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God damn, this is fascinating.

Some writing from before Roberts' talent seems to have dried up? Definitely interested.

 

Who?
Never heard of him.

 

Interesting to see the forged vs constructed cold genesis here (as well as the idea of an unimportant character perhaps having the ability to use the Matrix or seed life; we saw where that went). Wish more had been done with that as the groundwork was laid down well. Also interesting to see his early thoughts on why certain Transformers were simply more powerful / had "super" powers, etc.

My only real problem with identifying the outliers (your "adepts," or "point one percenters" or what have you) was that it led to that inevitable fandom thing of trying to match everything up like it was a stat in an RPG. "Is this point one percenter more powerful than a phase sixer?" "he couldn't do that because he wasn't a point one percenter."

This is much like when western DragonBall fans tried to quantify everything via "power levels," (and still do, sometimes) when it was clearly a throwaway thing Toriyama used to establish that we were dealing with power far beyond what was seen previously in DB. Not everything needs "stats," and frankly, if Megatron killing Metroplex by shooting him in the face is what's called for by the story, then that's what is going to happen, regardless of trying to qualify it under nebulous power rankings.

 

Truly truly fascinating stuff. 2011... we were still very much in the Costa run. Wild.

 

July 2011 Ongoing (Costa run) issue #22 was Roberts intro, and he continued writing/co-writing until issue #30 (Nov 2011).
Roberts had already worked on Last Stand of the Wreckers (2010) and helped Nick Roche with All Hail Megatron #15 (2009) which also featured the Wreckers.

Just noting in case you haven't read the Costa Ongoing, because Roberts and his ideas come in at #22.

 

It’s awesome he had these ideas, but I still think he needs an editor who will curtail him.

 

Thanks for the reminder. Sitting here in 2020, 2011 feels like so long ago. But I had forgotten Roche was involved in the Ongoing.

 

I just recently bought the entire Ongoing, so it was fresh in my mind. (read my brother's copies previously)

It had some great ideas and scenes.
The low point being Costa's obsession with Spike. But him coming from GIJoe, it makes sense for him to be hung up on the human military side of the story.

 

That Civil War concept would of been amazing. Too bad we couldn't of slid into that instead of just dropping IDW1 and getting IDW poo I mean 2.