I'm cool with that, I think that building upon his Victory characterization and making more layered and interesting is the way to go. The problem with Optimus is that he's sometimes a one-dimensional character and it's hard to take him in new directions without annoying a good number of people because of the sheer number of fans he has. Whereas with Star Saber you can use him to write a more interesting character who's prime-esque because he's not as popular.

He could even work as a counterpoint to Rodimus Prime, a high ranking Autobot who tries and fails to emulate Optimus Prime posthumously and finds that it's the way to go and that Optimus wasn't the saint many Autobots see him as and decides to be his own kind of leader. I know we won't get that here just because of when it takes place, but there's a lot of possibilities you could explore with Star Saber if he starts getting more exposure.

 

I’d be lying if I said I’m not worried about having Simon on this and it’s one line in this that makes me worried. It’s labeling Shockwave as a scientist. That maybe not raise any eyebrows for some due to how shockwave is portrayed nowadays but if you read marvel than it should. Shockwave is not a scientists in marvel. Shockwave wasn’t labeled a scientists until Dreamwave in 2002. Before that he was just a logic driven military general that decided he was more logical to lead than Megatron but never a scientist. For the past 20 year’s he’s been given that mantel but for the first 15-17 he wasn’t a science guy.

this worries me that once again Simon is going to shoehorn more of his original scrapped IDW-verse stories into marvel just like he did in Regeneration one because that’s exactly what he did. He said up and down “these are the stories I never told!” And by the end most people were noticing that these were ideas he leaked about where he was going with the IDW-verse when he was writing it and by the final issue he admitted they were not the ideas he had 20 years ago.

 

Exactly. There's a lot you can do to flesh out Star Saber as a character,and make him more then just a typical Prime/Convoy leader. It's why I'm now annoyed on how James Roberts wrote him as well as every other character he deems characterless. Sure the original Star Saber from Victory wasn't that fleshed out as a character but neither was half the main cast in MTMTE/Lost Light so it's frustrating that he changed Saber from being one type of blank slate character to just a different brand of blank slate while he gives plenty of depth to his favorites. So I'm hoping that this book as well as future TF media can do him better justice cause there's a reason why he's still a fan favorite in Japan. I mean he's basically a robotic knight how is that NOT awesome?

 

To be fair Roberts was approaching this from a more writerly perspective than a fandom one. He wanted to explore a particular theme and he needed a big high ranking Autobot to do it. That being said I wish he had picked someone else or had made a new character given that Tyrest and Pharma were both new characters.

 

A lot of people seem pretty upset about Simon being on this one, but I really enjoyed his work on IDW and would gladly read any new stories he puts out, regardless of continuity. This stuff looks cool, and I think I\'m ok with some things being shuffled around if it makes for a good comic. Plus, Guido Guidi\'s art is as sexy as ever.

 

I don't know about upset, at least not in my case, I'm just not a huge fan of his stuff. But I will give this a shot.

 

I. Can't. Wait.

I loved the '84 #0 issue, and I don't care who knows it. As I said in another thread, I gladly welcome any chance to return to this era of Transformers, however brief.

 

Hmm... Star Saber vs Straxus. We KNOW Straxus survives four million years until he’s defeated by Blaster.... Star Saber.... is never seen again.

Uh-oh...

 

YEAH!!!

 

I don’t hate him I just there’s better writers to handle this. His past book in the last 10 years arnt very good and he just wants to focus on the same characters over and over and over. Shockwave, Grimlock, scorponok, bludgeon, etc. he just wants to focus on his favorites and that’s all while just slaughtering everyone else while making the most interesting Optimus prime in comics where Optimus just stands around, hesitates and thinks for issues one after another

 

Star Saber vs. Straxus? Yes, please.

And I very rarely buy alternate covers, but those Guido covers, the Nick Roche covers... My main man Geoff Senior... Too good!

 

Star Saber can win and not kill Straxus, we don't how this version is going to be characterized, he might abhor killing Batman syle.

 

True. All we know is Straxus survives. And Star Saber never appears in the comics.

 

Yeah but that doesn't necessarily mean he's dead. He might be somewhere far away in space that we've never seen.

 

...so if we're really going to keep doing this, we need to establish whether generation 2 or regeneration one are the accepted canon...

 

I'll get it, if it's good, great, if it's not I'll just ignore the words and pretend it's a series of Guido Guidi's sexy artwork.

 

It's a little different leading your army knowingly into a desperate cause where the odds aren't great. That's what leaders do. But 84 #0 wasn't that. This wasn't a case of unlikely odds - this was him straight up planning to kill them all by his own hand in a desperate bid to take Megatron with him. Anybody with even a halfway decent sense of morality can see that that's wrong but hack writers want to add grit wherever they can even when it makes no sense for the character.

Hero archetypes don't have to be boring. They just need to be well written. Captain America from the MCU is the perfect example. He's virtuous almost to a fault and completely unwilling to compromise. He takes shield down completely rather than let it continue with corruption. It's what makes him such a great leader - the avengers turn to him "Call it, Cap," and when he tells Shield to stand down against their orders, they freaking do it because they believe in him over their own chain of command.

The MCU also shows the dark side of that - whether you agree with him in Civil War or not (and I very much do), you can see the consequences of his uncompromisingness. It splits the Avengers apart and makes him and his team outlaws. In Infinity War, Thanos gets the mind stone because Cap wouldn't compromise by "trading lives." That right there is how you write a paragon. None of this "ends justify the means" nonsense.

That's how I want Optimus written but apparently it's pretty difficult. So you wind up with Bayverse Optimus who is so eager to sacrifice himself that he hatches a plan to kill himself, or rather make Sam kill him, and thus leave earth at the mercy of Megatron. A Megatron who, in this scenario, has just lost the super important maguffin and is standing over the body of the only person who could've stood up to him and a defenseless human who just took away his maguffin. And you wind up with Furman Optimus who leaves Earth for 20 years while never checking back to make sure that oh, I don't know, Megatron hasn't destroyed pretty much the whole planet. And during that 20 years, all he seems to care about is training his replacement while doing as little leadership as possible. And this same Optimus is all, "I have to literally kill all my friends so I can take Megatron down with us." So damned stupid.

Just so we're clear, I'm okay with him being fallible. I like when he lost it after Ratchet's death and briefly gave up. And I like how he snapped shortly before that incident and immediately regretted it when it was pointed out that he'd endangered human lives. I liked how he so regretted losing Skids in the assault on the Decepticon base (I've made fun of that bit before but I can concede that there were too many humans around and the Autobots didn't know that the Decepticons weren't planning on coming after them and thus endangering the humans). I didn't particularly care for how he gave himself up because he'd accidentally killed some video game characters but that just kind of comes back to the whole difficult to write hero archetypes thing.

So anyway, yeah, my point is that a hero archetype can make for a wonderful story but they need to be handled by a writer who knows how to handle them. Recent stories seem to suggest that Furman is not that writer.

 

That Star saber looks strait out of an early 90s OVA . \"amazin\"

 

That's a Prime characterization that I'd like to see tried. With a franchise that reboots itself once every couple of years, there's room to try that.

 

Preach!