Andy Schmidt is an asshole.

 

Asexual reproduction does NOT equal mpreg. Ever. You can't even take this argument seriously.

 

Any answer that's not "the Costa run" or "Heart of Darkness" is completely wrong and just butthurt.

 

Scorponok's whole plan was to turn robots into humans so they'd all have sex and get everyone pregnant to repopulate the Decepticon forces. That's embarassing. But James Roberts had been in on the decline for ages before that, so it was also weirdly kinda expected. At least in a morbid "let's see what crap he does this time" sort of way.

I miss when MTMTE was the best thing in TFs...

 

The shipper fanfic writer of mtmte and ll said Hoist was a furry. Not kidding.

 

Rewind and Chromedome making out in someone else's alt mode.

Yeah... If Scorponok's mpreg happened in any other comic series I might believe that the underlying intent was different. But I'm not this gullible. The tail end of the run was plainly weird.


At times it looked as if they were desperate to get any more sales by targeting things specifically.

 

Rebooting.

If you're referring to Roberts, that's only kind of true. Someone in an AMA stream who on the ship was a furry. Roberts' response was a flippant and sarcastic Hoist. There wasn't any truth or meaning behind it.

Rung was designed by Milne with little to no input from Roberts himself. He was visually based off of Brent Spiner and David Hyde Pierce, not Roberts. So no, he didn't do any of that.

 

I genuinely feel bad for whoever's alt mode that was. But, do they have mouths?

 

It was Roller. And he said he thought they were "canoodling", which can mean a few things including embracing, fondling, and kissing. The point of the issue was to show how cabin-feverish everyone was getting and how it was effecting them. Rung who seemed to have an aversion to his alt-mode is seen using it the entire issue. Characters get pissy and impractical throughout. Given this running theme I always kind of wondered if Chromedome and Rewind did anything at all in there other than just try to be where others weren't and Roller was paranoid in the same vein of everyone else acting out of the cramped quarters.

At the very least, they crawled into his trailer to just unwind together for a while which is messed up in itself in its own way. Nothing was ever confirmed if they did beyond that but it would be exponentially worse - even if that was just pressing their faceplates up against one another a bunch.

But on the other hand, they were using a dead decepticon's corpse as a ride which they were all in well without HIS permission either, so... maybe it's all relative.

 

Alright so I got a proper contribution here.

Slide. Whiny, annoying Slide.

However annoying and frustrating people thought characters like Windblade or Pyra Magna were, Slide was far more frustrating to read than any of them. "MY ALT-MODE PARTNER IS DEEEEAAAAD," the endless whining about Optimus not doing the things she thinks he should be doing, like apparently she wanted a Junkion genocide as revenge for Oiler and thought Optimus was letting them off easy for not exterminating them all. Like he does one, very Optimus thing of brokering peace with a hostile force, who accept his terms, but ooooooooh no, Slide can't have that, they should all pay and be slaughtered! But that's not how war works, you don't massacre the entirety of an attacking force when they're no longer, well, attacking. They killed some people, one of them important to her, the response is not and should never be to commit a war crime.
Then her endless whining during the Unicron event, irrationally believing that Optimus wanted any of this to be happening and that somehow Caminus and the other Colonies being destroyed were deliberate actions (that is, that they were "sacrificed") on his part. And whatever that stupid line about "fascism" she had that I can't even be bothered to remember enough to quote it, just that it happened. And she only finally gets anything resembling pay off for her arc at the very end, becoming Victorion's new leg and finally realizing that Optimus had never been out to "rule" over them.
I don't even know how many issues featuring her there were, just that she spent most of her panel time whining about Oiler and being a frustrating character to read. Like, hell, during the final battle against Unicron, she's trying to argue that they should just run away and leave Earth and everyone else to die because fighting Unicron is just fighting "someone else's" battle for them.

 

God yes, Slide was the absolute worst and anyone who's claiming that title belongs to Windblade obviously hasn't read any of the books that had Slide in them. Slide was just a perpetually angsty piece of shit and never got anything approaching her comeuppance-- arguably she was rewarded for being a shitheel by the end of the comic. I get that she was grieving because she had lost someone who was close to her, but it was just draining seeing her be pissy issue after issue after issue up until the 11th hour, and doubly so because we had functionally already gotten the same arc from Aileron, who had by that point moved on, having come to realize that picking fights with Optimus and/or the humans simply wasn't going to solve anything, let alone avenge Sterling. Aileron was right to snap at Slide after a while, but I can imagine a better-written version of that scene where she tells her that she's not the only person who's lost someone, citing Sterling's abrupt death and losses that her newfound friends had endured over countless years of war, and telling her point blank that not only is she being irrational, she's being distinctly and deliberately selfish by avoiding coming to terms with it. Because as it was Slide just muttered to herself and skulked off, but that would've forced her to stop and re-evaluate her behavior.

 

I skipped over those two parts entirely because, unlike every other part of IDW2005, they seemed to be almost universally panned. Every other title had at least some people who liked it, but not those, at least that’s what I gathered from these boards and others.

So I don’t know about everybody else but I couldn’t mention the Costa run or Heart of Darkness because I never read them. (Though if it’s a case of “so bad it’s good” then I may reconsider...)

Oh god how could I forget Slide, I must have been mentally blocking the memory of her or something. I found “Optimus Prime” a frustrating read overall for several reasons and she was one of the biggest.

 

Heart of Darkness is... well, in a way it's actually very entertaining. Not because it's good. Dear Primus no, it's utterly, utterly shit, but it manages to achieve that oft-cited but rarely achieved pinnacle of being so bad, it's good. Reading it the first time, I honestly thought it was some deliberate, very arch stylised comedy satire of the rest of the series, retelling events that had been told elsewhere, but from Galvatron's perspective to show how utterly deranged he was. Then I realised part way through that it wasn't meant to come across like a surreal Monty Python-esque farce reinterpretation of the storyline, but was actually *telling* a story which would factor into the ongoing plot. Yes, even with 'Thinkbox'. Yes, even with the ridiculous- no, not just bad, I mean ridiculous art. The childish colours. The character model fidelity that puts early 80s colouring books to shame.

Lost Light was just somewhat painful- but that was because I'd enjoyed More than Meets the Eye Season One, and the better parts of Season Two so much, that it was seriously tragic to see all that subtlety, world-building, and characterisation just drain away into such clumsy writing and sheer awkwardness.

In honesty I can't comment on the Barber run after Dark Cybertron, because I didn't bother reading it; what I heard of it, I thought sounded abysmal- but wiki synopses and other people's reviews don't always accurately reflect how the story will actually play out when told.

 

I’ll bite here - as someone who has read both Eugenesis and Roberts’ entire run, in what way is MTMTE/LL him rewriting Eugenesis? I find them to be reeeeally thoroughly different stories.

The thing that hurt me most about Heart of Darkness is that I thought “Thinkbox” was a super cool name for a Headmaster! Then they tainted it by associating it forever with that series  

 

Transformers (2009) gets a bad rap mainly because the art in the first volume was so god-awful. Don Figueroa has recently drawn a bunch of Movieverse comics at that point and I think they kinda broke him, those first six issues were completely devoid of facial expressions or body language. Hell he barely drew characters outside the same pose he used on the character model sheets. But both the writing and the art improved a lot by volume 3, issue 13 in particular I even consider to be the definitive Hot Rod issue.

 

Being IDW.

 

Okay all, how about we all just take a breather and get this thread back on track?

About Onslaught/Blast-Off, honestly, the dumb thing about it to me was that it was never properly followed up on. Like we know it's a terrible, scummy thing and Blast-Off is terrible for stooping to such a low, but...We never saw the actual fallout of that, the reactions to the utter betrayal of the rest of the team's trust on Blast-Off's part. They only appear once after Starscream's arrest, and it's in the cell next to his. With Blast-Off just off to the side from the rest of them to indicate that they aren't happy with him or what he did.

 

My understanding of that was Scott expected more time with her cast of characters but the ill-fated visionairies series stymied that. Scott didn't want any part of it and there wasn't any wiggle room.

 

Ah, I see.
On which note, we can add "Transformers vs Visionaries" to the list of dumb things IDW did.

 

Exactly this. TAAO got the axe way too early and Scott had to scramble to make a cohesive ending.

Also god dammit now I'm remembering the Visionaries crossover.

Actually, you know what? I feel the need to go into something that really irked me about late stage IDW: Revolution and all of its associated baggage. I don't know who's fully to blame, Hasbro or IDW, but they banked on there being such a thing as a catch-all "Hasbro fan" and it didn't work out because if the audience they were looking for does exist, it's far too small to make up a meaningful market for a comic, and even then the comic was doomed to be a complete mess because you're taking the core continuity of Transformers and just piling all of this crap on top of it. GI Joe or Rom by themselves? Fine. The Stardrive comic was good by all accounts. Those, plus MASK, plus Action Man, plus Visionaries, all at the same time? No. No, you are setting yourself up for failure.