At the moment, Roberts is way out in front on votes but very far behind in the comments. I voted for Roberts, so I guess I'll add my reasoning:

I rate and enjoy every named writer on the list, and it becomes a matter of balancing highs, lows and range.

Scott and Roche are in the same boat for me - they've both written great short series and the quality is consistent (although I found Scott's early issues fairly flat). They haven't been given the opportunity to show a lot of range, though - each stuck to a particular tone and a particular way of doing things.

Barber is the opposite - he's shown himself very adept at telling different kinds of stories and has racked up a number of memorable issues. The trouble is there's not a single arc I can think of which didn't nosedive at some point. Early RiD struggled to get off the ground - it got stuck on the same characters giving each other the same grief for far too long, meandering towards plot twists that seemed pretty wild and arbitrary. He got a lot better after the action moved to Earth but then settled into a pattern of building up intrigue for four or five issues before plunging into a messy and unsatisfying finish. He has a good grasp of individual characters, and writes some of them very well indeed, but then doesn't seem to have many ideas for how they would work to resolve their various conflicts. If two Barber characters are pointing angrily at each other in issue 1, I expect them to still be at it by issue 50, or until defenestration takes place.

Furman has a great imagination for concepts and writes a good action scene, but his major weakness is individualising his characters and over-reliance on 'Big Bad' enemies to keep the story moving forward - often at the expense of character development, since everyone was busy working out how to conquer/save the universe. Regeneration 1 seemed to stumble all over the place. Again, a narrow range.

Roberts has shown a decent range, I think - not to the degree of Barber, but more than any of the others - and is also the standout when it comes to longform plotting. He kept various threads weaving in and out for the entire run of MTMTE/LL, drawing them together in ways that make narrative and poetic sense, and that's incredibly impressive. He used big threats, but most of the action was character-driven - unlike Barber, he pushed his characters constantly towards their goals and made them play out their conflicts to the end. The problem is that he wouldn't bench them or kill them when they'd done their part, and some of them had nothing much to do in the first place, so his story became overpopulated with indestructible bystanders. Overall, for me, his qualities are the most unique, his flaws are less egregious than Barber's, and his range is second only to Barber's.

 

Barber is hands down the most uneven from the entire pack. Good range of themes he's able to cover and had a few great issues. But when it's low it's really low. Also, his build ups took forever and then some.

 

I said this elsewhere but I think it fits here: Barber deserves a lot of credit. RiD does a lot of heavy lifting post Dark Cybertron to handle toyline tie ins, crossovers, IDW mandates for the shared universe, etc. Barber took all the hard tasks of the IDW Transformers line and that let Roberts, Scott, and Roche do what they did best. Think about it for a second: Combiner Wars, Titan's Returns, Revolution, and First Strike. How much do Scott, Roberts, and Roche have to really even acknowledge those stories?

Roche was able to pretty much ignore all of that. The only impact he felt was not having Kup around for his final story with the Wreckers.

Roberts also pretty much ignored all this. He lost the Protectobots to Combiner Wars, but let the various B teams in the story do the tie ins. Scavengers had a one shot in Revolution. Prowl, Max, and Red Alert covered Titans Returns. And Roberts didn't tie in with First Strike or Unicron at all.

Scott? She had a pretty big tie in with the Combiner Wars, but only had a one shot with Revolution, was out before First Strike and Unicron, and barely crossed over with Titans Returns. Her work isn't in the tie in graphic novel and there's a sense that if she wanted, she could have had that fleet of Titans never reach Cybertron, ever.

That left Barber to do all the heavy lifting on the whole Hasbroverse thing, the toy tie ins, etc. And that let the others just do what they wanted.

 

It was a tough choice for me between Roberts and Scott. In the end, just due to the total number of issues, Roberts won. My reason, and everyone has opinions, is because they both took characters I had no particular connection to one way or another, and made me care about them.

Roberts: An entire team of C and D list Autobots and Decepticons, with only a few big names. Tailgate before Roberts, I could care less about. He could have replaced generic deadbot 113 when Prowlvastator destroyed Iacon, and it wouldn't have bothered me before Roberts got his hands on him. Same with Whirl, Swerve, etc... But, after a few issues, I genuinely liked the characters and felt for them. Yes, he might have had some OCs brought in, but that's all fine for me. If you take Star Saber for a reason, people were wanting more named characters brought in, but when they are, they don't like how they're portrayed. Personally, I think had Megatron not become an Autobot, you could put Star Saber in that same role, and he would have ended up where he was in Japan.

Scott: The combaticons. To me originally, they were just generic soldiers. She made me see them in different light, and at least to me, made me like Blastoff's new form. Also add in Windblade, who I really didn't care one way or another about, to liking her, and made in MY opinion one of the best versions of Starscream, she deserves to be on the list. Unfortunately, she didn't have the same length of run as everyone else, so she just went from kind of flat (but, in part due to Combiner Wars being in her first run) to pretty good, so we didn't have a chance to see how she would be overall, given a much longer run.

 

That'd be in 'other,' and she did one mini that was mostly about the Visionaries that started with an editorially-mandated shock death. And while I feel it was better than it gets credit for, it did feel like a sequel to a Visionaries comic that didn't exist and came on the tail of, like, three other 'some group of humans or humanoid aliens attack the transformers because they think they're mindless robots,' stories.

Even as a Magdalene Visaggio fan, I think it lands more in 'ok, but badly situated.'

Considering how the Titan invasion lead to the freeing of Liege Maximo, I'd say Scott ended up doing the best part/heavy lifting of *that* particular crossover. Didn't have to, but made it a big thing with a lot of impact.

 

Have you looked at the writing credits on First Strike recently?

 

Whoops.

Sorry. I was just thinking First Strike doesn’t tie in with TAAO. I didn’t connect her with the series itself.

 

Yeah, this I'd agree with. I think if the Titans had either never arrived, or arrived during Unicron, most folks would have given that a pass. Scott really used their arrival to kick a few of her plot threads into high gear. I can't picture how the rest of TAAO goes with the Titans. My point was, she was in a position where she probably didn't have to do anything with it, but did.

There's parts of Scott's run I don't enjoy (mind rape is icky icky icky), but it's a heck of a run. We had an abundance of good stuff for a long while here as Transformers fans.

 

Don't think I could give a single "best at everything" award to any one person.

(I'll stick to Phase 2, and it's really the only time we have writers working at the same time)

Barber is the absolute master at continuity and making old comics work within the new framework. His slower-burn arcs are crazy with amazing payoffs. (I think my favorite page in all of phase 2 is when Prowl reveals everyone in the black room and it all falls into place). Barber is also the hardest-working guy in my opinion - every toy-inspired crossover had to happen in his book and he had to make it work. He was also the editor for a good period of time (and I generally felt other writers such as Roberts were best when John was editing).

Roberts is definitely the strongest at characters and relationships (in general). He makes good arcs, but I don't feel the payoffs are ever "good enough". Like Cyclonus' rematch with Star Saber. It just... is over before it began. I do feel Roberts was good at characters, but as time went on, more cracks began to show. Too many of the cast adopted the same quirky and witty personality. Now I know there are people who felt MTMTE/LL got better and better, and they're entitled to that opinion, I won't argue it. I just, personally, felt his early stuff was better than the latter.

Scott is the writer that I feel never really got a full chance. Windblade 1 was a good 4 parter and I really enjoyed it. Windblade 2 was basically Combiner Wars and never got to really tell the story Scott wanted to. TAAO was the closest to an ideal Scott story, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Shame it ended rather early. It ended just when we really could have seen the fruits of the seeds of Scott's work introducing the colony planets.

Roche is hard to compare to the others. Even more so than Scott, he only wrote small, short bursts. It takes different skills to make a story work every month for years on end compared to short, contained bursts. It's like the difference between making a TV series compared to a movie. LSOTW works so well because it didn't have to come back the very next week and try to keep the hype going and going. I'd say he's very high tier, but we've never seen an ongoing from him.

tl;dr - I like all four of the major Phase 2 writers and would try out any future TF stuff from them. Each have their strengths and weaknesses.

 

Roberts is the easy win for me, it without his contributions would have meant that it would have been another mediocre addition to transformers lore and the franchises fiction would have remained in low-tier ghetto for another decade.

Roche has made some good contributions but a little overrated for me as sins of the wreckers had some positive ideas and great art but was a huge letdown for me hindered by dreadful pacing which lead to some of the worst info-dumping I have ever seen.

Scott has had to do a lot of heavy lifting around the dreaded events but she has done it with surprise grace and I would have loved to have had the opportunity to read her being given something more substantial.

I think Barber is hands-down the worst idw has ever had, I’m sure he is a nice person and he has tried really hard responding to criticism trying different approaches but for me he seems to have the anti Midas-touch with everything he touches turns to bland and vague storytelling.

Firman at least had some great ideas with the infiltration protocol but it also made some usual Firman mistakes of drifting into a bland mystical threat and that arcee mess that took ages to soft reboot.

The all hail megatron and ongoing stuff was mediocre and thankfully in the past tense.

 

Mairghread Scott for the win! Easily one of the best TF comics of recent years that was unfortunately canceled. But I respect what she wanted. If it went any longer it’d be my favourite series but it’s only second to Optimus Prime. James Roberts is great as well. Mainly MTMTE and less so LL. Nick is also great at multitasking art and story. I haven’t read much of Simon’s stuff so I won’t say much but I’ve heard he’s great.

So:
1. Scott
2. Roberts
3. Barber
4. Roche

 

This cannot be overstated.

 

Worse than Costa?! Really?!

 

About the same really but Costa had the good graces to go when things wasn’t working out rather than drag it out for years of uninspired comics.

Barber also seems to have been given the opportunity to do more damage to other people’s work with how he has made a dreadful mess of shockwave, turned prowl from a fascinating calculated and pragmatic character to a dull angry pro violence guy and made Unicron indistinguishable from all of the other forgettable events that he is also responsible for.

That ‘god of continuity’ nickname doesn’t seem earned to me at all as most of his storytelling is shallow and isn’t that ambitious with only the occasional call-back to older issues which is hardly anything particularly big, clever or original unless it makes inspiring new stories which he consistently fails at.

If you want ambitious storytelling that gets to a ‘god of continuity’ level look at how elegant chaos weaves together years and years of comics, a huge cast and even time travelling in a way that doesn’t fall to plot-hole pieces the minute you give it some scrutiny. I can’t think of many other time travel storylines that hold up as well as that even if you put all the other stuff to the side.

Okay, rant over, beast-mode off. If anyone else likes him fair enough to them.

 

Costa’s stories are why I canceled my subscriptions and walked away from IDW for years. His very public, outspoken contempt for the franchise, the concept, & the people that like TFs soured me on anything the guy writes, regardless of title.

He didn’t just burn the bridge when he left. He nuked the bridge. So while he may have had the good sense to leave, he didn’t leave gracefully & in hindsight, he should never have been brought on in the first place.

*edit*
Just read his TF wiki page. They were mercifully kind to him there, though they did include a couple of his deriding quotes, that set me off so much. The one quote they didn’t include, was where he claimed that TF fans don’t read anything other than TF comics.

He at least admitted that it was he, who was having trouble wrapping his head around these characters. I think maybe it may have been a problem of overthinking it too much. And perhaps lack of research, because everything he said the TFs don’t have to serve as motivation, they do in fact have.

 

Say what you will about the Costa's ongoing, but the Ironhide mini remains a stand-out work of his imo. Really, I think Costa was just a case of a creator who didn't really fit with the franchise, as he has written plenty of good stuff (his work on G.I. Joe comes to mind.)

 

Agreed there. It was his condescending tone towards TF fans in general that I most disliked.

Thinking about it though- it’s been something like a decade since he opened his mouth. Maybe I should let it go. I mean, even Furman & Scott made peace, so why not?

Didn’t want to derail this thread and make it all negative anyway. Hard to fight my knee-jerk reaction sometimes.

 

Furman's writing was an excellent starting point for this continuity, but I have issues with pretty much all his characters sounding the same. He's always struck me as being better at worldbuilding than character writing. Still, can't fault him for giving us the likes of Hunter O'Nion, Verity Carlo and Jimmy Pink, even if only Verity got a satisfying send-off.

Nick Roche put out the best content overall, but like others have said before me, he's only ever written in short bursts. We have no idea how his writing would fare in an ongoing run, and perhaps we're better off not knowing.

Barber's a bit of a weird case with me. He's walked out of the IDW continuity as the most competent writer-- good at adapting to sudden editorial mandates and whatever toyline Hasbro needs IDW to shill for them-- but the problem is most of his writing is so bland and forgettable. Story arcs he writes will start off strong, but then drag their feet and just sort of... stop instead of reaching any real satisfying conclusion. This also applies to a number of the characters he's penned-- Needlenose immediately springs to mind, and it seems clear to me that he never really had any idea what to do with the Torchbearers. That's not to say his writing was all bad, though. There were a few standout characters-- he salvaged Arcee, I kind of liked his take on Soundwave, Thundercracker needs to have a dog in all Transformers media going forwards, Starscream was genuinely great, and I really liked Aileron. She actually contributed to the stories she was in without overshadowing them, and grew and developed believably. I would not object to seeing her in any future TF media.

Scott was a bit of a mixed bag. I loved the first Windblade mini up until the ending, hated the second one with a burning passion, but then warmed back up to her with TAAO. I admit I judged her a bit too harshly with the second mini because TAAO is genuinely incredible, and it's kind of heartbreaking that it had to end so soon. Regardless, we have her to thank for one of the most intriguing takes on the Combaticons, some of the best writing of this universe's Starscream (even managing to put Barber to shame here), and while Windblade herself... still isn't terribly interesting because she has a bad case of Transformers Protagonist, she was at least one of the better takes on the character in the end. (Plus, uh, the Tankors and Lightbright and Sparkstalker. All of them were absolute treats whenever they showed up.)

Roberts. Hoo boy, Roberts.

Roberts started off incredibly strong with MTMTE, but after Dark Cybertron his writing slowly but steadily degraded into some of the dumbest, most pretentious writing this continuity has ever seen. All the characters just turned into variations of the same person-- presumably, James Roberts himself-- and all subtlety or nuance got thrown out the window as things wrapped up. Now to be fair, I can't blame all of this on Roberts-- the continuity was wrapping up and he had a lot of plotlines he needed to wrap up before its conclusion-- but he stubbornly clung to plotlines that added nothing to the overarching plot like the Firstborn and... everything related to Anode. The pop culture references became increasingly inexplicable, reaching the point of abject parody when Getaway started parroting Brexit supporters and Donald Trump. Roberts was amazing at his peak, and it depresses me to see how far he's fallen.

Of course, this list is missing THE ADONIS, TOM SCIOLI, but since he never wrote any of the mainline books I guess I'll let it slide.