Comic Review - Transformers Spotlight: Shockwave

Simon Furman's IDW run was never afraid to stick to safe old favourites and even whole dynamics and that's something which marks out Spotlight: Shockwave like few other titles. The plot is slight, covering Shockwave's attempt to independently seed prehistoric Earth and other planets with Energon after foreseeing Cybertron's energy crisis, neatly providing a good excuse for the present day stuff revolving around our home planet.



While the action's on prehistoric Earth Furman also takes in the time to cover one of the vexing problems facing any new Transformers continuity - how to get the Dinobots - alien robots from a planet which doesn't have dinosaurs - to take dinosaur modes. So there's something of a contrivance with them having a simple vendetta against Shockwave for a previous clash.

Then we're onto the familiar territory of both taking each other out to be dug up in the present day without any awkward hanging around for millions of years disrupting evolution. So there's little original - even Shockwave's narration, centred on logic versus chaos, feels like a retread of Marvel material - but it bumbles along in a fun enough fashion.