Transformers - Spotlight: Hot Rod

One of the more interesting "prequel" Spotlight issues, this gives a bit of backstory for Hot Rod while laying a couple of seeds for future stories. 

The lead's trademark rashness is examined in light of a raid for a MacGuffin called the Magnificence on an alien planet; however, it's only a qualified success - Hot Rod gets out with the object but apparently the rest of his team don't after a series of unpredicted mishaps. As team leader he blames himself despite evidence pointing to simple bad luck and jumps at the news that one of his troops - Dealer - apparently survived, setting off on a solo rescue mission.

While his motivation is simple stuff - he's trying to redeem himself - Furman plays a little with the predictable twist of Dealer actually being Decepticon undercover agent Doubledealer and rather than playing the cause of failure for impossible suspense tags on a coda where the true reason for the mission going wrong and the whole rescue being a complicated way of getting Doubledealer to infiltrate the Autobot ranks are laid bare. 

It's not a bad little story due to its' willingness to play to how obvious this all is to the reader while convincingly showing that Hot Rod himself could have no idea without making the Autobot look like an idiot, as his blinding desperation to make things right comes across well. The only problem is there's really not 22 pages of interest here - the actual rescue comes across as strung-out padding and if the format had required it to be closer to 15-16 it would be an easy job to cut this part down. However, it's a good read and Nick Roche's art once again excels, catching the bouncy enthusiasm of the more naive Hot Rod on the original mission and the grittier version breaking into the Decepticon prison.

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