Wow, Getaway is great. Shame the Titans Return figure is so lacklustre. I also love that First Aid is seemingly so take charge, guess as a kid I just sort of imagine Hot Spot as the main person in almost every situations.

 

The Nudge gun definitely throws everything into question.

Blaster and Perceptor are two of the biggest ones right off the bat (though, oddly, Blaster was shown as part of the group shot of mutineers. Though, of course, so was Riptide)... I'd also throw Dipstick onto that list, since he's a fairly common background extra (and almost always shown with Xaaron, who did appear).

 

I felt like Xaaron would never join the mutineers and lie and get his friends killed. It seems like it contradicts his personality from previous IDW cameos

 

Win!    

 

My major takeaway from this is that Getaway is using thought warfare on the crew to an extent that would put Bombshell to shame. The security team are probably true believers, but with the support of a relatively small number of guys Getaway can manipulate reality on the ship with little more than a general sense of discombobulation. I mean, Hound OBVIOUSLY has been shut out of both power and the loop. Perceptor could probably figure out what happened through sheer brainpower, which is why he's been marginalized somehow. Also missing--Blaster.

It's nice to see Riptide playing a role, and the one he was clearly intended for given his status on the "margins" of Team Rodimus. Also, there is an obvious inconsistency with Riptide knowing that the DJD showed up, it seems deliberate enough to be more than an error.

And yes, in a FULLY CONSISTENT manner with his manipulations as seen earlier, Getaway is a ruthless fucking asshole.

 

We have seen many classic archenemy dynamics throughout Transformers.

Optimus vs Megatron

Rodimus vs Galvatron

First Aid vs Getaway

 

10 bucks say he's going through a memory loop of his own.

 

You sure? Could have sworn when 13 was announced he or Roberts mentioned he'd have some other issues later down the line

 

well see that's just it....to them it still has to be the same...if they looped 100 times and 99 of those times atomizer is there...but 1 time another character is there that breaks the loop. so it does have to be the same. redoing the same pages emphasizes that it's a loop. the more you look at each panel realizing this is exactly how the comic started the more it sinks in what really happened...so when he says "we'll revisit this conversation later" it's more messed up and has a bigger impact than when he said it the first time.

look i don't run around saying roberts is a genius with every book her writes like some people do....but it was kind of smart the way he did it. that last line of dialogue getaway says is more sinister when you realize what he had done. i just think the repeat served its purpose in what it conveyed and i don't see it as a cheap panel repeat like some other books. seriously i read a comic where a character got knocked out and there were nine panels of straight black....nine....panels. that's cheap.

 

I'm guessing it's because Riptide was keeping his head down since he had seen what had happened to the other "changed their minds" crew members-memory loop coma, and floating brains in jars...(I doubt if that happened all at once; probably one or two at a time, and since Swerve's was locked down, nobody could see the real sicko that Getaway is, especially with the "very pro-Getaway" security team in place), so Riptide may have decided that the Protectobots and Mirage were the best chance of changing the status-quo.

 

I absolutely loved this. I doubly loved that I walked right into it blindsided.

 

This just got fittingly circular. Did Getaway get me already?
You may not consider it a waste, as we didn't lose anything. I consider it a waste because I acquired something completely unnecessary, (a wasted gain). I can read the same thing, including Getaway 'meeting' them in Bay 4, at the front of the book.

 

Ah, Verminator is IDW canon.

 

I get that it was meant to solidify it was a loop. In fact, most of the comic beat the reader over the head that it was a loop. What if, at the end of the book, we got a spread of the previous panels set behind, say, the vat of brains or the knocked out protectobots? That way, it insinuates that they're reliving it. It's not necessary that they repeat three whole pages to get the message across. It's just playing a joke on the reader. No extra punch is given. To me at least, I was just left with a lukewarm feeling. It was clever, but it was also just a way to reuse pages. There are plenty of ways to express a loop without repeating the exact same images.

 

Just chipping in to say that repeating FOUR FULL PAGES is the laziest thing I've ever seen. One or two panels would have sufficed to establish what was happening.

 

But it'd lack the psychological impact.

 

You mean the psychological impact of skimming the last few pages more and more quickly as you realize there's zero new content? I was expecting a final panel of them comatose in the medical bay at least. What a waste of paper in print editions.

Those previous pages still exist; we can flip back to them and pick up on all the foreshadowing and symmetry (Getaway's lines, Blade's injury, etc.). There's no need to actually print them twice. Moore was playing with symmetry and chronological repetition in WATCHMEN thirty years ago; it's not exactly revolutionary anymore. Roberts has a pretty low opinion of his readers if he thinks he actually needs to handhold us through the exact same four pages twice in a row.

 

Seriously, yes. Most of Getaway's dialogue was hinting at a loop. Thunderclash's predicament was outlaid with emphasis. Blade's injury at the start was suddenly explained in an 'Ah' moment. This was a typical Roberts setup. I fully expected it to end on the opening panel, but was surprised to see how long it just kept going. Sure, it took no real effort to do from an artistic point of view, but it was so unnecessary.

It appears to me that the loop was joined during the firefight, just before the race to the shuttle. The missile that hit the shuttle may have separately triggered the memory loss. Those elements didn't need repeating.

 

Yes, they are.

 

When I read the book, Blades getting shot at the same point where he was hurt in the beginning was already a dead give away that they are in a memory loop. Then when they reached the hangar and commented how their ship was rebuilt so fast, was another. It would have been enough to maybe just keep the first panel of the first page at the end. I didn't read any more panels, because I knew it was the same. More confirmation wasn't needed. I'm more annoyed with the Free Digital Ashcan. I usually skip them as well. Either because I'm not interested or I already have the comic that's featured.