One thing I noticed about All Hail Megatron how it seems to be trying to be too many things at the same time. Is it an action comic? A military thriller? Political satire? Social commentary? All of these ideas gets mashed up together and the end results is less than satisfatory.


I've come to conclusion that the reason for this, disjointedness is the clashing creative directions between Chris Ryall and Shane McCarthy.

Ryall, green-eyed at Bay's financial success, sought to replicate it, but with a decidedly G1 flavour, to woo in disenfranchised fans of Transformers.

McCarthy, one of the aforementioned disenfrachised fans, sought to write a version of the movie he wanted to see i.e. a deep political statement.

Indeed, it seems the only creative agreement he has with Ryall is the decision to go G1-flavoured. Everything else just doesn't gel right.

So the idea is, would All Hail Megatron be better if Ryall were to write it himself? Or should McCarthy've been given full creative control?

 

No, it would have been better if it didn't chuck continuity out the window.

 

I have to agree with Autovolt here.

The main reason I was disapointed with AHM was the fact that it felt completely out of place in the IDWverse to that point. It was also fairly obvious that a lot of the backstories connecting the end of Furman's run to AHM was only added into later issues after they saw the negative reactions the fans had to their soft reboot.

They should have either let McCarthy write his own story that was separate from the IDWverse, or they should have had the connections between the -ation series and AHM be evident from the beginning.

 

Whilst I agree with both of you, I only think it's fair to judge AHM on it's own merits. Many fans hated Furman's covert robots take on Transformer, and prefer the 'cons to be a bunch of invincible ciphers 

 

IT'd be better if plot threads didn't widely change between issues. I don't particularly care with the continuity before it, but I sort of dislike how its not consistent with ITSELF.

End of issue 12, Starscream is all "Can't off Megatron. My duty's to protect him and stuff" Issue 13: Back to regular Starscream'ing.

 

Either option would probably been better than what we got. Was Shane given more freedom on the drift mini? Cos that was down right awful too and if that is the case Ryall all the way.

 

OH MY PRIMUS! This won't become true if you repeat it enough! It did NOT chuck continuity out the window. Oh, oops Reflector was in there. that's an editorial mistake. NOT continuity going out the window. Oh wow, Soundwave acted different then he did in that ONE ISSUE that came out a couple years ago. Big Deal. "Oh they made no mention of Ore 13" So what?!

People decided that AHM was a continuity mess after one issue, when it started 20% of the way through it's own story. reading the actual book seems to do nothing to remove that false mindset. And people hold onto things getting explained at the end as "Oh diffrent writers had to fix it" Sweet mercy, if people stopped griping about AHM for 5 minutes everyone would crap world peace and I'd be able to stop taking sleeping pills.

 

I almost blew coffee at my computer screen reading that part!

Good show and well said haha!

 

It had great artwork though. Well, most of it. There were a few pages drawn simplistic.

 

AHM was my first IDW exposure. Still love it.

 

Considering that was what made the Earth of priority importance and was the whole reason for Megatron stepping up trying to conquer the planet during Furman's run... If Ore 13 was no longer of any importance to even be mentioned in AHM, then what was the point of them conquering the planet? What where they still doing there? And how about stuff like "The Matrix started the war" inconsistency? I don't recall that ever coming up before or since. It came off more like Megatron decided to take it from Optimus on a whim.
Autovolt 127 is right, AHM would have been better if it hadn't chucked continuity out the window. Not only with the stories that came before it but as Ghilz said, it had continuity problems within its own narrative as well. That's the biggest problem I had with it, the lack of consistency with... well anything. Not sure it would have mattered if Ryall wrote it himself or McCarthy had full creative control with the types of problems AHM had.

 

AHM was my catching on point. Didn't bother me.

 

...if it didn't exist or was an elseworld to begin with?

Yup.  

 

The problem with AHM is that, initally, it was supposed to be a total continuity reboot IIRC. Somehow, at some point, it was decided it would link up with the *-ations which is where all the long running continuity problems crop up en masse that have taken years to be tamped down. Ironically, Spotlight; Drift ended up being the means for this because it introduced the plot elements which led to that time traveling ship which ultimately corrected the Schrodinger's Reflector paradox by just sending AHM Reflector back in time to die in Spotlight:Wheelie thanks to the events in that really complicated issue where Pax visited LV-117.

 

I didn't mind AHM. It had flaws and some entertaining parts.

However, I feel like the promotional campaign for it was misplaced. I LOVED the soviet-inspired Decepticon propaganda posters and would have liked to see a greater emphasis on a Decepticon-ruled planet. What was it like? How did people adapt? How were the actions explained/justified?

Such a rich idea that was just scraped by the plot. Decepticons blow up cities. Starscream and Megatron note that there is nothing left to prove and that the current fighting is merely a distraction from the fact that they won. Decepticon infighting.

It could have been so much more and climaxed on those ideas / the Autobot return. It just seems like the unique ideas that McCarthy had were rushed and/or more of a pitch than a real plan.

 

The tale of Ryall pushing McCarthy to write a bad story is a more interesting and imaginative tale than most of AHM itself.   Seriously though, I don't buy Ryall's interference being the reason AHM was what it was, the movies had their own comics, if he wanted McCarthy to write a movie cash in he would have put him to work on those.

Lack of editing was the bigger issue at IDW rather than too much micromanagement from people like Ryall, Shane was given 12 issues of their main continuity, plus spotlights and a miniseries with the space and freedom of it being pushed as a soft reboot to make sure that he got to write the story that he wanted to tell. The end result was weak and Shane deserves a lot of the blame for that, it felt like he'd planned out a bunch of cool moments at the start with little clue as to how to string them together in a satisfying way, much of it seemed like filler when there was absolutely no reason for it given how much of the story happened off panel.

I can't help but feel someone like Barber would have told Shane to cut some pages of flat cliché humans and Transformers standing around, chatting and replace them with pages foreshadowing future events and the whole thing would have been a better read overall, both as a trade and as individual issues.

 

There's no lack of consistency with anything before it. Anything after it can only be blamed on the newer stuff. You can't fault a storyline for not incorporating things that were added on years after it was created/published.

And to this day I'm still kind of puzzled how most fans can't seem to be able to put two and two together. I mean, Roberts for instance consistently writes stories and narratives with some gaps between them, so that fans can slowly piece out a story while he gradually unfolds his original intentions. And we're okay with that, cause it works.

But sometimes people end up blaming one medium and not the other.

-Why didn't the Autobots and Megatron move out of Earth? Was this so important? Perhaps with both leaders on one world, things kind of escalated there. One leader leaves the world, the other has a clear peer to peer strength advantage over the infiltration team remaining back.

-The matrix started the war. I don't really remember that line, could be there, and even if it was...come on people, with the stuff we've gotten these past 2 years, is it so difficult to put two and two together? The matrix represents the lineage of Primes, which was so corrupt it actually pushed people like Megatron to band together, form the Decepticons and go on their merry way. Most bots opposed to that could be argued to not want to move away from the traditional values of a leader being sought by the matrix [which, until Optimus and excluding Nova, was a fake], and others enjoyed the reign of power the corrupted lineage of Primes [Nominus, Sentinel, the senate] gave them.

Honestly? AHM had hints of the previous continuity since issue 2, which attributed previous sightings of any decepticons and autobots to random machinations from the labeled terrorist group Machination. It's an extremely simple pick up point that somehow Furman and Ryal completely glossed over while writing/editing Maximum Dinobots, which came out months after AHM.

Sometimes editors can/should take the blame instead of writers. Fembots appearing in Megatron: Origins should not be a contradiction with Spotlight Arcee and it's not Holmes or Milne's fault. SL Arcee came out almost a year/bit more than a year AFTER Megatron Origins. Surely at that point somebody could point out something like "pst, hey dude, the entire plotline of your issue is negated by 5 or 6 panels in that story last year. How do you want to proceed?"

 

Uh, that's not exactly true, since McCarthy wasn't the one who wrote Spotlight: Kup (where he's last seen at death's door and having cone totally batshit insane). That was Nick Roche, who wasn't brought onto AHM until after Kup magically showed up okay in AHM issue 5, then for ten more issues it's not even explained how the hell was the subject of nothing less than a medical miracle. The issue that does fill in that gap; #15, was in the hands of Roche and Roberts, NOT McCarthy.

 

No, it really does lack consistency with what came before it. And I wasn't blaming it for what came after, just pointing out some of the conflicts AHM creates is ignored by future storylines. Like the Matrix being the cause of the war for example. That's never referenced outside of AHM because it doesn't fit with anything that's been established.

Sure, but there is a difference between leaving gaps to fill them in as the storyline unfolds to build the mystery or suspense like Roberts tends to do, and leaving gaps that aren't filled in at all or otherwise conflicts with the previously established continuity like AHM did. That's not a question of being able to put two and two together if the story isn't told consistently with known events in the first place.

No, that's not how the story unfolded. The Autobots had pretty much left Earth during the Devastation storyarc to deal with other issues. McCarthy said AHM takes place about a year later (allowing for Furman the time to wrap up his loose ends) and then the Autobots return only to get steamrolled by the Decepticons due to Sunstreaker's betrayal. It's only then that the Decepticons actually start to take over the planet despite having had about a years worth of free reign.

But besides that, the only thing that made Earth so important to the Decepticons during Furman's run was Ore 13. So why aren't they conquering and stockpiling the Ore in the Autobots absence? And why do they stay there to conquer the planet once the Autobots are defeated? Why continue to bother with Earth at that point?

Kup says it in issue 5 of AHM. And there's nothing to "put two and two together" with when the Matrix had absolutely nothing to do with the story up until that point. The Decepticon movement began in response to the corruption of the Senate and their functionalism oppression. Not the corruption of the Prime linage, which the general population wouldn't have been aware of before the war began. Even if we say the war began over the Matrix, why didn't Megatron take it earlier? We know he has had the opportunity to do so before, like when he had his hands in Optimus' chest squeezing his spark in the Escalation storyarc. Why didn't he take the Matrix then if that's what the war had been all about?

 

Well, putting the continuity gaps aside, I can tell you what I found disappointing about AHM right away.

Look at the characters that McCarthy decided to use for his first 3 and a half issues. All we get are G1 Season 1 and 2 characters. It was extremely obvious from the get go that McCarthy had not done much research into anything that came before it, because he was basically just writing his own Season 2 cartoon fanfic. Hot Rod and the Wreckers show up a little later to add a little variation, but not much.

I know I'm blowing this a little out of proportion, but that is the way I felt at the time. Furman had built an interesting new world that was populated by a multitude of G1 characters from all over the spectrum. McCarthy, on the other hand, wanted to bring the universe back into the Sunbow Season 1 and 2 bubble.