Comic Review: Transformers - Chaos

PUBLISHER: IDW (2011)
WRITERS: MIKE COSTA, JAMES ROBERTS
ARTISTS: LIVIO RAMONDELLI, CASEY COLLER

I am not a professional comic writer, or even an amateur one. However, I have a salient tip for any writer out there - if you're hurriedly compacting two-plus years of storylines from multiple linked series in four issues compacted and compressed from a planned mini-series to clear the decks ahead of a relaunch event do not, I repeat do not call it Chaos. Thankfully for anyone looking for a cheap shot at Costa (and there was never any shortage both in terms of opportunity and opportunists) it's pretty chaotic. While James Roberts is involved his role seems largely to be doctoring a bit of the dialogue and making sure the characters he's eyeing for successor series More Than Meets the Eye get guided through (note the sudden assignment of whacky funster status to Swerve, just a teaser for the mint banter we'll be subjected soon) and the rest is pure Costa - by which I mean a succession of promising developments executed poorly and quickly before he shuffles on to his next brainwave.

Comic Review: Transformers - Police Action

PUBLISHER: IDW (2011)
WRITER: MIKE COSTA
ARTISTS: BRENDAN CAHILL, E J SU

With the "Chaos" event folded into the main ongoing at late notice and with planned co-writers Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning joining Don Figueroa in fucking off Mike Costa was left juggling much of the closing days of the IDW ongoing, now stepped up fully to bi-monthly. He used alternate issues to tidy up the remnants of the Earth-based story threads which probably pissed a lot of readers off at the time, which is always a plus. Costa was probably used to fans' utter impatience with anything he did at this point and for once didn't buckle; it's strange how James Roberts is deified for taking a year to answer perceived flaws in his stories and yet Costa's versions of Spike and Prowl had morons apoplectic every month, desperate to have every little frame explained to them immediately. Arguably the difference was Costa tried to supplicate these idiots and cater to them. Or that Roberts is a dyed in the wool Transformers fan who spends most of his time talking about Transformers to people who like Transformers whereas Costa was a jobbing writer who'd rather have been writing X-Men or something and saw the title as a means to an end. But Transformers fans would never be so fickle and shallow; it wasn't like they spent years trying to have Bob Budiansky shot for not writing dark epics about Unicron or anything mental like that.

Comic Review: Transformers - Chaos Theory

PUBLISHER: IDW (2011)
WRITERS: MIKE COSTA, JAMES ROBERTS
ARTISTS: GUIDO GUIDI, ALEX MILNE

The supreme irony of IDW finally taking the plunge into making a single Transformers ongoing only for it to be even more fractured continues in the fifth collection of the series. IDW had by now realised that Mike Costa wasn't really hitting the right notes with either the fandom or the by this stage non-existent casual readers the title had accrued and began looking at bringing in another writer alongside the handful, the original plan being for Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning to join the three or four different Mike Costas in writing the book. After contributing the dodgy "Infestation" and weird "Heart of Darkness", the first building blocks for the planned "Chaos" event storyline, yet another IDW saga that would make sure the world of Transformers would never be the same or whatever. They then fucked off to do something else and instead the job went to James Roberts, then just the popular mortal writer of Last Stand of the Wreckers and yet to be cocooned in a sycophantic social media echo chamber.

Comic Review: Transformers - Revenge of the Decepticons

PUBLISHER: IDW (2010-2011)
WRITER: MIKE COSTA
ARTISTS: NICK ROCHE, DON FIGUEROA, ALEX MILNE

Mike Costa's schizophrenia continues in the third batch of ongoing issues, consisting of a prelude-style one shot and then a five-part story. The real story though is again IDW's lack of editorial direction and forward planning; just like the Dead Furmanverse and All Hail Megatron the ongoing is set into that pattern of a bold new direction that didn't go down too well and then furious backpedalling when the fresh stuff failed to find the expected crossover audience, instead forcing pandering to the fandom in order to keep the numbers up. The main events of the first year's issues were that the war was over, that Megatron was out of the picture, that Optimus Prime had abdicated and that Bumblebee was the leader of the Autobots. Basically all of these things are undone in deed if not word.

Comic Review: Transformers - Ironhide

PUBLISHER: IDW (2010)
WRITER: MIKE COSTA
ARTIST: CASEY COLLER

IDW's first attempt at a solo 'spin-off' mini-series Bumblebee suffered from a catastrophic piece of mistiming, choosing a character who was too entrenched in the ongoing plot and at exactly the wrong time. Aside from which it wasn't all that bad; the problem with the Spotlight format had always been that it's fairly easy for any writer worth their salt to focus on one character and give them a bit more focus than might be allowed in a bigger arc, leaving them to come out the other side a richer character. The problem was always the plot - whether to keep it self-contained and end up with something inconsequential or whether to link it into something bigger and just be left with a regular issue with narration boxes.

Comic Review: Transformers - International Incident

PUBLISHER: IDW (2010)
WRITER: MIKE COSTA
ARTISTS: E J SU, JAVIER SALTARES, GUIDO GUIDI

All comic writers have bad ideas. The trick is to realise them as such. The second batch of issues from Mike Costa's unsubtitled ongoing series are an odd bunch. The man has no quality control; not since Bob Budiasnky's second year on the old Marvel title (after which he was obviously trying to get fired) has a writer on Transformers had so many good ideas and so many bad ideas blended with a total inability to realise which is which. The result is bordering on schizophrenia and results in a wildly uneven ride. 

Comic Review: Transformers - For All Mankind

PUBLISHER: IDW (2009-2010)
WRITER: MIKE COSTA
ARTIST: DON FIGUEROA

This is it, the most innovative and crucial piece of Transformers fiction since Bill Mantlo and Ralph Macchio sent that stuff about naturally occurring gears and pulleys creating sentient life off to the printers in 1984. Since then the story of the Transformers has been dominated above all by one thing - the civil war between the Autobots and the Decepticons. Whole stories have been hung on how perpetual and unavoidable this cycle is, a billion dollar film franchise hinges on the premise that the Decepticons are never quite beaten and naturally having two factions always battling is vital to selling toys, so it's never going to go away. Apart from here, where it does.

Comic Review - Transformers: All Hail Megatron Coda

Having already blundered with the format and possibly the content of All Hail Megatron in the first place IDW decided the best way to deal with the troubled Maxi-series was to extend it by four issues and throw out a series of semi-related short stories while re gearing for the upcoming ongoing series. Mostly this involved catering to whiny Simon Furman fans who were used to having every single dot painstakingly joined for them and undoing as much of Shane McCarthy's work as possible. In short the treatment of McCarthy and AHM underlines that the company would have been fine with whatever if they'd had a blockbuster on their hands but now that the disappointing figures were in they were suddenly all about respecting loyal readers. 

The problem is that most of these stories really didn't need to be told. The Denton Tipton story showing Perceptor's transformation is nicely done and probably one of the more worthy subjects but at the same time is indicative of IDW's habit of capitulating to the pedestrian intelligence of their readers. Within the context of AHM it's entirely plausible and obvious that Perceptor needed to tool up to survive in the current situation and did so, something Sean McCarthy showed amply in two frames. Here we have ten pages for the angry idiots who need everything drip fed. It looks nice and it reads nice but it's like a rogue Mosaic. 

Same with Nick Roche's return to Kup; despite continuing the excellent work on Prowl and formally introducing future cult leader and shipping devotee James Roberts it's just spinning out a story from the evident fact that Kup got better.

It's basically a grab bag of unnecessary epilogues and worrying previews. There's an unnerving start for incoming writer Mike Costa as he resets Megatron and Starscream  to exactly where they've always been and undoes one of the few positive progressive elements of AHM; the first try out for Don Figueroa's appalling live-action influenced art style, a pointless return for Simon Furman...

Basically this is four issues of marking time in the most banal fashion imaginable. And part of  that is an indictment of IDW's ever-slapdash handling of the franchise on an editorial level. But it's also a tacit condemnation of a readership and fandom incapable of filling in the blanks and pathologically afraid of change.

■■□□□□□□□□