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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