Comic Review - Marvel Boy

PUBLISHER: MARVEL, 2000 - 2001

WRITER: GRANT MORRISON

ARTIST: J.G. JONES

Grant Morrison started his comic career at Marvel's UK branch on licenced titles like Doctor Who Monthly and Action Force before getting his teeth into things like Zenith, Animal Man and The Invisibles. It was something of a coup for new Marvel EIC Joe Quesada to get such a hip writer working for the company at the turn of the century and in return Morrison was given relative creative freedom to craft Marvel Boy. 

Issued under the more mature Marvel Knights banner (flying high at the time due to well-received darker series for the likes of Daredevil and The Punisher), the series shares only a name with the Atlas character. The premise in a simple glib line is instead "what if Captain Marvel really was pissed off when he got to Earth?". Instead of coming as a spy and finding he likes humanity, central character Noh-Varr is part of the crew of a science vessel shot down over Earth by an insanely wealthy maniac and opportunist who calls himself Midas. Only Noh-Varr and the ship's biological computer Plex survive the crash.

Noh-Varr promptly declares war on Earth in general and Midas in particular and it's no empty boast; bio-engineered with support from Plex and a buried Kree science vessel packed with exotic weaponry he's one angry and dangerous lad. What follows is a riotous cascade of innovative powers, technology and concepts. The imagination is almost incontinent.

Throughout the six issues the storyline is largely concerned with Midas, a fellow dressed in what looks to be the original Iron Man armour who wants the cosmic ray engine of Noh-Varr's ship to complete his quest to gain the elemental powers of the Fantastic Four. His main weapon is his messed-up daughter slash personal assassin Oubliette (Wikipedia it!), who quickly becomes fascinated with Noh-Varr. 

The only interaction with other Marvel Universe characters comes when Noh-Varr torches an obscenity onto the face of the planet, drawing the attention of Dum-Dum Duggan (I think Nick Fury was dead at the time) and SHIELD, but after the cloned supersoldiers they send in are defeated he's largely left in his own corner. The story manages to set itself firmly in the Marvel Universe without Captain America or someone turning up in a way that foreshadows Morrison's use of the X-Men mythos soon afterwards - he's more interested in the concepts and possibilities than actual events outside of the title, making the story fresh and independent. 

Only the issue revolving around the living corporation Hexus (a great idea that can't be done justice in 22 pages). Aside from that, this is a crucial, energetic and thought-provoking little series. It's also a great introduction to Morrison's style for anyone into typical superhero fare after a nice gateway into weirder comics.

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Comic Review - The Official Gobots Magazine

PUBLISHER: TELEPICTURES PUBLISHING, 1986-1987
WRITER: P.E. KING, JAY ITZKOWITZ, PAUL KIRCHNER
ARTISTS: RALPH REESE, PAUL KIRCHNER

Gobots was always seen as the poor cousin to Transformers and to some extent that was fair. If anyone wants to slander the overall quality of the toyline they can step outside and be administered a hiding courtesy of my man Perkins but as a franchise it was all over the place. The problem was that while Hasbro spent time working with Marvel on a set of character bios and a mythos for Transformers, Tonka - in their rush to get toys on shelves - just threw pun-based names on the figures and basically left it at that. Seriously, the first batch didn't even gave faction names, but were delineated as "Friendly Robot " or "Enemy Robot".

By the time Tonka got their cat together and linked up with Hanna Barbera to make the terrible but Stockholm Syndrome-inducing Challenge of the Gobots cartoon Transformers had overtaken it with barely a look back. The other half of Hasbro's media pincer was of course the exclamation mark-riddled monthly comic, and to that Gobots had no real equivalent. With Marvel working on Transformers and DC not doing that sort of thing comic rights were just another thing for Tonka to sell off to some hapless goober rather than part of the company's promotional arsenal.

The first attempt at a Gobots comic wasn't even really a Gobots comic, but is worth a brief mention anyway. Bandai retained European rights to the figures and sold the line there as Robo Machine; after seeing Tonka's initial success they inked a deal to copy the names and factions over and decided to promote the brand with help.from Fleetway. They put out a serial in the weekly Eagle comic written by veteran Tom Tully with a grittier tone than Transformers material of the time that still stands up well despite a hurried, inconclusive ending. 

In America however the licence fell to Telepictures. Don Welsh's company mainly handled television syndication packages but also had a small publishing arm which put out titles for other programmes they owned the rights to, such as The Muppet Show. When Challenge of the Gobots came under the former they decided to put out a title based on the show - The Official Gobots Magazine.

And it's certainly a magazine rather than an outright comic; the large format quarterly generally averaged five or six pages of actual Gobots content. As well as a five-page strip set in the Challenge of the Gobots continuity (if that isn't an oxymoron) the title was padded out with the same sort of stuff Sheila Cranna used to fill pages in the early days of the British Transformers comics - anything on file about sci-fi, robotics, computers and home electronics.

The first issue was put out for Winter '86 (probably an off-sale date), with - as for all the published issues - a painted cover by Paul Mangiat. Inside was the strip "The Blast of Doom", written by P. E. King (a quick Google seems to line up with a moderately successful children's book author of the period) and illustrated by one R. Reese - most likely Ralph Reese, who drew for Flash Gordon and National Lampoon but seems to have had an eclectic career. It's a trite little trip with Dr. Braxis coming up with a gun to kill Leader-1, who is lured into a trap when Pincher is able to kidnap Scooter and Nick (a.k.a. Team Fail) while popping out for ingredients to make a birthday cake for A.J; it makes the cartoon itself look like Evangelion or something.

Dated Spring 1986, the second issue's strip is called "Scooter's Mighty Magnet" and you can pretty much guess it all from there. The writer is Jay Itzkowitz, a staff writer at Telepictures (also working on their Muppets and Robo Force titles) and the art is by Paul Kirchner, another one with an unusual CV that included surrealist strip the bus for Heavy Metal and covers for Al Goldstein's porn tabloid Screw with He-Man and Thundercats. About the only thing of interest is a rare appearance from Creepy in with the Renegades.

Issue 3 (Summer 1986) had a cover falsely promising an appearance by Mr. Moto, but the strip ("The Wrath of the Mountain", written by King and illustrated by Kirchner) features the usual cartoon crowd of Leader-1/Turbo/Scooter versus Cy-Kill/Cop-Tur/Crasher, with the Renegades mining an energy source called Ultium from a sentient mountain (they even put a sign up). See if you can work out how that goes. The issue also featured the first of the "Ask Leader-1" pages, where readers (or staffers) quizzed the Guardian leader with a mixture of Gobot-related and general science questions; it's actually quite a sweet feature - I doubt anyone at Telepictures was aware of the UK Transformers comic's use of a character as letter answerer.

Tonka of course were also behind the Rock Lords toyline, which was part of Machine Robo in Japan but was pitched as a separate line in the West. However, their only well-known media appearance was a crossover with the Gobots for the flop Battle of the Rock Lords feature film. Accordingly, the strip in the fourth issue - both written and drawn by Kirchner - also has both groups in. Sadly it's not any good, being a lightweight take on the old Trojan horse thing, with the Rock Lords largely incidental muscle for both sides. 

The Winter 1987 edition proved to be the last - not surprisingly, as the cartoon had ended and the toyline itself was winding down. News was broken to subscribers with a paper cover around the magazine itself, cheerfully informing those who had paid for the sixth issue that they would be receiving a copy of The Kids' Official Statue of Liberty Magazine instead. Brutal. 

The main strip is again entirely by Kirchner and while it's the same simplistic story (named "A Spy Among Us") it's worthy of note for one reason - it's the only Gobots media to feature Super Couper and Clutch, not to mention the only thing to have Night Fright with the right name and colour scheme (his design was used for a green Renegade referred to as Blades in one episode of the cartoon). While Clutch doesn't do anything the lightweight plot focuses on Coups (as everyone calls him) and Night Fright gets to do a couple of bits. The issue also contains a one-page all-Kirchner strip named "Update from Quartex" which focuses entirely on the Rock Lords - and shows the other stories up by cramming a plot just as pat into a single page.

So there we are, The Official Gobots Magazine - largely rubbish, noticed by few and remembered by less. I scanned all the comic strips back when I owned them; part of me wishes I'd done the magazines cover to cover despite the rest of it being terrible but there we go, the indecent amount of money I sold the things on for took the sting out of it.

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OFFICIAL GOBOTS MAGAZINE #1 - 5 - STRIPS, COVERS & ASK LEADER-1 ONLY

Total File Size: 14.0MB

Comic Review - Transformers: Maximum Dinobots

PUBLISHER: IDW, 2008

WRITER: SIMON FURMAN
 ARTISTS: NICK ROCHE, JAMES RAIZ

As IDW wanted Simon Furman far, far away from their main Transformers title but presumably still around to fuck up the movie tie-in stuff and the awful ReGeneration One he was allowed four Spotlights and the five-part Maximum Dinobots to finish off as many storylines as possible before the decks were more or less cleared for Shane McCarthy's All Hail Megatron relaunch. 

The template was simple - use one for the Earth-based stuff and the other for all the bits in space. The problem is that he got it wrong. Whereas the four part Revelations has more plot than a George R R Martin novel, the five part Maximum Dinobots is deathly dull and features pages and pages of padding. 

There's an interminable attempt to play to Skywatch's idiocy for intrigue when they once again unleash some captured Transformers which they then rapidly lose control over. Naturally the captivity of the other Dinobots was something that was going to be addressed sooner rather than later but at this stage at least having Grimlock break in and free them would have been a change. And as for giving one of their inept agents a bigger role in an attempt to address their idiocy - examining the issue only makes it even more glaringly dumb. And then it's all topped off by the organisation choosing to lob Shockwave out there. It beggars belief.

The Dinobots themselves are also poor. They drown in a sea of late-Marvel angst as Grimlock moans about betraying his team, Swoop moans about Grimlock betraying the team and The Other Three take turns at having a perfunctory line from time to time. If this is the crack team at their maximum it's obvious why no-one really missed them for aeons. Swoop especially is a pain - after a long history of being an interesting character in the Marvel material here he's a whiny stuck record. Nick Roche is a talented artist but his Beast Wars-influenced character models are a disaster with Swoop the worst culprit - allied to his bitching it's hard not to want to reach into the page and mash your thumbs into his stupid emo steampunk goggles in the hope you'll kill him or at least shut him up.

But then the comic isn't really about the Dinobots. It's more concerned with the Machination storyline which has been awful from the start and gets no better here. As with Skywatch there's an attempt at lampshading the absurdity of it all by having Scorponok spend what feels like 20 pages explaining his plans to Hot Rod (whose dramatic commando operation ends hilariously when he parks outside Scorponok's stupid factory and is promptly beaten to a pulp) in a fashion that's meant to be a spoof of badly written villainy but reads as badly written villainy.

Into all this Furman throws the Monsterbots for no good reason. Like the Dinobots they talk a good game, being bigged up by the script in a way that makes McCarthy's writing of Drift look subtle but do absolutely nothing necessary - like Cloudburst and company in Revelations, you lose any sympathy for the writer's compacted plans when he's throwing stuff like this in of his own volition. By the time Soundwave, Shockwave and Ultra Magnus have been worked in you're just numb to the contrivances and convolutions. 

Even worse is the last rushed gutless coda as it's revealed that basically everyone is fine - Sunstreaker's fine despite having a hole blown in him (are CR chambers the single worst idea in Transformers fiction or what?), Hot Rod is fine, Hunter is fine, Sludge is fine despite being picked at random for death in a sad attempt to ramp up the stakes and look here's Verity and Jimmy and Optimus and Ratchet and some crap jokes and let's make sure Furman's never given a gig like this again please.

Maximum Dinobots? Minimal Excitement.

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Comic Review: Dare

PUBLISHER: FLEETWAY (1990)
WRITER: GRANT MORRISON
ARTIST: RIAN HUGHES

Since the iconic Eagle character Dan Dare had been left behind by the industry in 1967 there had been two main revivals; firstly as the lead of 2000AD on launch before Judge Dredd and other brand new characters rapidly overtook it and then as the lead of the relaunched Eagle itself a couple of years later. Both had their own style quite different from the enjoyably cor-wow original but neither were as shocking as Grant Morrison's take at the start of the nineties.

The serial - simply titled Dare - debuted in the new and short-lived Revolver, a Fleetway title launched in 1990 to try and cash in on both the serious adult comic audience uncovered by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and the late eighties interest in the sixties in general and psychedelia in particular. The result only lasted a handful of issues before folding into Fleetway's other adult comic, Crisis, with the main legacy of Revolver being Peter Milligan's Rogan Gosh. 

The Dare strip was somewhat typical of the milieu of adult British comics of the period, dripping with heavy-handed but well meaning political allegory. Britain is under the yoke of unsubtle Thatcher parody Gloria Monday and her Unity party; Spacefleet has been privatised, the Treens have been subjugated and live on Earth as a hated underclass and a retired Dan Dare lives a life of empty privilege in London while people queue for food in the North. So this would be something of a bleak take, then.

For all its edginess and shock tactics the story is surprisingly readable. The plot concerns the mysterious death of Jocelyn Peabody after a spell working off-world on the new Manna miracle superfood at a time when Dare's patriotic image is being exploited by the government, and leads to an uneasy reunion with an embittered Digby,  now a leading Northern freedom fighter. 

If the script is occasionally clumsy the story is worth reading for Rian Hughes' angular artwork, a propaganda postcard from a future dystopia. The art is at its' very best in some of the story's more striking juxtapositions, notably the militant secret police using Frank Hampson ray guns that cause Steve Dillon damage. Like the first couple of books of Zenith, this is very much a story of its' time and in a way it's as outdated now as the fifties stuff. However, it's still a diverting and entertaining piece of work.

 Total File Size: 13.6MB

Comic Review - Transformers: Revelation

PUBLISHER: IDW, 2008
WRITER: SIMON FURMAN
ARTISTS: E.J. SU, NICK ROCHE, DAN KHANNA

Revelation was originally published as four Spotlights  (Cyclonus, Hardhead, Doubledealer and Sideswipe) but was really a hurried rewrite of Simon Furman's mooted Expansion mini-series; as all four run sequentially it makes more sense to review them as a whole than separately. For a start none are really genuine Spotlights; each title character gets a thread which goes some way to exploring their internal drive complete with the usual narration but each issue has a lot of other things going on which doesn't have any real connection to them.

In short, Furman across four issues makes a valiant stab at resolving two years of plotlines , and the result is a far from perfect story which somehow remains breathlessly enjoyable. Simple law of averages means it's impossible to like every single plot thread, with some getting too much space, some getting too little and some getting it just right. 

You do have to wonder why exactly the Spotlight format was used, however, as Furman clearly feels obliged to give the lion's share to the subject even if it is less attention than that received by, say, Wheelie or Ramjet on their big days out. It's probably the biggest flaw in the storyline - Cyclonus gets a role that would have worked better for Galvatron, the obvious payoff of Dealer is shown via a pace-sapping McGuffin quest and Sideswipe's personal realisation is oddly placed in the middle of a cross universe death struggle (which is beautifully illustrated by E J Su, signing off from Transformers in style). Quite why IDW didn't just pack it as a four issue mini I don't know, but then at an editorial level they've always been basically incompetent. Only Hardhead's chapter (helped by fantastic art from Nick Roche) feels particularly organic. 

Still, in among all of this there's payoff for myriad plot elements - Arcee quest for revenge, Nightbeat's lobotomy, the betrayal of Hot Rod's team, Jetfire and the Technobots' research into Thunderwing, Banzaitron's unit, Monstructor,  Sixshot,  Galvatron, Nemesis Prime - aside from the Earth -based stuff held over for Maximum Dinobots there's hardly a thread from the past few years that isn't resolved and most of the defining faces of the era make some sort of showing.

Some of the resolutions are clumsy and unsatisfying, and on occasion Furman makes a rod for his own back - you can give him the benefit of the doubt for the sudden appearance of Straxus and Grindcore as further heralds of Nemesis Prime as the former had a toy out around about then while the latter probably did and I just don't care (though their easy defeat at the hands of Sideswipe is a bit much ). 

But the Pretender stuff is handled poorly - the debut of Cloudburst, Landmine, Waverider and Groundbreaker mere pages before Jetfire's reworked Pretender tech is ready just feels silly, like Furman feels obliged to make the unloved eighties guys Pretenders out of sheer anal neatness and lack of imagination. It worked composing Bludgeon's cult out of eighties Pretenders but in the cramped confines of Revelations putting the Technobots in the suits would have been cleaner and more satisfying. Elsewhere, other characters - such as Sixshot and Monstructor - do just disappear in the press, their fates vaguely implied rather than outright tackled.

On the other hand some are done very well indeed - Hardhead executing Nightbeat in one simple frame is still one of the peak moments of IDW's entire output, an unexpected and clever solution to the problem that convincingly causes Jhiaxus' plan to begin unravelling. The takedown of Nemesis Prime is some of the best Optimus Prime writing Furman has done for some time. 

The phrase "a mixed bag " doesn't begin to cover it, but the flawed and frantic Revelations retains a curious readability that little else of Furman's IDW work possesses. 

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Comic Review - Transformers: Spotlight Grimlock

Spotlight: Grimlock was published in uncertain times; word had not long leaked that Shane McCarthy would be taking over the title of main writer from Simon Furman with a soft reboot series while Furman's planned Expansion miniseries was dropped. The  process does actually seem to have been surprisingly cordial, as Furman was given a total number of nine comics to tie up selected plot threads and seems to have been given the chance to heavily revise this one as a trail for the Maximum Dinobots mini - Spotlight: Grimlock was originally intended to be published the month before Spotlight: Mirage but inexplicably arrived a month after it.

The result is that this issue actually has a clarity in the plot that has been missing from several issues. It gets off to a poor start when Skywatch decide that the best response to losing control of Ravage and Laserbeak the second they were in the field during Devastation is to let a bigger robot loose in the form of Grimlock. Amazingly he breaks loose almost immediately - the last we see of Skywatch is of their incredible backup plan to send the other four Dinobots after him, because surely there can't be anything wrong with using the same plan a third time even after all this, right? To be fair I think there's an element of just wanting to hurry the process here and as dumb as it is once it's done the issue improves dramatically. 

At the time of publication myself and quite a few others had become a bit fed up with Grimlock. Furman latched onto the Dinobots in general and their leader in particular early in his time writing for the British comic, using him a lot before American series writer Bob Budiansky took him in a funny weird unpopular direction and then killed him off. One of the first things Furman did after taking over the American book was bring him back (alright, the reason was the release of the Classic Pretender figure but he was probably going to resurrect the character anyway) and went a long way towards restoring the character's standing in  subsequent issues. However when Furman returned again for the Dreamwave era it felt like the character had become a simplified Wolverine style "badass", an ever-present never-wrong Mary Sue. From memory that seems to be something of an overreaction awoe Furman only wrote for him during the War Within prequel minis, the bulk of the appearances being authored by Chris Sarracini or James McDonough & Adam Patyk. At the same time he was woeful in War Within, so yeah.

Basically when the character made an early doors appearance in Spotlight: Shockwave and was then shoehorned into the Beast Wars mini for no good reason many were braced for more of the same. Indeed,  Furman's incredibly slow-burning style means it could well have still been the plan for Grimlock and the gang to ride in and save  Optimus and everyone who isn't a Dinobot from the implausible number of Decepticons floating around, probably nutting Nemesis Prime to death while throwing an insult at Prowl. It all worked out better, short-term at least let,  as here we have the unusual experience of Grimlock being likable. 

It might be the mechanism of the internal dialogue but this is the best writing the character has had for a decade or more as he examines his misleading of the Dinobots while retaining the headstrong attitude that made the character interesting in the first place. The battle with Scorponok indicates his power levels will be sensible too, and the use of a minor grudge as motivation is a nice touch. The whole business also folds him into the Machination storyline in a nice natural fashion. 

It's not a classic, no comic that opens with that sort of device can be, and IDW let it down with an awful colouring job and their usual inability to point speech bubbles at the right characters. But it is a promising start to Furman's final stint on the main book - and once again indicates that the best way to get results out of him is by constraining his focus.

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Transformers - Spotlight: Mirage

Oookay. Spotlight: Mirage is not a bad comic, but I have no idea what it's for. And not in the way that Furman's Spotlights have more than once meandered off on a tangent and further cluttered up the overall story.

The only issue of the third batch of Spotlights not written by Furman,  this one was instead penned by George Strayton - an RPG writer who did some hazily defined work on IDW's movie tie-in comics and presumably displayed enough affinity to be given a try-out. 

With the main material a complicated mess he was no doubt directed to do something as standalone as possible. The choice of Mirage was probably a matter of finding a character well-known enough to shift a Spotlight but not tied up in Furman's masterplan; as a first year character with a single notable appearance as a murder suspect in Spotlight: Blaster he fits the bill.

The approach to avoiding story discontinuity however is a little odd as the issue either takes place in an alternate timeline of some abstraction or entirely in Mirage's head (though the final page depicting the apparent reality of Mirage driving around Earth as a Ligier is still enough to take this out of mainstream continuity until John Barber apparently found a home for it several years later). The plot mines out the character's apparent flexible loyalties via a dream or fantasy of helping the Decepticons kill the last handful of Autobots in an alternate future that has no particular anchor with the rest of IDW's material. That's a bit of a shame for two reasons. 

Firstly,  just about the only attention anyone official has ever given him has revolved around whether his sympathies lie. This story takes a slightly different approach by portraying the internal struggle rather than someone  (i. e. Cliffjumper ) leaping to conclusions but still, it would be nice if the opportunity had been taken to have a different look at the guy.

Secondly what we see of the alternate or imaginary future is so abstract from everything else that you're spending as much time trying to figure out the purposefully fractured plot at the same time you should be focusing on Mirage. A What If style storyline with Mirage betraying the Autobots at some crucial juncture like the battle in Brasnya would oddly have more impact than the downfall of a group of effective strangers. 

Nevertheless taken in isolation it's a nice read, well written and illuminating. The lack of context gives it an odd transcendent feel like the one achieved by the better Mosaics, a universal character study that could ring true for any Mirage. But it's also a dashed odd thing to come out at this point, and it's understandable many readers were nonplussed when it first appeared.

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Transformers - Devastation

It didn't have to be like this. Even after the horrors of Escalation there was a chance to carve a decent action adventure from the ruins, even if the brave new world and hard sci-fi of Infiltration was a distant memory. But Furman manages the not inconsiderable feat of making Devastation even worse than its predecessor. 

Sadly - and I apologise for sounding like a broken record, but keeps happening - it's the same old failing of too many plot threads choking the story,  though the latter isn't that good anyway. As well as the stuff left dangling on Earth - Megatron's Decepticons, Sunstreaker and Hunter's abduction by Scorponok and the Machination, Skynet and their pet cassettes,  Ironhide's fate,  the imminent arrival of Sixshot on Earth - yet more elements are drawn in from the Spotlights - the Reapers, Galvatron, Soundwave,  Sideswipe... Alan Moore wouldn't be able to pull this together in six issues, let alone Simon Furman. The difference is that Moore would never put himself in this position,  whereas this whole mess is the fault of Simon Furman and Simon Furman alone.

Overriding all of this even is instance after instance of bad writing - anti climactic climbdowns, villain decay, cheap drama, padding,  contrivances, obvious twists and plain outright stupidity abound.

Let's start with the two human organisations with their ominous epithets. The Machination rapidly become absurd and impossible to take seriously. Firstly there's their insistence on keeping Hunter alive - we're talking about an organisation that has enough state of the art tech to abduct an Autobot without being traced, infiltrate Decepticon bunkers and stay off the government's radar while doing so. They can mass produce and crew a platoon of Sunstreaker clones in the time it takes the Ark to track Ironhide,  so why do they need to brainwash some random kid as part of the operation? Slit the nerd's throat and chuck him in the furnace or something. It's one of the most obvious villain fails around, the sort of thing you get in a kids' comic where you're not allowed to off anyone.

And then they get worse. The aforementioned Sunstreaker clones go after Hot Rod and Wheeljack as part of some half-baked training exercise, revealing their presence and weaknesses to the Autobots in record time. Just to make sure when the pair are finally cornered the first thing the Machination agents do is separate from their powerful mech bodies to lecture the pair at from a worm's eye view while wearing deformed Sunstreaker faces. If it wasn't all so mercilessly serious you'd think you were being had. It is possibly the best yet explanation Western media has given for the Headmaster concept,  yes, but then all it needed to do for that was not feature any Autobots tearing their own heads off as a peace gesture and once again you have to wonder why Furman felt the need to examine that particular flawed idea all over again. 

And then it gets either worse (if you're still somehow taking this nonsense seriously) or better (if you're enjoying the total car crash this story is). As glimpsed in Escalation,  the Machination is a front for Scorponok - okay, fits his MO as seen in Spotlight: Ultra Magnus, though we're kind of reaching a saturation point for the number of Decepticons with different agendas springing out of the woodwork on Earth at the exact same time. With him being a head - presumably his escape in the Spotlight was a close one - the Sunstreaker bodies make sense there too. However,  when Scorponok does reappear (with Dante as his Headmaster because eighties) it's back in a copy of his Cybertronian body as obviously when you're pulling the strings from behind your human front operation the best thing to be is a gigantic green and purple robot scorpion. 

Skywatch, who sound like a cold-calling scam company, don't really do any better,  wheeling out that other crap villain standby of letting loose alien technology and then being surprised when they lose control of it. It was a tired development even before Dreamwave regrettably introduced it to Transformers seven scant years before this story, and it's not any more welcome here.  Amazingly their response to having Ravage and Laserbeak immediately bugger off to find Soundwave is to start thawing Grimlock out because... Furman really likes Grimlock. Really it's hard to see why, with so many thematic and narrative overlaps,  the Machination and SkyNet weren't merged into one storyline. Or just not used at all really - neither serve any purpose beyond rushing another batch of big names into the Earth theatre.

Sixshot manages to be even more of a disappointment. I can take him having some idiotic off switch because there was always going to be some stupid way of stopping him from killing everyone and seeing as Furman's only other ideas were likely to involve someone turning up Quickswitch or Metroplex in the hands of a shady Men In Black agency I'll settle. It's everything that goes before that's really bad.

In both the character's Spotlight and his briefing by Megatron he's portrayed as an unstoppable killing machine capable of wiping out worlds, yet here he doesn't kill a single Autobot  (and it's even inferred not a single human either). Instead the ultimate weapon, a guy who is built to kill swiftly and indiscriminately, plays cat and mouse with Ratchet until the rest of the Autobots turn up, at which point half a dozen Autobots who've just bailed out of an exploding spaceship into the sea keep him busy until, what do you know, he's recalled to face some other problem. Sum casualties from a Phase Sixer being mercilessly unleashed on an unexpecting, undermanned team of Autobots? Bumblebee gets shot but basically seems alright and Jazz loses an arm. The Autobots' orbital bounce teleport system does more damage by at least briefly killing Verity and Jimmy. Imagine the dramatic punch if - as much as I like the guy - he'd killed just Ratchet,  our guide and companion since Infiltration #1. But no, it's another cop out.

That other problem he gets called away for is the Reapers, who have followed him to Earth in order to reiterate their offer and decide to do so by attacking the Decepticon base rather than going straight to him and asking because then there would be no need to call him off the Autobots. Really the group had already served the closest thing they had to a purpose has been served. Here they're just another contrivance, though they at least get to off Runabout and Runamuck before serving their always obvious real purpose of being killed off to show how tough someone else is - Galvatron finally getting the job of euthanising them. 

Megatron himself continues his slide from the calculating military commander seen in Infiltration to the moron seen in the original cartoon. Yes, the comic acknowledges how rubbish he is with another mini-rebellion in the ranks but it really is disappointing. At least we don't have a predictable revival of Starscream,  though. No, wait, I'm thinking of a different comic that's good. Well, at least Megatron punishes his troops for plotting behind his back for the second time in three arcs. No wait etc etc and so on.

The Autobots generally do better - their consistent individual characterisation is the closest thing to a plus point in this miniseries (yep, the best thing to say about Devastation is that Furman doesn't fuck up every single character featured), aside from welcome fill-in work from Nick Roche and Robby Musso for the middle issues, handling most of the action with an energy E J Su never managed. They're effectively a reader surrogate, hapless innocents with no real choice but to weather what appears to be a complete mental breakdown on the part of the writer with some sort of dignity. However, even they can't escape from the disaster without getting engulfed in the brain fade. Firstly there's a lamentable subplot where for some dumb reason the easiest way to rescue the deactivated Ironhide from being crushed at a scrapyard (as a blown up Autobot in car mode is indistinguishable from a blown up human car because it wasn't like the opposite was a plot point in Escalation or anything) against the clock is to have Hot Rod and Wheeljack drive there rather than use the orbital bounce. So basically the whole plot line is devised so they can run into the Machination. Best of all, after six issues of this repetitive dross Hardhead just beams down as they find Ironhide and tells them to get their shit together,  and the never in doubt rescue happens off-panel.

The reason for Hardhead dropping in is to let the pair know that the Autobots are abandoning Earth in order to follow up on the raid on Garrus-9. This is a poor move for two reasons - one, it's a disappointment on a dramatic level to see Optimus and the boys bug out at such an odd point in the narrative at a point where you'd rather they were tooling up for a do-or-die raid on the Decepticon bunker. Secondly, one of the undeniable strengths of the IDW material is giving the impression that the war is truly galactic rather than taking place on just Earth and Cybertron. But in this case it fails to convince - sure, someone needs to be pulled back to find out what's happened with Monstructor but Prime's crew are in the middle of a pitched battle on an alien planet at outright war with Transformers, a planet that's the current base of the Decepticon leader and (as far as the Autobots know) a Phase Sixer. Are the Wreckers or the post-movie guys Prime was hanging with before arriving on Earth really doing something even more important?

Amongst all of this there's even space for a quick bit of cheap drama when Verity and Jimmy are killed being beamed to the Autobots' spaceship; in typical style they go from being blue to getting resuscitated without brain damage, presumably (and why the Hell is Jazz letting Ratchet know the time they've been dead in "Earth minutes" anyway?). It's just such a random thing to be thrown in at that point, a shock frame and then a simple "no, wait, they're basically alright" resolution within a few pages. The same goes for Hound's team - including Sideswipe - getting called up as Earth reinforcements but then getting rerouted before they've even packed their bags.

In some sort of mitigation for Furman somewhere during the production of Devastation IDW took the long overdue decision to demote him to rhythm guitar and lined up Shane McCarthy as the main writer. This could possibly have compressed Devastation's narrative and forced a few late changes to be made to switch the focus, but this seems overly charitable and Furman's still throwing in random stuff in the last issue so simple bad writing is the most likely cause. There was probably some follow-up planned in terms of Earth, however, with Hot Rod and Sunstreaker/Hunter likely to be at the forefront of the resistance, but at the same time nothing in the past twenty-odd Furman-penned issues gives much hope that this would have been any good.

There's a chance that it might have gone better than Devastation, however. It really is an absorbingly bad comic; Escalation was crap, but it was just crap. This is a horribly readable, a comic so bad you keep turning the pages to see how much worse it's going to get, and it rarely disappoints. If Furman had known IDW were effectively binning him for McCarthy he couldn't have written a story more likely to destroy the readership and the title's continuity. This is an experienced writer self-destructing, tearing down 25 years of hard work on the title in a rabidly masochistic fashion.

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