Well it is a slow burn and I am in no rush to get to the typical fights.

 

I was late to thread and read the whole thing this week. I don’t remember one post praising a single character or characterization in the whole main series. It’s not brought up as a defense against the critics at all. There’s no one people love or hate. Even if you like a slow burn isn’t this a problem for people?

There is some potential but it’s never explored and the stories are too unfocused. Some of things off the top of my head:

-Sideswipe shows some personality why not let him carry the security segments instead of Chromia and Prowl who are charmless plot facilitators.
-Elita-1 is in interesting predicament with internal conflict, but it’s not focused on enough.
-Bumblebee’s arc is the heart of the story. Accept it and give it the necessary space. His and Elita-1’s characters mesh nicely.
-Cyclonus is interesting, but it’s not capitalized on.

 

I think one of the things that is plaguing Transformers comics (and comics as a whole) is the drive for the writers to bring in their worldview and to try and use that to try and give the universe more gravitas than it needs. Yes, TFormers stories can be serious and dark but there also need to be an element of fun, and to me, that is what is lacking. The new series is way too slow. The story is trying to be the massive event with multiple moving parts from multiple different groups as if it were a novel and that doesn't really work in a comic form. Comics work best when the story is fairly linear. I understand there will always be exceptions but that's not the norm. Then they take a character like Dai Atlas and try to make him some sort of pacifist again (like they did in IDW1) makes no sense. He wasn't one in Zone nor any other interpretation that I can think of. The new series feels all over the place tbh. It took too long to find it's footing and it's costing them IMO.

 

This buddy, you said everything, IDW 1.0 had gone off rails long long ago

I never even saw TF comics being published in my country  

I think it's only the same in the sense it's a story about a Megatron being radicallized, but their ideals are pretty different, i think functionism works well....for a war on Cybertron, the moment it becomes a galaxy wide conflict this backstory no longer works, how did Megatron go equalist turned extremist to wanting to be a conqueror of worlds ? In IDW 2.0 Megatron already shows signs of supporting expansionism even before the war starts, similar to Marvel's take, this Megatron sees Cybertron as a stagnant society which abandoned it's glory days, this make his turn into conqueror more reasonable

 

The burn is slow, but it starts coming together as something coherent

 

I'm afraid the burn was so slow I gave up on it after 24 issues (thats two years worth of stories, even if it was double-shipping).

There's slow and then there's glacial.

 

I suppose the time gaps between publications didn´t help, which is something only now im facing since i got up to date with IDW 2.0, but before that i was basecally marathon reading it

 

Yeah thats fair - pacing is always crucial, if it had kept double shipping maybe it wouldnt have felt as bad.

As a comparison - X-Men stories - Messiah Complex and Rise and Fall of the Shiar Empire. Both 12 issues, but Complex came out over 12 weeks (3 months across four titles) and Rise and Fall was 12 issues in 12 months. Both read fine in trade, but at the time, Rise and Fall totally lost me!

 

I'm not so sure about that. Personally, I've never had any problem empathizing with the Transformers before, largely because they were imbued with the basic human qualities of thought and emotion. For instance, as a kid, when I watched Optimus Prime die in The Movie, the fact that he was a truck robot from space didn't get in the way. Despite the fact that I hadn't yet experienced death, Prime's heroism, his dignity in dying, and the sadness of his comrades all struck me, even if I didn't quite understand what all those things meant. Back then, as with now, the Transformers felt like people to me, not because their external circumstances mirrored mine, but because I could recognize the humanity in them.