PUBLISHER: IDW (2013-2014)
WRITERS: JOHN BARBER, JAMES ROBERTS
ARTISTS: ATILIO ROJO, PHIL JIMINEZ, JAMES RAIZ, LIVIO RAMONDELLI, ALEX MILNE, BRENDAN CAHILL, NICK ROCHE, ANDREW GRIFFITH
It's that time again! The big IDW big plot big clusterfuck in which the poor hapless writers again try to live up to the hype generated by the company's psychotic PR as once again the lives of the Transformers and/or Cybertron will be CHANGED FOREVER or at least for another 12 months or so. While the storyline ran through both Robots in Disguise and More Than Meets the Eye (not to mention bracketed by a pair of one-shots, like a proper comic event) with both the usual writers handling whatever they usually did "Dark Cybertron" feels much like "Chaos" did - the story of one writer (in this case John Barber) with script input from another (James Roberts). In theory this set-up should work - Barber can plot almost as well as a proper comics writer while Roberts is more suited to a smaller soap style.
[Spoilers Follow]
PUBLISHER: IDW (2013)
WRITER: JOHN BARBER
ARTISTS: LIVIO RAMONDELLI, ATILIO ROJO, DHEERAJ VERMA, ANDREW GRIFFITH
As covered in the More Than Meets the Eye Volume 5 review Hasbro and/or IDW decided both of the Transformers titles should reunite for the Dark Cybertron storyline and gave the writers a seemingly limited warning to get things in place for the crossover. For James Roberts this meant compressing things; for John Barber it made for a mixed blessing it would seem. On the one hand Robots in Disguise featured most of the franchise's traditional big guns and Cybertron itself and thus such an epic would dovetail fairly nicely into his book compared to the cast and crew of More Than Meets the Eye effectively having to abandon their central plot line. The problem was Barber had just blown out a whole ton of his own
storylines and set up for a second phase of his Cybertronian political
drama which then had to be tweaked to fit in with Dark Cybertron. The
result was the six-part Dark Cybertron Prelude which was really more a
collection of Spotlight-style one-shots while Barber tried to get all
the pins in position for Dark Cybertron itself.
[Spoilers Follow]
PUBLISHER: IDW, 2012-2013
WRITER: JOHN BARBER
ARTIST: ANDREW GRIFFITH
Over the first 11 issues of Robots in Disguise John Barber had gleefully shaken the beer cans of Cybertron - the actual planet is hostile, Bumblebee's in charge of an increasingly-hated Autobots, Prowl seems to be carrying out the assassination of various technically peaceful Decepticons with the aid of Arcee, Starscream is gaining ground as leading candidate for success in the promised democratic elections, Metalhawk and thus the former neutrals are very much falling into Starscream's orbit, the Decepticons largely seem to be resisting much in the way of integration with a planned plot by Shockwave being foiled by Prowl at the cost of the Autobot's serious injury, Omega Supreme is bombed and finally Megatron staggers out of the wasteland. It's all at bursting point; the only problem is that Hasbro were at the time trotting out the largely dire Combiner Wars line and decided they wanted it featured in the comics. More Than Meets the Eye largely dodged it, with Robots in Disguise taking one for the team. And Barber decided this was exactly the time for Iacon to explode.
[Spoilers Follow]
PUBLISHER: IDW (2012)
WRITER: JOHN BARBER
ARTISTS: BRENDAN CAHILL, GUIDO GUIDI, LIVIO RAMONDELLI
The third collection of Robots in Disguise again suffers from the difficulty IDW had from lining up trades properly with the writers; why they haven't gone for a fixed six-issue trade length with the creative teams free to divide each block up as they see fit I don't know. Money, money, money I guess, unless there was some demand for multiple pages of sketches that pushed the stories down readers' wishlists. The third trade for RID is possibly the most fractured volume yet - containing the Annual, a one-shot catching back up with Orion Pax and another part of "Combiner Wars".
PUBLISHER: IDW (2012)
WRITER: JOHN BARBER
ARTISTS: LIVIO RAMONDELLI, ANDREW GRIFFITH
It's one of the ironies that Simon Furman was given a clean slate and crammed it full of crowdpleasing rubbish whereas his largely more relevant successors have been expected to pander to Hasbro in a way not seen since the eighties. However, these interventions - a legacy of the boom since the live action movies hit overdrive - aren't always a bad thing and Hasbro's stipulation that both titles in mid-2012 feature Optimus Prime, written out in "The Publicity Stunt of Optimus Prime" some six months previously, actually brings out a welcome change for both titles.
PUBLISHER: IDW, 2012
WRITER: JOHN BARBER
ARTIST: ANDREW GRIFFITH
RiD was The Other Comic of IDW's relaunch, handling the workmanlike practicalities of a reborn Cybertron swarming with a mixture of refugees, demobbed soldiers and prisoners of a finished war. Writing was handled by John Barber, who had won minor acclaim on IDW's dying live action movie books through a mixture of respectable writing and an ability to patch gigantic continuity problems in a somewhat flowing fashion, making him just what the company needed. RiD is the book that for better or for worse continues on from Costa's meandering ongoing series with MTMTE more of an offshoot in narrative terms; the former is defined by Barber's admirable refusal to use things like the less than clear events of "Chaos" to reset any troublesome areas and instead write his way out of trouble.
