On the Ultraverse title Hardcase, the artists changed fairly often. Some of them were pretty good, The last artist was the second worst artist to set foot on an Ultraverse book, beaten only by the Pander Brothers. The writing stayed consistent and the book was still good. A bad book, however, can be seen no matter HOW good you polish it with art.

 

I mentioned this in a thread before.
The series has almost nothing to do with Transformers. This isn't a Transformers comic, it's a comic with Transformers characters. Roberts could his made his own original Sci-Fi comic, and replace all the characters here and nothing would change. Hell, the characters rarely transform. It has Transformers concepts, but kinda doesn't expand on the world of the Transformers. I think the most notable idea he introduced was "Empurata" which was removing the heads and hands of Transformers. Which is a cool concept, but could work in any other sci-fi franchise. Also the pop-culture references. When I think Mystery Science Theater 3000, Transformers is the last thing I think of.
Still a fun book. Swerve, Whirl and Brainstorm were my favorites.

 

...Functionism is inherently tied to the concept of Transformers. It cannot work outside of that.

 

Does it have to be, though? Picture a race where some members are inherently amphibious, some inherently able to scale surfaces, other such abilities, and a small subset unable to do anything extraordinary like that who are placed into a caste system and treated poorly. Bam. Functionalism is done without having ANYTHING to do with transformation or Cybertronians at all.

 

This is the criticism I find the most bizarre of all. It's actually the most 'Transformers'-centric book of all of them. Yes, you can modify most of the concepts a bit to make them work for other theoretical sci-fi properties, but that's the case with any concept in any book.

The fact is that Roberts put in more lore, plotlines and character quirks that related to changing modes than any other writer. He had a disease activated by transforming (introduced by a pair of bots who combined together to become a sonic bomb), societal functions bound by alt modes, a character with a 'mystery' alt mode that tied back to the creation of the Cybertronian race, a character who changed modes reflexively when lying, another who burned out their transformation cog in protest, another whose power was to make people transform in mangled-up ways, another who is reformatted to transform into a bomb as punishment ... I think I could go on?

And that's before you get onto other Transformersy concepts like bots inside other bigger bots, body-jacking, memory hacking, forged versus cold constructed etc.

Like, in what possible way is the Sunbow series, for example, more indelibly Transformers-esque than MTMTE? The alt-modes might as well just be vehicles that the characters are driving. It was basically a superhero cartoon. And the original Marvel comics had loooong stretches where the writers forgot that the characters did anything but talk and shoot guns.

 

Yeah, came here to say exactly this. Say what you will about MTMTE, but the criticism that it wasn't "it wasn't about tfs" lacks material evidence of any sort. It was the only media to deal with the consequences of transforming on the philosophical, political, and interpersonal scale in a robust way. I get that folks were miffed there wasn't enough action figure transforming fanwank on page, but just be honest about it. Surely these forums are one of the few places that is acceptable?

 

Yeah. RID/OP might be a more "traditional" Transformers story than More than Loses the Light and a better one but it isn't inherently more "Transformer-y".

 

There were whole $4 issues where NO ONE TRANSFORMED. Also, there was no war between heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons. That’s a problem. That’s the most important piece of canon there is. It’s on the packaging of the G1 toys for crying out loud. There was only interactions between flippant robots and quirky robots. It was fan service for shippers with the Transformers title on the cover. Nothing more.

 

Does transformers need to be specifically about Autobots and Deceptions? Beast Wars wasn't.

 

And there are whole episodes of Game of Thrones without thrones. Whole chapters of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where they aren't standing in the Chamber of Secrets.

It's not called "Autobot Decepticon War", so that's just not relevant.

Well, that just describes every piece of Transformers fiction.

 

Beast Wars was about the Autobots and Decepticon War.

This is about Transformers comics. Transformers that don't transform is a symptom of poor storytelling.

So your answer is simply "nuh-uh". Cool.

fixed it for you

 

All I know is, here we are 2 years after it ended and we are still discussing it.
Love it hate it, it's made its mark in more ways than most.
Craving a hamburger now.

 

how

 

No, a symptom of poor storytelling would be having to make your Transformers transform every issue in order to remind your readers that that's what they do, because you've failed to make that trait fundamental to the background or the storyline in any other way.

Well, yeah. I mean, there's not really any more comprehensive way to answer the fact that your requirements are silly. What's next? "It wasn't a proper Transformers story because there weren't any animation errors"? "It wasn't a proper Transformers story because Frank Welker didn't voice Megatron?" "It wasn't a proper Transformers story because the book didn't make the sqk-ich-eek-eek transforming noise when I opened it"?

 

So did some really shitty things that happened in the late 30's early 40's, what's your point?

 

ahahahhahaha, fucking excellent. MTMTE has now reached the precipitous cultural heights of nazism. Its times like these you realise what a special place tfw can be.

 

The point being is just because something is polarizing or by its nature invites debate doesn't inherently infer good quality. People are still talking about most of Liefeld's runs on several books because of how awful it was, does that suddenly make it good?

 

Considering that Liefeld is an enormously successful artist with fans that seem more interested in his style than substance, I’d say that his books deserve the same nuanced, non-absolutist approach that we give everyone else.

 

I didn't say anything about it being "good." That's up to the individual reader. I said it's made it's mark. Which it clearly has. There isn't a thread about it's sister series that ran concurrently alongside it for 8 years. Draw your own conclusions, but please don't attach my comments to Naziism. That's pretty poor form.

 

Nice to see we're at the "You know who else liked puppies? HITLER!" level of discourse.