IDW tried soft-rebooting at least four times: with McCarthy's All Hail Megatron, Costa's ongoing, MTMTE/RiD and then Lost Light/Optimus Prime. They also started off with Furman producing miniseries that always started on a #1, as if each were independent. The problem was that their editorial/management dept seemed to think that publicising a new era as a jumping-on point, renumbering the issues and throwing in a bunch of name tags/explanation boxes was enough to coax in readers unfamiliar with what had happened previously - but in every case the new series immediately leant hard on past events, and threw a tonne of established characters at you. Even MTMTE - which is the cleanest new starting point the continuity managed - kicked off with Cyclonus reflecting on the events of Chaos and based two of its early last-page shock reveals (Overlord and Shockwave) on readers' familiarity with the earlier series. It really should be possible to have a fresh start within a new continuity. Concentrate on a small group of characters - or even ones that were previously just bystanders - and don't worry about straightening out what has come before. I don't know why IDW - and, to be fair, comics publishers in general - are so bad at it. I think it's in large part because writers constantly want to re-use the same characters in the same way, even when they've been killed or give through their development arc already, and also because comics franchises tend to be mostly about writers 'playing with' existing iconic characters, with the result that they're not very good at introducing readers to new characters and concepts.
Sadly that's not a surprise since Bee and Windblade are said to be the main characters of this book. Which already has me feeling worried for majority of the Decepticons (pending) who will most likely turn out to be a bunch of bumbling oafs during any dialog or fight scenes against the two. I'll give them 2 issues to prove me wrong.
More like poor Decepticons in general. Save for maybe Megatron. Bee (a scout) will be slapping around the average Seekers like they're nothing while Windblade will likely be taking out everyone else like Starscream, Shockwave, Soundwave and even other Con's you'd be happy see get a feature until they're easily beaten in that time period..... During the first season of G1 the Con's were outnumbered, so as a result they made the Con's a lot tougher, so you didn't see Bee or Huffer slapping around Soundwave or any of the Seekers. Even the Cassettes gave the Autobots a hard time. Scale and Rank got more respect and rightfully so. But sadly as the numbers evened out the Seekers fighting skills and threat level diminished a little. But not nearly as bad as it is now in different TF shows and god awful movie sequels. Now in cartoons and movies it's a case of the Autobots being outnumbered and as a result most of the Con's even the ones who usually stand out in intellect, strength and skill just being incompetent grunts and cannon fodder that easily get slapped around begging the question why the h3ll Autobots where losing the war in the first place??? I couldn't stand TF Prime because of this and I stopped watching Cyberverse after seeing Bee beat up Seekers with ease (gave the show a shot though). And as much as I enjoyed some of the G1 part of that Bumblebee movie (Well just the 3 minutes shown on YouTube anyway), Seeing Bee kill FOUR SEEKERS in under 10 seconds was a huge turn off to me. He's not Hotrod nor should he have ever had his role IMO. But I digress.... If this new Author gives this upcoming book merit and depth and make the Con's a viable threat, then all is well. Bring on the next issue.
well, that nugget (if true) takes me from like 2.5% interest to actual 0%. I've never seen something so blatantly corporate-ly desperate as how hard they've tried to make Windblade REALLY REALLY important, but they forgot to make her an actual character people care about first. Maybe 4th (5th?) time will be the charm? it's also weird/surprising with the level of focus on the Siege line, that if they are leading the book with those 2, there's been no rumors about either receiving a figure in the line.
Hm. Looks good. The style is nice, the chatacter designs are good, but then... Bumblebee\'s eyes... Mother of Primus something is wrong with his eyes.
That worries me too, IDW most of the time had an ans amble cast which allowed memorable cons like Megatron, Thundercracker, the DJD, Scavengers, and others, the list is a mile long.
Characters usuallybecome fan-favorites because of, well, the FANS. Nightbeat was a nobody 1988 Headmaster with a crappy toy and a cool bio. Furman took it and ran and now Nightbeat is a fan-favorite. Windblade is Hasbro trying to force a character into becoming a fan-favorite, and it’s not working. Let the character have time to grow. Let the fans actually start to like the character before forcing her down our throats. Now let’s give some good fiction to Doubleheader and Vroom so they can become fan-favorites too...
One thing I don't think a lot of people keep in mind is that IDW had two major sides. There's the creative and memorable series like MTMTE, Lost Light, Last Stand/Sins of The Wreckers, etc. These are the series that everyone loves and remembers because they had a lot of freedom. They were able to do what they wanted to do, have the characters they wanted, tell the story they wanted to tell with little to no restrictions. On the other end, there's series like RiD, Optimus Prime, and Combiner Wars. I haven't looked into these much, but from what I've heard the designs and story in these series were much more slavish to the current toyline, and they suffered greatly for that. IDW in its entirety isn't perfect. The half of it that's good is beautiful and some of the best comic book series period. But that isn't the entirety of IDW. Now it seems just by looking at the designs that what we're looking at now, will be closely tied to the toyline. Hopefully there will be a second series running along side it that isn't as restricted.
Yes, everytime they got a new toy, they had a random new design. they only explained it once with starscream but for no one else. if you notice at the end of Optimus Prime series, Soundwave and shockwave change to their cyberverse designs.
