Just finished reading. That was awesome!

 

It makes me feel better to know I'm not the only person who feels this way.  

Yeah, the same here. It made me laugh, but also feel a bit sad.  

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. Comics are a visual and -yes- ACTION-based medium. Saying that they are not is... sort of... weird. 

Hearing you say that makes me feel sad. It feels like you must have grown up on Rob Liefeld, and missed out on comics that are actually GOOD at depicting action. European comics, manhua, manga, classical american comics... they all have great action traditions, and all of them are a bit different from each other. At its best, comics action can take on a meticulous, expansive, cinematic flair. Likewise, animation can depict action in ways that are striking and exciting, or downright banal. In other words, whatever medium you're working in, if you can't convey action well, you're not doing it right. Don't blame the medium.

That said, comics action is often limited by space or narrative expediency. Roberts just doesn't script action particularly well... or perhaps, just doesn't leave enough ROOM to do it right. When you're accustomed to fitting 500 words of dialogue on a page, I could see how panel-to-panel action scenes could feel outside of your normal rhythm and comfort zone. It could be that Roberts just isn't a very visual writer (being so dialog oriented).

Also, Transformers, being typically high-detail, also tend to a certain "statuesque" quality on the page that doesn't lend itself to expressive action. I find Milne has become WAY more expressive in his work in recent years, but he's still not as dynamic as say Geoff Senior (who admittedly simplified the forms of the characters quite a bit). Between the two of them (Milne and Roberts), it may be why the action scenes are often vague... or perhaps just brief.

Still, even so... we saw a bit more energy and variety in the action in LSOTW, so maybe that was Nick's influence?

Yeah, but a 'long' DBZ fight scene usually means, like, a year or so. I think that's just an opposing extreme.  

I... don't think I've EVER seen anyone make that case for Twitter before.  

Personally, I think the character limit makes it particularly UN-suited for grown-ups. Unless you mean grown-ups who are so busy with real life that they can't bother engaging with anything except on the most fleeting, superficial and non-committal levels.  

In terms of creators keeping in touch with fans, I'd prefer a blog... but not every creator feels up for that, of course.

zmog

 

What can I say? Interesting people say interesting things on Twitter, I dunno what complex psychological reasons cause it. Remember that 140 characters leaves a lot of room for links as well...and it favors breadth of contact (lots of people) over depth. It's also very easy to share stuff effectively.

 

When I talk about comic books I tend to focus strictly on American big two ones because those are the ones most people I believe are familiar with, and I have a long history of not enjoying them.

I grew up mostly on Italian and Franco-belgian comedy comics with rare action-y exception. None of them where action heavy. And even when I read some action comic I never found the "action" part the reason why I come to comic books.

Manga are usually the ones that I found to be very action heavy, however most of the ones I read are either weekly based so they can easily spend lots of time showing of, sometime pretty amazing fight sequences because they have the benefit of not having to wait long to get the rest of it. Monthly manga is the same except that they tend to have a LOT more pages than the average western comic.

I can't agree with that. Some mediums are inherently better for different types of things. For example I love me a horror novel but a horror novel no matter how good can never send shivers down my spine and scare me shitless as much as a horror movie can. Same goes for action. Seeing a dynamic action heavy sequence of well done panels is always a treat, but compared to a good animated or choreographed live-action action sequence the comic books one will always be, to me, the lest impressive of the three and often times they end up eating a lot of pages and end up cutting the issue short and make it feel empty. And I generally don't like that when I have to wait 4 weeks between issues.

Unless the battle sequence is the CORE of the story and you dedicate a whole issue just to it I don't feel an action sequence should last longer than two pages in a comic. If that much.

Again all going strictly on American monthly based 22 pages per issue comics.

In the anime. Manga battles were quite a bit more fast paced and didn't last longer than a month or two really.

Toriyama now that's a guy who can draw exciting action scenes! He's all batshit insane but hey what can you do  

 

Now that... that was good.

Perhaps Roberts does have a tendency to pull out last minute saves (a lot), but it works, if simply because it gives me the warm fuzzies. Tailgate gets to live and enjoy life, through the intuition of his friends and some crazy guy. Cyclonus gets to open up and become a full fledged member of the crew, and Red Alert and Fortress Maximus (formerly two halves of Ultra Magnus' personality) now get to run their own station and hopefully have their own adventures. Oh, and Ultra Magnus is alive too, after twice getting cut down.

That being said, I do hope someone is eventually killed off, preferably a major player who's not a mini-bot.

 

The thing is, last minute-saves are the best kind. If you see it coming, it lessens the worry. "Tailgate's only got three days to live!" "But we have the cure now." Suddenly it's not as dramatic.

And they always make sense. Cyclonus saves Tailgate with basically a violent version of jump-starting, which we learned about, what, in issue #5? Rodimus uses the Matrix to stop the killswitch, which makes sense as it operates based on the Matrix's energy signature. (well, it's not the energy signature, but I don't have the comic to see the specific term they used. It's wavelength)

Thing is, being suprised by a turn of events =/= events coming out of nowhere.

 

I guess. In my (limited) experience, it just seems like 99.99% of twitter is pointless self-important blather, slavering idolatry or recycled links. I do understand that it's an easy way for busy people to fire thoughts into the void on a whim from pretty much anywhere, which is I suppose what makes it different than any other social networking platform, but I do find the short 'n shallow of it kind of a turn-off.

Bur again, bear in mind that I also refuse to own a cell phone, so I'm clearly some kind of weird cultural luddite.  

"Big Two" American comics do have a pretty bad action pedigree stretching back about two decades now, I admit. By that I mean that mainstream superhero comics have been (IMHO) horribly damaged by the Image Comics years, and the tendencies in the artwork that became common around that time. But going back further, there are some truly great artists, who in their prime, could drag a slugfest out and make it awesome... John Buscema, Ron Frenz, Alan Davis, John Byrne... and that's just talking the stuff from when I was growing up... there are lots of other great oldies from before.

I think that depends on the delivery format, I guess. For a long time manga in the NA market was squeezed into the usual 24-40page standard monthly format... but the stories themselves belonged to a whole different pacing. Blade of the Immortal is one of my longtime faves, and although I don't think it's as good as it used to be, that series had a fantastic approach to action, where confrontations could be explosive and brief, or stretch out over 6 months. I find manga often gets to the point faster than anime though... both can stretch out, but I see a lot more power-ups and smacktalk used to kill time in anime.

Manhua stuff is hit or miss, but sometimes the mix of graphical excellence and crazy sensational imagery can really generate a powerful level of excitement. I followed The Stormriders for several years. It was great.

You can compare different mediums, and prefer one over another, but I think they are all capable of carrying a hefty punch when done properly. The thing is of course that they don't always achieve this effect the same way. Horror in prose or comics can be downright terrifying, but it has a different set of tools than cinema does, as well as a different kind of immediacy.

I do particularly love action in cinema (it's my main field of study), and the different techniques and approaches to that aspect of the craft are dizzying... but I think comics can definitely hold their own at the best of times. Or, at the very least, they can provide a different kind of action that can be entertaining and worthwhile in its own right.

Animation... I don't know what it is... maybe it's budgetary, since cost-cutting can certainly kill the impact of a lot of animation. Or maybe it's the general literalism and lack of imagination I see in a lot of American animated action... but it's pretty exceptional when I find animated action to really deliver the goods.

*edit*Y'know... upon reflection, I take that back. For some reason my mind was just feeding me unimpressive memories of lame action scenes in cartoons, but when I really think about it, I've seen some pretty damn AWESOME action sequences achieved in animation (and particularly, if not exclusively, in anime). So okay, yeah... bearing in mind the immediacy and communicative power of the visual image, film and animation are probably BETTER forms for showing action. However, what's important is that I don't think that this necessarily means that comics are a poor medium for action... not at all.

I do appreciate that, especially when Roberts' issues usually seem like such a meaty read due to the heavy dialogue. But at times, I think we definitely deserve a little more. Last issue, I believe I likened the Dai-Atlas/Star-Saber duel to a splashy yet content-less Liefeld exercise. It was kind of pathetic, and scaling back on the panels in that case really killed some of the dramatic impact for me. I think "american" comics especially tend to underestimate the power of fragmenting time and using multiple panels to depict one moment. It's this 'cinematic montage' approach that I find really shines in a good manga, and the palpable atmosphere that it can generate is worth the space.

Well, in the case of the last few issues, that format has been feeling pretty limiting for action AND dialog. I think James and Alex need to double up and do 40 pages a month instead!  

Exactly. Anime series with lots of episodes are always cheating, I find... playing for time and trying to stretch their material as far as possible. It's killed my enthusiasm for quite a few series. It's rare to find a good one with a sharp rolling plot and hardly any filler.

Last minute deaths are like that too. In my case, I didn't see Tailgate dying until Cyclonus actually stormed into his room and just DID it. It was great. And it made sense.

Except he didn't do it. Sigh.

zmog

 

Yea, I really enjoyed that last minute save as well. Plus it was already done in previous issues. The only difference was the conduit being used.

I don't mind if someone dies as long it has meaning to the overall story. I don't like the "EPIC DEATH" as much as I used to, though.

 

I think what the action sequences are let down by is a serious lack of 'Boff!' 'Pow!' And of course 'Kablooey!!!'

 

I don't get that. This issue had a bunch of good action scenes. Tyrest being blasted to shit was a good example.

 

Has any of the details of or reasons for skids being a lapsed Primalist been clarified yet? as I thought it was interesting that someone who was once religious and now not was the one who ended up visiting this supposedly mystical primal place through the portal

 

Oh yes, I agree wholeheartedly. Roberts has kind of turned it into... his thing, but it does build up drama. Just pointing out a trend that others have noticed.

And yeah, the Matrix imprinted a unique spark-code onto those constructed cold, so that makes sense (though perhaps a couple lines from Perceptor about researching the spark code in past issues would have made it seem less out of the blue, but I'm fine with it as is. We did get to hear about him researching the Matrix, so I guess that counts)

 

I'd hazard a guess that Skid's losing his religious leanings has something to do with his repressed memories and the Empyrean Suite.

Note that the word "Empyrean" apparently refers to a place in heaven, so if Roberts' normal love of foreign-language wordplay is anything to go by, the piece of music almost certainly has something to do with religion.

 

Oh, it sure as hell is. But it's all in who you follow.

 

So, does anyone care to mention their thoughts on Rung's note that the forcefield that prevents both himself and Tyrest from entering the portal is similar to Aquitas tech?

Two notable things to me are that Tyrest doesn't seem to have a mastery of Aquitas tech, which implies that Aquitas could be a portal-alien artifact; and Rung has significant guilt to deny him access to the portal.

I'll hold back on my standard "Tyrest is a Quintesson pawn" mantra for a bit, but I will ponder what portal-aliens would want with Autobot dirty secrets and guilt.

 

The forcefield didn't stop Tyrest, it stopped Pharma.

 

12 Fragments of the Primal Key, Unlock the Infinity Gate, Travel Sideways in Time, Defeat the Agents of Chaos, and restore order to the Multiverse.

All things in bold are usually bold for a reason.

 

There's still Drift. He was on the necrobot's list, though that list seems very easy to luck out of at this point.

I think a lot of the stretching is done in an attempt to not overtake the manga and run out of source material. They have to either tread water and stretch things a bit, or have huge blocks of filler (sometimes entire seasons!) to kill time until the manga can build up some more story. I'm not sure *why* it's so hard to keep an anime on pace with the manga...you would think that would be part of the planning from the beginning.

Personally, I love twitter because overall it's very friendly. It's not like most places on the internet, where posters treat everyone like shit because they can't seem to comprehend that there's an actual human being behind the screen name. Almost everyone will mix real life tweets in with their fannish discussion, so you also get to know them on a more personal, non-fandom level. Twitter may not win in the content department, but it more than makes up for that in pleasant conversation with other fans.

 

It might be incidental. Tyrest seems to have designed the portal with the same parameters that he designed Aequitas with, in this case to serve his own religious zealot outlook (and personal lack of any guilt baggage). For some reason, Skids was cool with that, which is a bit weird. I would have expected him to be hanging on to SOME guilt from some point in his life at least.

I don't believe in the Necrobot. I think that list has another meaning.

Oh, I know that's WHY they do it. But it still yields a kind of bad serial pacing that can get almost unwatchable. Filler arcs drive me insane, but when there's a popular ongoing manga being developed, an anime with a brisk pacing and 24-50 episodes a year will certainly overtake a single mangaka scribbling away on his own. It's the curse of most of that shonin anime stuff (Naruto, DBZ, Bleach, etc)


zmog

 

it was a joke. Either a reference to the way Warpath spoke in the G1 cartoon, or the old 60's Batman show where they super imposed the sound effects over the action when Batman and Robin were fighting and someone got hit like they did in older comic books. Maybe both.

Aaadam West, Aaaaadaaam West....adam west...adam west...adam west...I'll come out when they're all gone...

Anywho, how come we can't get this comic in animated form a la the DC Universe stuff?

MTMTE is begging for an animated treatment so we can get to hear what the cast sounds like.