M.A.S.K.'s vehicles are made by vivisecting Blitzwing, yup.

And there's not really any power creep. G.I. Joe are thoroughly outmatched by the Transformers when they face off at the start of Revolution (literally the only damage they do is knocking off Jazz's arm, which requires an RPG hit and a drone strike). M.A.S.K. do a bit better, but that's only because their vehicles use Cybertronian tech.

 

The shared universe has already happened. They actually tie things together pretty well IMO, with Transformers still being very much the centerpiece.

 

Yknow what? I'm going to try it. Hopefully there will be a reason why theJoes and the TFs have never mentioned each other in their separate continuities before now. But the curiosity of how this all fits together got me. Let's do this.

 

The Revolution Prelude kinda serves that purpose. You have to finagle some things, but on the whole it works.

 

There is a reason. The retcon is that the entirety of IDW GI Joe happened in the period where the Transformers had left Earth entirely (between the end of the first ongoing and exRID 28) and by the time the Transformers came back GI Joe had been disbanded and replaced with the EDC.

 

Okay, I read the prelude and the main five issues (still haven't read the individual issues of the various tie-ins yet)...

Not bad, not bad at all. I don't mind if the details aren't perfect I just ask for a basic mesh where the most obvious stuff fits together, where the inconguities are staring me in the face where I notice it.

One of the biggest things I was worried about was power creep and y'all were right, they pretty much made the Transformers extremely hard to kill. Outside of explosives, they were a nuisance to Prime and co, nothing more. Rom vs Prime was just about right given Rom's power level. Overall, it's a heavily influenced TFs story with guest stars, not the other way around the way I thought it was going to be.

I was surprised by the art because I thought the cover artist (which I realized when I got the books is TRadd Moore) was a bad fit for the series and did the interiors but it's not, it's someone else. I like Tradd Moore, just not for this. The actual interior artist did great.

The story is really fast paced, a callback to old Marvel crossovers where the shit hits the fan from page one and a million things are going on at once, and more shit hits the fan with each proceeding issue. If I had to make one minor gripe it's Scarlett's depiction. I'm not used to her being so uncharacteristically irrational/not listening. I get that the TFs decimated Earth, but at the same time, some of the characters (the way I remember them from older Joe comics) seemed a bit too stubborn.