru Curtis Circulation to newstands, book stores, grocery stores, gas stations, etc. If they didn't sell, the vendor could return the unsold ones for credit.

The ones with "faces" in the UPC box are Direct Market, sold to comic specialty shops at a greatly reduced price, but they were unreturnable.

If you're serious enough about purchasing them, you can ask the guy if you can take them out of the bag at look them over or have him do it for you.

The Circuit Breaker cover is issue 9(?)
Blaster was around 17 or 18 when they story goes back to Cybertron for a couple issues. Scrounge dies in that storyline. Its pretty good for the Marvel series.
Omega Supreme was right around the Arialbots issue, either before or after.

[Ran]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to think about it before I buy them.

[anarky]

Read Last Stand of the Wreckers. I decided not to cancel my pre-orders on the non-core titles, to see how they measured up. LSOTW had rave reviews, and even praise from Furman on the back cover.

It was... it was passable. I had a really tough time differentiating between the new guys until it was too late. The art and coloring made it tough to tell anyone apart unless they were really distinctive. Overlord didn't particularly impress me; I kept reading (even in the comments) that he was based on Caligula, but I thought it was pretty weak; what we have about Caligula (admittedly probably exaggerated as hell) paints a picture of someone who makes Overlord look like a wuss.

Verity seemed tacked-on. The fall of Garrus-9 seemed a bit corny; if all the Decepticons feared Overlord, why not bug out immediately when he showed up? How could a small squadron of 'Cons led by one super-Decepticon take out the security there? I mean, fuck, we saw before that they had no qualms about reactivating guys if necessary. Grimlock and Impactor were both imprisoned there. And Bludgeon was there, too, pretty much a brainless engine of destruction. You mean to tell me Fort Max, Grimlock, and Impactor couldn't put a serious fucking hurting on Overlord if that one goofy superweapon could take him out in the end? Shit, Max could've unleashed Bludgeon as a last resort; the IDW version of the character would just lay waste to everyone on the planet, then be too stupid to know how to leave.

If Ironfist were such a fucking weapons master, why couldn't they take out Overlord from further away?

Not to mention that it makes clear that the remaining Decepticons killed all the prisoners. Which means Fort Max and Grimlock. I find it pretty astounding that the original plan was to kill the three main guys (Perceptor, Springer, and Kup--seriously?!?), but Hasbro vetoed one (likely Perceptor), IDW vetoed a second (Kup, or maybe Perceptor if Hasbro vetoed Kup), and they admittedly wussed out on the third (Springer)--but it was fine to kill Fort Max and fucking Grimlock? Admittedly, there's a loophole, but that'd be a downright "Jean is really in a space cocoon and she wasn't really the Phoenix" way to bring Grimmy back. Topspin and Twintwist, people love them, but they're minor. Guys like Guzzle and Treadshot (who shouldn't have been there given his assignment earlier in the IDW-verse) and Kickoff, no one gives a shit. But Grimlock? Hell, Fort Max for that matter.

Honestly, this universe is such a pale shadow of what it was. Furman's right that it's the best in a while, but only because it doesn't utterly shit on what made Transformers comics at their best so damned great. This is just above average fanfic.

I've got Drift and Ironhide still on pre-order, but I have a feeling those are the end for me. Twice in the past ten years, a publisher has so severely assabused one of my favorite properties so badly I have no desire to continue it. I count the days until they fuck up GIJoe.

[Rollo Tomassi]

I missed the first two issues of Wreckers, so honestly I had clue what the fuck was going on.
Ironhide was pretty good. The story is decompressed a bit, but the art was good
Drift is too early to tell.
The ongoing was weak for the first eight issues or so, but has gotten more interesting. The idea that TFs are 'stuck' on Earth, but have to hide, so they truly are 'Robots in Disguise' is getting back to the root concept of the whole idea.

[anarky]

The preview for the next issue seems like it's broadcasting (forgive the pun) a bit too obviously that Soundwave was behind the assassination attempt on Bumblebee.