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.
■■■■■■□□□□
No comments:
Post a Comment