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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Robot Archie

Robot Archie was one of the trademark characters from Lion, one of IPC/Fleetway's longest running weeklies. An invention of Ted Cowan and Ted Kearnon (who would remain on the strip for most of its' duration), Archie appeared in the very first issue as 'The Jungle Robot'. In 1957 he would return in a self-titled strip which would run until 1974, lasting as long as Lion itself, and even after this he would continue to feature in annuals until 1983 (again, as long as the publication, though by the last years he was represented through text stories and reprints of old strips).

The mechanical man was always accompanied on his adventures by Ted Ritchie (nephew of the robot's inventor, Professor C. R. Ritchie) and Ken Dale. Formative years were spent causing massive property damage in various colonial backwaters in the search for lost treasures (where native tribes invariably mistook Archie for a god), before in 1968 Ritchie invented a time-machine, incongruously disguised as a giant chess knight, and the two 'pals' and 'Ol' tinribs' got to cause massive property damage throughout history. Initially, Archie couldn't speak, and was reliant on Ted for directions, but soon a voicebox was added (giving him a wonderfully boastful personality), and with time he was basically independent. He also received upgrades physically, gaining telescopic arms and flame-throwing fingers, amongst other additions. Archie tended to carry a sword as well.

Archie was also a considerable success in Holland, and artist Bert Bus redrew many Archie strips, even adding some of his own. Despite the fact this material recoloured Archie (making him silver; as the flagship character, Lion always had him red when he appeared in colour) and morphed Ted and Ken into Color Climax-era pornstars, these stories were used to represent the character in Vulcan's formidable roster (no doubt due to being in colour), with the Dutch dialogue switched back to English.

The character's iconic nature means he usually gets chunky roles in anything reviving the old Fleetway inventory, and thus he appeared as Acid Archie in Zenith, and getting turned into a killing machine by Bad Penny in Albion. While the latter is something of a perversion, it made for a nice T-shirt transfer... Thankfully 2000AD avoided him for their notorious Action Special, meaning we were robbed of an army of Archies artificially inseminating the Queen, or somesuch shit.

I'd love to have a full-blown section on Archie as the stories I've read have nearly always been fun (especially from about 1967 onwards, where his personality really starts to come to the fore), but the material's so hard to get hold of I couldn't hope to do justice to his two-plus decade career. 

However, here are a few Archie adventures for you to enjoy (nearly all from the annuals, as they're easier to find).

STRIP STORIES: "THE METAL MONSTER", "THE STEEL GIANT", "THE WEIRD WORLD OF X", 1974, 1975 & 1976 LION ANNUALS,
"...AND THE INCA GOLD", "...AND THE INVADERS", "...AND THE POWER CRYSTAL", "...AND THE SHARK MONSTER OF ARUNDA BAY",
"...AND THE Z-RAY", "VOLCANO ISLAND", "ROBOT ARCHIE'S INVENTION".
TEXT STORIES: "OPERATION ARCHIE", "THE MAD MILLIONAIRE", "THE VANISHING PLANES, 1974, 1975 & 1976 LION ANNUALS,
"...AND THE GLOB", "...ON THE ISLAND OF TREACHERY", "THE AMAZING ROBOT ARCHIE"

Total File Size: 67.5MB

Transformers - Spotlight: Arcee

Christ almighty. Okay, let's get the good stuff laid out first. And there is some really good stuff in here; structurally the issue does a fine job of naturally dovetailing several plot threads from previous Spotlights in an organic way as opposed to Furman's recent habit of just skipping from one to another with no narrative connection.

Firstly there's the appearance of Banzaitron's secret service-y unit from Spotlight: Hot Rod, clearly acting on information passed on by Doubledealer. It's nice to see the guy get something solid to do even if all those years haven't made that name any less wince-inducing. He makes for a nice clutter-free villain, though it's a shame the Combaticons, one of the better defined Special Teams, are reduced to generic Decepticon psycho-saddhists.

Also followed up on is the fate of Monstructor from Spotlight: Optimus Prime, being examined at the Autobot prison on Garrus-9 by - in a nice callback to Stormbringer - Jetfire and the Technobots. They're a bit of a plot device here as the reason for Banzaitron's attack but it's still nice to touch base. Other elements worthy of praise here are a good flashback showing for Ultra Magnus and the decent recasting of Fortress Maximus as a no-nonsense warden, meaning the guy's name can make sense without him having to turn into a city. 

Now the problems. You'll notice how Arcee herself wasn't mentioned in any of the positive sections - that is because here she is terrible in every possible way - as a character , as a concept, as a narrative device. It's hard to know where to start.

The most immediate I suppose is that this is another issue where narrative clarity is sacrificed so that Furman can bang on about a hot potato from the line's history - in this case gender. It's not actually an area I'm too fussed on personally; I'd rather the female characters weren't sexualised or stereotyped  (much like the handling of gender in Challenge of the Gobots, of all things) but I really don't think it's worth getting steamed up about or bogged down on - something on the level of the Transformers - Prime cartoon, where some Transformers are male and some female and that's about it for depth is fine by me.

However, thanks to the semi-humorous UK strip "Prime's Rib" and the asexual reproduction shown in Generation 2 we already know what to Furman thinks and it's really not worth yet another element being added to the straining IDW continuity to find out that he still basically thinks the same - that Transformers aren't gendered. It especially isn't worth it when it's done this badly.

The twist here is that Jhiaxus has introduced gender to the species by experimenting on Arcee. The why isn't so bad - because he could, he's a mad bastard playing God. It's the how that's really wrongheaded. The issue never really bothers explaining what precisely Jhiaxus does to Arcee - adds a reproductive system that has no male counterpart as the rest of the Transformers are gender neutral? Adds female character trails cribbed from observing other species to Arcee's neural network? A half-hearted mention of CNA doesn't even start covering this. Because on what the comic shows us, all he's actually done is painted Arcee pink, added curvy bodywork and told his experiment they're female now. 

At the risk of sounding offensive it's more a case of forced transvestism than a gender swap, straying into non-consensual sissification. Surely Jhiaxus can't introduce gender into a whole genderless species in this way anyway as he's changed nothing about anyone else to make them male. I'm not especially versed in gender politics but surely at best he's somehow changed the species to however many million gender neutral members and one female than however many million males and one female, otherwise we're left with the crass idea of male gender being defined as anyone not male. And the whole thing is muddied by Arcee effectively choosing to identify as female by going around telling everyone she's female rather than claiming to be a genderless robot mutilated by a mad scientist.

Arcee's characterisation is that of a vengeful action chick from an exploitation flick (though given Furman's propensity for being slightly behind the pop culture curve a homage to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill seems more likely). It's possible to read a bit too much into this and say the writer is trying to convey that being female is something to be angry about or that she's a balanced example of what a female Transformer would be like. In the context of the insane mechanics of gender as per this story though it makes some sense - Arcee is the result of an enforced change through Jhiaxus and no attempt at some sort of empathic female archetype is seriously attempted. While it's unimaginative the idea of a discarded experimental subject out for revenge is simply a dull old trope, and Arcee's quite openly presented as being completely mental. And anyone know why Jhiaxus also made his creation insanely powerful? No?

Annoyingly there was a perfect alternative to much of this literally right there on the page. If Furman had needed a revenge-crazed powerful loose cannon hell-bent on tracking down Jhiaxus, why not Monstructor? No part of the issue wouldn't work with this switch - they'll get nothing but used by the Decepticons and could have some development in putting their faith in Jetfire's honest scientific graft, so they could even be Garrus 9's last resort. Instead Furman introduces another 'new' character to carry out this function, opening an unpleasant can of worms in the process while also answering a question surely nobody was asking. A look at gender in this continuity might have been interesting some point down the line, but the question once again is why the Hell Furman's just throwing so much shit at the title when there are already a preposterous amount of things going on.

One final point should be made - the dialogue in this issue is appalling. It's never really been Furman's strong suit - yes, there have been memorable lines over the years but actual frame-to-frame dialogue's always been a bit of an area to work for even before he found out about the Furmanism thing and prolapsed into self-parody. But here is a low - everything Arcee says is a ridiculous level-breaker only matched by the Combaticons' Saturday morning cartoon evil speeches.

Oh, and Arcee apparently has a homing instinct which means Jhiaxus can't hide from her but is unaware that he's in the next room in the flashback. Rubbish.

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Transformers - Spotlight: Blaster

Spotlight: Blaster is a good demonstration of the way the format found itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it's been irritating to have ongoing plots sneak into the Spotlights but on the other something like this standalone character piece feels like a waste of pages now the box has been opened.

In this case the focus is firmly on the Autobot communications officer and his role in the war as a propaganda broadcaster,  boosting the morale of the Autobots with his rousing speeches. The speeches we hear admittedly aren't very inspiring but it's a nice bit of thinking for Furman, albeit still in the frame of reference of the civil war rather than the full blown Cybertronian culture James Roberts would later explore, and that sort of thing is difficult to write anyway. So Furman gets a pass there and the scenes of bustling Autobots listening in gives a good background canvas with lots of fun cameos to spot. 

The bulk of the plot revolves around a second attempt to assassinate Blaster (the issue opens with his deactivated body floating in space before being returned to the Autobots after the first), the twist being that the would be killer is - duh duh duuh - a fellow Autobot. The resulting attempt to lure said killer into the open is good hokey fun, even though if Blaster was half the asset the story makes him out to be it would never have been considered. 

The traitor is found in short order to be Beachcomber, and this is where the issue falls down. Obviously the irritating Minibot was being mentally controlled in what feels like a Saturday morning cartoon climbdown. Wouldn't it have been much more exciting to play with the pacifist aspect of Beachcomber's character and have him reluctantly resolve to assassinate The Voice for his stirring propaganda prolonging the war? Instead the resolution is used to set up an obvious rivalry between Blaster and Soundwave that to the best of my recollection never bore fruit.

Underwhelming (but truth be told competent ) conclusion aside this is an interesting look at Blaster taken in isolation. However,  in the wider context of the IDW universe and the way the recent Spotlights have been heading you have to question if this story had to be told here and now.

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Transformers - Spotlight: Galvatron

A couple of thoughts came to me on re-reading this issue which made me think considerably less of the thing.

Firstly there's the superficially fresh idea of having Galvatron himself be a totally different character to Megatron. Despite some minor confusion regarding some promotional material for the Japanese Scramble City OVA back in the early days of fandom and the intentionally non-committal wording of the original toy's Tech Spec (to avoid spoilers for the 1986 film) this has never really been done before. However, when you think about it, it basically has.

Furman's own time travel material for Marvel muddied the water by purposely playing up the pair's differences while having them team up against everyone else and by the time of the second clear cut Galvatron on Furman's American run it's even more abstract. Following Unicron's defeat in "On the Edge of Extinction " that Galvatron becomes a future version of "our" Megatron that can't come to pass in "our" timeline as Cybertron's destruction is averted, or at least the same destruction seen in "Rhythms of Darkness". Which doesn't make that Galvatron a different character, but does lessen the impact here - we're used to situations being contrived to allow Megatron and Galvatron to co-exist.

The Marvel USA Galvatron does bring up a second familiar element of this Spotlight - the character as a reluctant, rebelling herald of a dark force threatening life across the universe - just as he was in relation to Unicron. Now, this might be a little uncharitable (but considering the general quality of Furman's work on IDW I'm not feeling particularly charitable) but isn't Nova Prime actually a lot like Unicron? The heralds, the plan to consume everything, the dire astral warning given to Optimus in Escalation... It might be hard to remember now, but between Dreamwave's output, the potted myths of the Ultimate Guide and the Armada cartoon Transformers fans in general were really getting fed up with Unicron's over-exposure at the time IDW's material got started up and it's worth speculating whether the whole Nova Prime/Dead Universe thing was pitched as a Unicron arc before being overruled and tweaked. Or it could just be that Furman's got a limited imagination when it comes to having a great darkness threatens everyone.

That said, while Galvatron isn't as fresh as he could have been he does at least make an interesting subject, both in terms of his new back story  (the idea of him being the one to plunge the Ark-1 into the Dead Universe is a great mirroring of Optimus Prime's fateful decision to set the original Ark on a collision course with Earth in the Marvel series ) and in terms of his resulting personal conflict. His power level is nicely handled too, and it's nice that his agenda to regain his independence for once gives a good reason for him not just killing everyone. As yet the Dead Universe plot is intriguing but it's difficult to get too hyped when there's so much else already going on.

Talking of which the issue takes a page or two to touch base with the Earth plot, establishing that Sunstreaker and Ironhide are still missing after their problems in Escalation and that Verity really deserves to be stepped on.  The absence  of Sunstreaker leads to the issue's other thread - his brother Sideswipe is stationed at Galvatron's destination (a small pocket of artificial environment on Cybertron) as part of a unit led by Hound guarding Thunderwing's body. Naturally he wants to be posted to Earth to help the search but he's being kept away to keep things simple. Both the fraternal relationship and Sideswipe's character actually deserve more space than this comic can afford them, and it would have been a better use of pages to follow this up than what the next three Spotlights served up.

As it is we get a few frames of introspection before Sideswipe has to battle Galvatron and it's difficult hard to tell if some of the Autobot's dialogue is character work showing he's taking Leadfoot's death personally in response to his brother's disappearance, if Sideswipe and Leadfoot were friends or if it's just bad melodramatic dialogue. The rest of the Autobots get even less space though the redesign of Hound is nice and the Generation 2 fan in me is delighted not only to have Skram and Road Rocket show up but also not dying instantly as cannon fodder.

Overall despite the intended freshness falling flat this is a largely enjoyable read and therefore nudging its' way towards the higher end of Furman's work with the format. 

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Transformers - Spotlight: Optimus Prime

This is basically the tipping point from IDW having a convoluted universe to it becoming a case of "for fuck's sake, Simon ".

Set directly after Escalation it isn't even particularly revealing about Optimus himself, though there's a certain admirable quality to such a character thinking exactly as he talks. Shame it's probably unintended but at least Furman doesn't revive the self-doubting version of the character from the later stages of the Marvel G1 book. 

This issue is actually about further setup for the Ark-1 plot opened in Spotlight Nightbeat. It's difficult to evaluate this in hindsight, given that we know now how badly that would turn out but it's certainly not as interesting as it should be and definitely something that could have waited six months while other threads were tied up. It's also the start of mainline plots bleeding into the Spotlights, making them less character pieces and more an overflow system for the "core" plots.  

Really this is more about Furman "doing" the combiners than a story about Optimus. It's one of several IDW issues to just grind to a halt while the writer lays out his theories about how some eighties toy gimmick or another works in his universe. It might not have been so bad if the answer wasn't always "an evil scientist did it and it resulted in a nutter". 

In this case six Decepticons were merged by Ark-1 crew member Jhiaxus so they could combine into super powerful moron Monstructor. And that's a fumble there - while Monstructor is pleasingly esoteric and largely unused he's made up of six nobodies whose scant previous appearances have shown them to also be morons. They include guys called Slog and Birdbrain, for God's sake. And yet we're meant to empathise with Prime being appalled at their fate armed with only this. What would have worked better would have been to use an extant team, Autobots for preference. With the Technobots off the table by dint of being in Stormbringer, the Protectobots might have been a nice choice and, given their fate, more resonance. 

Similarly, the revelation that Nova Prime was a shady character doesn't carry any sort of punch because there's never been much telling us he wasn't. To be honest, what with The War Within and Megatron: Origin both making it clear the Autobots were corrupt and complacent before Optimus showed up and "Evil" Prime being such a common theme in various toylines it'd probably be more of a surprise if he hadn't been a prick. 

Both problems tie in with this incessant need to bring more revelations and twists into a universe creaking under enough weight already. Build Nova Prime up into some lost paragon over the next year, feed in some flashback characterisation for Wildfly and company somewhere and the issue would work a lot better. Once again the big concepts aren't bad but it's Furman's indecent hurry to rush them onto the page that jars. 

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Transformers - Spotlight: Ramjet

The one significant legacy of the crossover with the Avengers (which I have not and will not be reading as those things are always a terrible waste of all concerned ) was that Ramjet was left on Earth and clearly not part of main writer Simon Furman's plans. Thus the crossover's writer Stuart Moore was basically given a Spotlight to write the guy back out.

The original Ramjet was probably the stupidest of the trio lamentably known as the Coneheads, best summed up by his name being not a reference to the crude engine design but his habit of trying to charge everything with his nosecone in either mode. Moore alloys this minuscule intelligence with a stratospheric ambition and the result is a joy. The page where Ramjet explains his insane, incomprehensible and utterly unfeasible "nonlinear" plan for universal domination and shows complete ignorance of his abilities and resources is worth the price of admission alone. 

And it's not alone, because this comic is hilarious. As in on purpose hilarious. There's the Mini-Constructicons, Ramjet's trio of jive talking minions who make fart jokes. There's Harrison, his barely literate facsimile helper. There's his boasting attempt to recruit an obviously contemptuous Skywarp - yep, even Skywarp thinks Ramjet is an idiot. 

Despite his misplaced arrogance and pettiness it's actually a bit hard not to feel a little sorry for Ramjet when his planning is cut short by Megatron turning up to - wordlessly and effortlessly - kill him. It's clear that Megatron knew his plans from the start and - due to one of the better uses of overlapping with the main storyline - seems to use crushing the ersatz traitor as physical therapy after his humiliation in Brasnya rather than because he actually considers him a threat.

The end result is a funny, clever take on the perennial idea of a Decepticon plotter trying to overthrow the leader, and one that actually adds to Megatron - imagine if he'd done this to Starscream at the end of Infiltration, though.

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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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