The concept of post-war emptiness and malaise was an interesting concept to explore. The execution was horrible. Seems like a recurring problem with IDW. Furman's concept of infiltration and of human reaction to extraterrestrial robot invasion was interesting and off to a good start before he got derailed with the mystic dead universe and evil Prime crap. Even the new take on headmasters was ok, until he had to compress and prematurely end the arc. The concept of AHM was fascinating and lead to some interesting interactions and revelations between Megatron and Starscream, but overall didn't live up to hopes (though was perhaps my favorite of the concept executions). The Prowl magnificent bastard and nihilism concept was interesting, but Barber botched the characterization. The concept of colonial unification and canon welding all the transformer lines in Windblade has a lot of potential, but so far the writing has been pretty unsophisticated. So much potential in the IDW ideas, so little delivery.

Ironically, MtMtE was among the worst ideas conceptually, IMO, but had the best results (for one season…).

The only good thing to come out of the Costa run is the Thundercracker development. That was a good, logical concept fairly well executed.

But no, the problem with Costa (and Furman) had nothing to do with making transformers too alien. Costa's take was about as anthropomorphic as the average transformer series. Excepting the Arcee solo issue, which was extremely problematic, I don't recall Furman's run being criticized much, despite being slightly less anthropomorphic than the usual transformer comic.

 

I remember having very low interest when it was announced. From the solicits, and the very small sample I had of Roberts' work, it really seemed like Barber and Roberts each had the wrong project, and should have just switched. I still wonder how that might have turned out differently.

Of course, part of the strength of MTMTE is that it seemed surprisingly ambivalent about actually engaging with its "space trek" premise, and instead delved into all sorts of more interesting stuff.

sigh... it sure would be nice to see Roberts find his mojo again.

As you outline, none of the "concepts" of any of these series are actually bad ideas, when viewed at a distance. You can say "Costa's series was all about post-war malaise and the fallout of the invasion of Earth", and that sounds like worthy material... but it doesn't make it good.

Furman started off his run with a nice ambience... the notion of "aliens among us, waging a secret war" was classic. I never felt like it really took off though, and I totally agree about the excess of quasi-mystic junk. Mostly though, I just didn't find Furman's characterizations to be all that vivid. His stuff was largely just sort of... flavourless? Not bad-tasting... just kind of bland. Without EJ Su, I don't know if I would have rode it out as long as I did.

zmog

 

The concept of the Ironhide mini annoyed me. A mysterious wizard resurrects the hero for a quest only he can perform. That's never gonna work for me. But the writing was decent enough, I suppose.

Tangential issue: Sunstreaker could be one of the most interesting characters in the cast. Why is a sociopathic narcissist killing machine an Autobot?! That's ripe for some great exploration and character interactions. But at least in the IDW era, he's dialed way back to vain jerk at most, and often just your average soldier. The only hint of something dark is his eager participation in the gladiatorial games in Megatron. Even his AHM betrayal had more to do with headmaster PTSD and Bombshell's manipulation via Hunter than his own Personality disorder. What a waste of a good bio.

 

I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're absolutely right: MtMtE was much more interesting than it would have been had the stories been more directly about their quest to find the Legendary Knights.

I can see what you mean about Furman's characterization being a little bland. Su was definitely the biggest draw of the series. Stupid jerk, going and getting a real job…  

 

Didn't work for me either. Nice to have Ironhide back, but what a convoluted, contrived, comic-booky way to do it!

I found the writing was pretty sparse. How many issues was that? It feels like they could have pretty much covered that material in a one-shot.

Yup. This is the beauty of the old bios... when you look at them, suddenly you see the wasted potential in pretty much everybody. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker could be a really interesting pair to focus on... a couple of guys who could have very easily ended up as Decepticons, but didn't.

Again, on a private joke level (if you know the genre) I really love how as a pair, the twins also both completely fulfill a couple of anime character archetypes... the battle-hungry, fiery-hearted fighter, and the vain, languid, bishonen villain/antihero. You could pretty much pour them into a Go Nagai manga.  

Is that what happened?

But he was so good at drawing Transformers!  

*bonus fact* I also really didn't care for Stormbringer.
...somehow Furman+Figueroa+epic/cosmic storyline = giant snoozefest for me

zmog

 

I am starting to reconsider my stance on Spotlight: Arcee after all this time. While it wasn't great, I no longer find it anywhere near as bad an attempt to explain gender in this franchise. I do agree that perhaps Furman was trying to head somewhere along the Gobot line of things had he continued on the books. Everything ground to a halt when AHM happened and even his plan for Revelation got cut short. At the time though I thought he had a decent balance of humanization of the characters and clearly presenting them in an 'foreign' way.

Though most of them didn't really stand out or seem like there were noticeable changes between their personalities. Like at some points you could swap lines from more than one character and not be able to tell who was saying what. I guess you could say some of the writing was a bit generic, it wasn't bad but it kept things from being too memorable. Roberts has the same problem with sarcasm and the one liners being more memorable than anything else.

I can't really say which IDW writer has gotten the closest to doing both without distractingly taking the story in either extreme.

Also yes I am biased and I don't particularly care for Scott's writing, like ever.   Did no one read her Transformer comics before se wrote Windblade?

 

Man IDW Optimus suuuuuuucks.

He does pretty much everything wrong yet he's THE hero.

If Barber hadn't fucked up Prowl. He should have the MC IMO.

 

I think there are still a host of problems with Spotlight:Arcee... which were not helped by the fact that both character and the implications of that story got just about zero follow-up or exploration beyond "MUST KILL JHIAXUS!!! GRRR! ARGH!"

This was exactly one of my complaints with Furman's run. It's true that Roberts has a similar tendency when it comes to distinguishing character "voice"... though at least his dialogue (when it's good) isn't so deadly dull or cliche-ridden as Furman's tends to be.

I actually don't mind Scott's writing that much... at least in terms of dialogue and character interaction. I think Scott really needs to work more on the broad story strokes, but in terms of characters, I MUCH prefer her authorial voice to Barber (who has just gotten worse and worse, I think). Admittedly, her most recent stuff has been particularly uninspired...

zmog

 

My biggest gripe when I look at comic previews, seeing TFs drinking and dancing. Seriously?

 

Well, they always did drink and dance since G1, (The Decepticons over-energizing, Maccadam's old-old house, the dancing on planet Junkion and whenever Blaster or Jazz would play their music. Etc.) but that's the point of this thread I guess.

For me it's, like others have said, the focus on earth/human references in a setting where there really shouldn't be any sort of fascination with the planet above any other planet around. It was cute at first with the Back to the Future thing, but when it's excessive it's excessive. I'm sure it's bound to die down sooner or later, but it's definitely been a turning off point for a number of people since it feels more indulging for the author than the reader. Plus the "touching" chassis thing in WB, which is all kinds of innuendo I am not a fan of.

That said, I'd definitely still take it above Costa's "literal robots". I sort of liked his writing towards the end right before Chaos, but his interpretation was WAY bad.

I still can't agree with some people that think Transformers shouldn't hug or even 'sit'. It makes them less human, but it doesn't really make them more unique or mysterious, or "alien" as people seem to desire. Bigger doorways makes sense, but never making someone sit just takes away the artist and even writer's ability to compose them at different levels. It doesn't not make sense since we know they have a form of sleep, and for them to be "tired" can be linked directly to that. The way I've seen some people depict how they think these robots should be is kind of ridiculous since they've never been depicted as anything more or less than robots that act exactly like humans. It just feels like a pointless criticism to make at times since that's just how they've been depicted from the start. They've hugged, they've cried, they've danced, they've had personal feelings, they've even been drunk since long before even Beast Wars came around. Again, I'm really not into the pop-culture and general earthen references, and I've always embraced their more alien aspects and cultures, and MTMTE has been great with that, but I'd actually like to know what people would do to make them more or less human that isn't taking away from regular physical or biological actions like sitting or drinking.

 

Sure, and all that dancing and crying and hugging and inebriation was pretty stupid back then too.  

They haven't always "acted exactly like humans". From the beginning, there were always aspects that made them different or distinct from Earthlings, and it would be remiss to ignore those and only note the excessively anthropomorphic stuff. Over time, questionable lapses in judgment have become canonized, and in my opinion, the whole fiction has become degraded as a result.

It's not just a pointless criticism... it's an ongoing push-pull, in an effort to maintain what little remains of "alien machine people" elements of Transformers, after having it chipped away bit by bit by bad writing for decades. In short, to keep a workable balance, most especially now that a huge portion of the Transformers (particularly G1) audience is no longer a bunch of kids... we don't need the fiction to baby us anymore.

So yeah... drinking through their mouths is already bad enough, though maybe it's an acceptable nod to the already-present anthropomorphism (though how do "faceless" TFs drink?). But the fact that their drinking culture is depicted as being totally identical to earth pubs? Weak.

Or dancing... I can understand the idea of dance as a ritualized social practice in an alien culture... and hey... even dancing to music in the conventional sense (TFs have a sensory capacity that extends into the radiowave and electromagnetic spectrum, so how different might their music be?) but again, their use of dance is instead exactly the same as our own. Or worse, identical to an extremely narrow subset of the most shallow, frivolous forms of dancing used by afflluent modern youth of the late 20th century.

It's lame. It's pandering for cheap affect to the detriment of even a superficial veneer of world-building.  

zmog

 

I'm not a fan of comic book resurrections, period. Deaths feel like cheap theatrics when you expect they'll be back no later than a year or two off. Hard to care that Bumblebee died when you know he'll be back sooner or later.

I think it was four issues. The writing was no great shakes, but nothing particularly bad, relative to the concept.

To be fair, I shouldn't sound like IDW is doing a particularly bad job. Plenty of concepts in other comic book companies that fall flat. I suppose you might say that at least half of all art/media is junk anyway. And I suppose it's worth noting that the comic book media has some innate challenges, what with the need to write twelve ongoing installments of a given series into perpetuity.

But the IDW transformers have definitely not been a resounding success at exploring some pretty compelling concepts.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with anime/manga to be familiar with those tropes. I've only watched a handful of anime, and I don't think I've read more than a couple manga collections. Not for any particular dislike, just haven't gotten around to it.

Yep, If what I read somewhere was accurate, he got a job doing industrial design or technical illustration somewhere. It’s a real shame.

*Stormbringer* the story was decent, but that's all. I loved the art, but that's just me. ::shrug::

Then again, I loved Figueroa's experimentation in Costa's run. I expected to hate it, but after my initial exposure and shock, I came to love it. Probably my favorite take on the G1/classics line ever. Eventually I want to make my classics Prowl look more like that depiction, and I hope to make a classics Brawn inspired by his figure.

The argument "they've always been like this" never flies for me. Things can change. They aren't fossils. No reason to calcify them. They are media depictions, and the depictions can evolve when it makes sense. Have transformers been depicted as sleeping in the past? So what? If it doesn't make sense, change it. Why would they need sleep? My iPhone can still be active while it recharges, why can't a Cybertronian?

That's an interesting point about sitting enabling different compositions by the artist, or perhaps framing by the writer. But logically, why would they need to sit? Why not be creating as a writer and find other ways to convey a given attitude or concept than rely on human gestures that might not make any sense in an extraterrestrial mechanical species? Why would a species without the same sort of tactile skin or sexual reproduction that we have express affection the same way we do? Why would there be lubricant which could be expelled as tears on the surface of what are essentially mechanical camera lenses? Why not come up with other ways to show emotion? Why would they drink when they do not have the same sort of biological digestion system we do? Would it not be interesting to see how a different energy input system would impact culture and socialization? It just seems cheap to import systems from our own society (which is only a small subset of the human societies). Remember, they aren't even biological. They are mechanical.

What would I do? try to eliminate anything that seems specific to biological life (especially human biological life) and consider ways the same psychological concepts would be expressed in mechanical life. Explore how they would socialize without food or drink. Explore how music might differ for a species whose auditory senses differ from humanity's. Hell, in some ways they might not distinguish between some senses the same way humanity does. They obviously can communicate via radio, as they "talk" in the vacuum of space. Would that be considered auditory to them? On the recent Battlestar Galactica series, one of the human Cylons bitterly complained that their vision was constrained by human limits, and expressed a yearning to see astronomical events on the electromagnetic spectrum beyond what humans can see. So would radio communication be auditory or visual? Would music be a visual medium? How would that impact the art and the socializing of Cybertronians? Would any sort of sports as we know them have meaning in a society where one's body can be upgraded mechanically to be optimized for any given competition?

None of those things would impact the essential sentient nature of Cybertronians. They would still feel emotion, they would still have relationships and we could relate to them on that level. But they would all be authentic world-building efforts to create a sense of difference on a more outward level.

 

Well anime/manga is a big field, full of garbage and gold... I've been a dabbler long enough to recognize some of the classic tropes, and the twins especially just feel like dead matches for a couple of the stock character types (which seems all the more appropriate after Sideswipe's portrayal in Revelation) I'd love to see that played up sometime, just for kicks. I mean, I'd like to see Sunstreaker and Sideswipe get used more as a duo anyway.

I'm glad the guy is doing well, but that still makes me sad.  

In terms of robot designs, more than anything it was the faces that bugged me in Figueroa's Ongoing run... but my real discontent comes more from a general falling-out with Don's interior art in general. Don is a fine Transformers artist... but he is just not a comic book artist (or wasn't at that time). His layouts were heavy on detail, but ultimately static, awkwardly composed, and lifeless. It's one thing to draw monumental box-art style pin-ups of cool Transformers, but it's quite another to actually tell a story effectively in pictures. With Stormbringer, I really noticed this weakness, and with the Ongoing, I think it felt even worse.

Yeah, I think the human analogues are really tricky things to manage. Sitting and standing, for the purposes of expressing a gesture or filling a panel, doesn't bother me much. It seems like it's on the acceptable range of anthropomorphic conceits. Embracing... borderline. I mean, they are social creatures, and they do seem to have some kind of surface sensory ability. I can see how touch could still be a sort of cultural similarity (if not in every sense). The crying, and even more so, the recent trend of having TFs "bleed" purple goo like overripe blueberries any time their injured anywhere on their bodies... I think it's just too much. A writer should really step back from what they're doing... whatever feels "easy" and "natural" and "normal" in a scene... and question it, and ask themselves if there's another way to show that. That's what writing an alien species should be like.

Yeah... sigh. Why are people so boring? I'm always amazed how much fuss many fans kick up whenever questions like this are raised.

Oh well...  

zmog

 

There's a degree of irony in claiming "they've always been humanized" by using a cartoon that redesigned the bots to look more humanlike. Ironhide/Ratchet are the most obvious ones, but quite a few others had faceplates/visors removed or more robotic parts swapped with "normal" body parts to look more relatable. (one wonders how Whirl might've looked)

 

This. I'd rather not risk trying too hard to make the TFs feel alien to the point of just not feeling any empathy to them which just comes across as way too pretentious for me to accept. For some people that can be a dream come true but it's going to understandably drive away a lot of others. Maybe writers lately have been steeping a little too deep into human territory but I'd rather have that then to make the TFs feel too much like unfeeling,emotionless robots all because of an idea of wanting them to not feel like humans at all.

 

I can respect that others like a different level of anthropomorphism than I do. But I don't get this idea that Reducing the human characteristics will make them seem unfeeling, emotionless robots. They can still feel and express emotion even when they don't ingest fuel orally, or hang out in bars, or leak lubricant from their eyes, or sleep, or touch intimately. They still would feel happy, angry, sad, bored, whatever. We could still relate to their feelings even if they don't do everything we do, even if they didn't refer to each other by gendered pronouns. I think we as an audience are smart and sophisticated enough to still relate to essential emotions, and authors like Roberts and Scott are smart and sophisticated enough to come up with ways to write actions that better fit the mechanical idiom.

 

See, that's what I thought I would hate, because I hate that look in the movies. But for some reason, I ended up loving it. Probably because DF's facial proportions were better than the Bayformers. IDK ::shrug::

Exactly.

 

Wasn't Costa also working with the possibly the worst editor any TF comic book run ever had?

How it was not supposed to end badly?  

 

Note: I'm still reading other posts. On mobile. Gonna be a bit of a slow burn.

I just mean fiction in general. In terms of designs I'm on the side of more alien-like or at the vey least unique looks for the robots. Mtmte Whirl is one of my favourite designs because of this. But if cartoons and comics depict something to be a certain way in loads of past fiction personality-wise, I'm not sure why one would think it should be any different. Unless it's like a femmebot thing, but that 's more of a matter of fiction adapting as real life social norms change than anything.

 

A) I'm not sure if "pretentious" is the word you should be using there.
B) You continually fret over the possibility that emphasizing some of TFs "alien" qualities would somehow destroy our power to feel empathy... which is not a realistic concern. This is still science-fiction... the whole underlying premise is still about building an alien race, with all the novelty that implies. Removing undertones of sexual love, removing dance parties and bar crawls, removing exact biological analogies, removing exessive pop cultural reference points... if that makes TFs cold and unrelateable, I think people should re-evaluate their standards just a bit.

Nah. They all looked the same to me, they rarely expressed a discernible emotion... they just felt overwrought and (wait for it) overanthropomorphized. By that, I mean there were just too many details in the functioning of their eyes, their teeth, the lines on their "cheeks" etc... but whatevs.

zmog