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 - 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: All Hail Megatron

PUBLISHER: IDW, 2008-2009

WRITER: SHANE MCCARTHY

ARTIST: GUIDO GUIDI, CASEY COLLER, E.J. SU, ROBERT DEAS, EMILIANO SANTALUCIA

All Hail Megatron gets so much right. So, so much. Intended as a summer blockbuster to reconnect with the casual comic buyer,  long alienated by the rambling joyless mess Simon Furman had turned the book into AHM largely failed from both a commercial and critical point of view. 

The basic idea of resetting the cast to all the big names and having Megatron straight up invade Earth is great. After the Reapers and the Dead Universe and Verity and all those moronic Men in Black operations readers were due some good wholesome smashy robot fun. It even follows on nicely from the Autobots abandoning Earth abruptly in Devastation while the protracted winding down of Furman's storylines largely involved putting all the familiar faces in the familiar places.

And the opening setup is great, with the Decepticons wreaking unchecked havoc in New York while the Autobots huddle on a habitable but inhospitable Cybertron, with Optimus Prime on life support after they were lured into a trap by an unknown traitor. There's some surprisingly adept characterisation in there as well, ranging from good takes on Ironhide and Cliffjumper to the first real progression of the Megatron/Starscream dynamic since, well, ever.

But right from the start there are problems. Firstly the series is straight up overlong. The plot would have been nice brainless popcorn fodder at six issues (which I recall it was originally pitched as); at twelve issues it's flabby and bloated. Most dispensable are the humans - while some idea of the natives' response and predicament was necessary the time and space given over to first downed F22 pilot Andy and then IDW's in-name-only arsehole version of Spike Witwicky not only sap the pace but in the case of the latter take away plausibility too.

Secondly McCarthy cheats somewhat on bringing further characters into things. The basic premise revolves around the Autobots having taken serious military reverses all over the universe. This takes a hit when the battered squad on Cybertron get an artificial pepping up due to Kup and a crew of guys the writer obviously thinks are the coolest ones just drop in and start showing off. Yes, Science Sniper Perceptor is cool but their arrival just feels like a cheap shot - and when Omega Supreme makes a timely reappearance suspense disappears as it becomes clear there's always going to be a cheap escape route. Kup  himself is also quite annoying - the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman impression wears thin quickly and rather than coming across as an inspiring living legend he's more of a grousing, bossy sod. 

Thirdly there's the odd relationship with past material where some of Furman's plots are worked on while others are brushed over or outright contradicted. The discontinuity is jarring due to never really knowing what's going to be ignored and what's going to be picked up as a plot point. A straight reboot was clearly the thing to do; quite why IDW opted to shackle the thing to Furman's messy overcomplicated output is one to ponder. 

Nothing really sums up the best and worst of All Hail Megatron than the sequence where Sunstreaker is revealed to be the traitor who sold the Autobots out. It's a surprise even though the misdirection afforded to suspecting Mirage is a bit obvious. It's brave - there's no cerebro-shell flaking, with only a little misleading from Starscream an Autobot betrayed his faction, partly through wanting an end to the war but largely to dick Earth over after having such a horrible time there. Which is an odd one as his treatment by the Machination was from Furman's material but then so apparently was some trite rehabilitation. We'll give that a pass as the Huntstreaker stuff was bilge, though. So let's digest this massive development. .. No, wait, he's just blown himself up in a dumb redemptive and somewhat pointless gesture and the whole thing is barely touched upon.

By the last two or three issues the thing is really all over the place, still full of padding but also glossing over loads of other things as it staggers to the finish line. Spike takes up pages and pages while he finds a supergun to shoot Megatron but at the same time Optimus Prime is revived, the Autobots hop onboard Omega Supreme  (in Sunbow mode rather than mystical Spotlight : Optimus Prime mode), fly to Earth in short order and... just beat up the Decepticons. No mention that only a short time ago they were broken husks starving on Cybertron. No big cool strategy, no plot device even. They just drop out of the sky over New York and take the Decepticons out. It is made a little easier by there only being a dozen or so Decepticons; the (possibly Hasbro-mandated) appearance of Dropshot aside, we're in pre-TF:TM territory here, which is odd when you consider who the Autobots have. It makes you wonder, ambush or not, how they managed to lose so badly in the first place. 

All Hail Megatron reads like a first draft of a potentially enjoyable comic. There are several good moments and in among the attempts at crowd pleasing there are a couple of genuinely fresh ideas that deserve more exploration in a better comic. But the finished material is badly paced, contradictory and ultimately frustrating. 

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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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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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Transformers - Escalation

My memory of Escalation from my initial read was of a flawed but entertaining step in the right direction after the troubled Infiltration, with the main plot only really faltering when Devastation began. I was wrong; Escalation is such a disaster it's hard to know where to start.

Maybe with the good bits; it won't take long. I think every Autobot involved gets some sort of show-off moment and their characterisations generally ring true, though I'm not sure where Bumblebee's gone. I think that might be about it really. 

The problem is that Furman has plainly been hurt by the moderate reception to Infiltration and just throws everything he can think of at the story without outright alienating the people who did like it. There's government plants, facsimile constructs, internal friction, robot fights, foreshadowing of more villains, Spotlight follow ups and more thrown in. There are also fake outs, contrivances, obvious gestures and plain idiocy. 

Handling things in turn, the human trio of Verity,  Hunter and a still personality free Jimmy (no, reminding us he's a mechanic doesn't count ). At the start of the mini they're being packed off and while only the naive would expect this to be followed through the way they're kept in the mix is disappointing - would the Machination really factor Hunter, found by coincidence in Sunstreaker when he was captured, into their plans in such a last minute fashion? It's another one of those kids' comic moments when in the real world Furman is occasionally trying to capture they'd have guinea pigs for the Headmaster process all worked out and leave the kid to fry in the fake Lamborghini. 

Verity manages the feat of being even more obnoxious and whiny than in the first arc and while she and Jimmy get to show a little resourcefulness in locating the Machinations front garage really the contrived need to again send them in to investigate while a pair of Autobots watch on is not only repetitive but is another Saturday morning cartoon trope, moving the series further away from serious sci-fi aspirations. 

Another comes from the silly antics at the Russian border. Firstly Russia borders the obviously made-up state of Brasnya now; it's an obvious Chechnya analogue and you have to wonder why it's been renamed - is Chechnya a key market for IDW? Were they worried they'd be sued? Saturday morning cartoon, might as well have used Carbombya for all it does for the mood. Anyway, there's an insane moment where Megatron changes his alt-mode to a handgun and gets his cloned minion to fire him at an oil pipeline - why not get Blitzwing to do it, or said minion to set explosives? Because then there would be no energy signature for the Autobots to somehow magically monitor, that's why. Saturday morning cartoon. 

Sure, there are some hints that Ore-15 has brought out some arrogance in Megatron and that he might be having trouble letting go of direct control of the Earth operation, so this might be deliberate. If it is,  it's really not a welcome development to have him continuing the rapid character decay from the end of Infiltration. The rest of the Decepticons here make little impression, being largely thugs with a special skill each, which is the downside of having most of the big guns tied up elsewhere. It's perhaps as simple as the Infiltration Protocols working better as an abstract principle rather than actually being carried out. The idea of Decepticons unbalancing countries and agitating disputes falls down a bit when it involves a group of them zapping over to commit simple sabotage. 

The Machination, apart from being the same old tired group trying to use alien tech for their own ends (wonder how that'll work out for them? Well, right?) are dumb, something which spreads to the Autobots - both the abduction of Sunstreaker and the lockup fight with Jazz and Wheeljack make the Autobots look stupid rather than the Machination look fearsome. 

The appearance of Hot Rod, Nightbeat and Hardhead on Earth meanwhile really feels like a sop to the fans rather than a genuine attempt to mix up the status quo. All three are respectably used but it just feels a bit forced that Prime calls in reinforcements while leaving three Autobots back at base to have their own adventures. Optimus himself naturally manages to die for a few pages,  and while Furman doesn't insult us by dragging it out for long it hardly yells brave new world, something not helped by a succession of cheap devices - twice characters have to escape exploding buildings against the clock while too much of the plot hinges on coincidental timing.

E. J. Su's art is something of a disappointment; it might just be coming off the back of Nick Roche, but it's all very unimaginative and staid. There's just no real feeling to any of it, with the action scenes being particularly flat and unexciting. The wintry setting and muddled choreography (what are the soldiers doing for most of this?) do him few favours but it's a very adequate,  perfunctory job with the use of patterned backgrounds in the Optimus/Megatron fight looking more like a timesaving measure than a bold stylistic choice. In short,  it doesn't look like E. J. enjoyed drawing this at all.

Furman for his part still doesn't seem to have learnt that having this many plot threads covered concurrently actually slows the pace and undermines any excitement. Even when read as a single block Escalation inches along in  a frustrating, stuttering fashion and the decision to add even more to the mix with the pretentious interludes foreshadowing the involvement of Scorponok and Skywatch in the main plot is downright worrying. 

Oh, and Optimus asking Ironhide to recap the plot of the first issue at the start of the second even though he knows exactly what's happened? Fucking. Hell.

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Transformers - Infiltration

I'm not sure why I decided to re-read the IDW comics in chronological order but at this point it stops making much of a difference, because this is where the meat of the continuity begins. In a way it's a perfect preview of the company 'so output, being readable but avoidably flawed. After 20 years of dealing with the whims of others at Marvel and then Dreamwave, Simon Furman finally had a blank canvas to show us all how he could mould the Transformers from the ground up. What follows shows his talents off while exposing his weaknesses to an almost cruel degree.

What's good is the clear attempt to reasonably plot out the processes involved in Decepticons invading a planet, and how the Autobots would counter this while also establishing a perfectly good rationale for both factions to remain low-key and in disguise. The whole idea of the Infiltration Protocols is bluntly a writing masterstroke that is unequalled in the franchise's fiction, even topping the Cybertronian Empire pull-back of the Generation 2 comic.  

The players are also expertly chosen, the cast carefully blossoming from Ratchet (initially largely seen as an ambulance which communicates via a holomatter avatar) and the Battlechargers to a decent roster of favourites, enough of whom receive good characterisation to lay a workable foundation. The series' glacial pace is also less of a problem in a solid read-through, which - in either digital or trade form - is the only way anyone's read the story since 2006. And E J Su's art largely retains its punch; the clean Binaltech-influenced designs (which - it is easy to forget - preceded the similarly practical visual ethos of the Paramount films) are a delight and his kineticism is up to every challenge the script puts his way.

However, the series - and thus the whole continuity ahead of the soft reboot of Furman's effective removal from the title in 2008 - is flawed on a genetic level. The problem being that Furman is an epic plotter but a kids' comic writer. It's not even his dialogue for once, which aside from a couple of fumbles (Hunter phonetically spelling out his surname in a conversation when he's just said it out loud and thus phonetically anyway stands out as the only really dumb moment) is restrained and even largely maintains the intended mood in its functionality. No, it's the mental incapability to throw away the rulebook, a rulebook that - with a fresh sheet of paper and Hasbro in a "whatever, just give us money" mood - only existed in Furman's own limitations. 

The most evident problem are the three main human characters. I have no inherent problem with humans in Transformers fiction, and the idea that a major arc could take place on Earth without some interaction between species closes down many promising angles. The problem here is that all three are not only largely uninteresting but that they're basically child identification figures - like Spike and Sparkplug from the eighties cartoon, or Rad, Alexis and Carlos from Armada or something. In a comic surely aimed at nobody aged under 16 and conceptually tooled as a sleek, modern adult-orientated attempt to break free of previous comics' restrictions. That they're in their late teens or early twenties rather than at school makes little difference. 

The characters are as follows: spunky orphaned runaway Verity Carlo, who drifts from place to place thanks to her pickpocketing skills and tech savvy ; Hunter O'Nion, a nerdy conspiracy theory enthusiast and Jimmy Pink, whose character is that he's a mechanic and that he provides a flat neutral middleman in Verity and Hunter's discussions. Verity is largely inspired by Jubilee of X-Men fame, or at least the best known pre-Generation X version - attitude and repeated declarations of self-dependency proving lazy shorthand to show the reader that she's not your average comic bimbo, Hunter is Fox Mulder Junior, Jimmy is just there. Both indicate a writer who lost touch with the generation he's trying to write in about 1997.

To be fair the big problem with these three kids is that the debut arc ended up being the meat of their appearances. Lukewarm reaction saw Furman and/or IDW lose faith in them as major characters fairly quickly and not only would the second arc (Stormbringer) market itself on their absence but the third and fourth would write them out with only moderate decency.  That's not really Infiltration's fault exactly, but then the series has plenty of others.

If it can be summed up in one cheap shot it's that Furman talks the talk but can't walk the walk. There are several opportunities to show that this is a brave new comic where everything you know before is void, and they're all fumbled. Despite almost painful attempts to justify it in the story, we still have three kids snooping in a Decepticon base like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Even then there's a chance for a statement to be made - Bumblebee describes the intrepid trio as acceptable casualties and it's clear the Autobot doctrine on Earth means their lives are a minor priority weighed against the other six billion on the planet. But it's empty bravado - a last minute escape from a Decepticon air strike comes panels after a super sequence where Megatron spots Verity and instantly dismisses her as an insect not worth caring about. Killing off one of the humans - even third wheel Jimmy - would have been a fantastic way of declaring that all bets were off.

However, the poster child for such squandering is the Megatron/Starscream dynamic. The original comic had largely avoided the cartoon's stupidity by the pair rarely being front and centre at the same time for much of its' run. While their textbook relationship was revived for Generation 2 it had a fair bit of necessity to justify it, the odd wry lampshade hung on it and the inescapable factor of both being on the toy shelves. Here, Starscream - hyped up on the Ore-15 superfuel that provides such a good reason for setting the action on Earth - tries to draw Megatron into a showdown by repeatedly breaking his leader's cherished protocols. Megatron declares that he's had enough of all this treachery derailing the Decepticon cause and goes to put his house in order.

He shoots down the conspiring Skywarp and Blitzwing, then heads to Starscream's nest. There then follows a scene of minor genius as the Autobots look on while Megatron instantly cows Starscream's handful of followers before setting to work on the backstabber himself. There is then a brief but well drawn battle where Starscream proves no match for Megatron even with Ore-15. 

So there's Starscream the traitor, smashed to bits by the new no mercy Megatron. Fatality,  right? We're going to see this new no-nonsense Megatron brutally take out Starscream to show it's not the same old story... No, wait, he's still alive and Megatron is going decide what to do with him later. Which we already know is more likely to involve banishment to an asteroid than summary execution because Furman's still using the same old tired dynamic and is too scared to kill off a popular character early doors and scare the traditionalists. Instantly undermining any pretentions that this is a brave new universe or that this is finally a Megatron to be taken seriously.

Talk talked. Walk not walked. 

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