I mean it probably got the axe because it wasn't very good... I have no doubt IDW would've given her another go if she wanted, but I don't think having 2 canceled ongoings under your belt is a good look so she probably decided to peace out.

Dunno what she was so worried about though, Marvel cancels and relaunches shitty books all the time!

 

From the horses mouth she did not have a choice. It was write visionairies or nothin and she chose nothin.

 

What I want to know is how a writer like Roberts can write a gem like LSOTW
then come out with romcom/sitcom scenarios for MTME/LL. I didn't know if I was reading Transformers or a comic based on humanised robots  Eventually gave up and didn't bother reading the rest of the series.

 
I just forced myself to read Valentine's Day Special this weekend. All the bad memories of Tumblr-esque fanfiction just came flooding back. TF Writers should just stop catering to segment of the fandom much.

 

One thing I will say for Roberts' later work; at least he had the sense to treat Revolution with the contempt it deserved and keep it out of the main plot.

I don't really think what Scott did - invoking the sickening McCarthyism of "callout culture" upon another professional writer, no matter whether that writer were Simon Furman or another less regarded scribe, is actually forgivable or professional; that sort of discussion should have remained private and in-house, so I don't feel she should have been hired, but, dismissing someone's professional contributions because we dislike their personal attitude is exactly what cancel culture wants us to do, and would, at its extreme, lead to us striking Newton's Laws from the canon of physics just because he was a colossal knobhead, so, let's not do that.

Her work seemed reasonably good, with a decent focus on characterisation, let down by the focus on the godawful Windblade-Sue - though that was Hasbro's fault rather than hers, I imagine.

 

How this mini was introduced probably is taking the cake for this entire topic. How the First Strike finale was hijacked for its promotion (and in the end - the entire Hasbroverse idea). Did you expect us to wrap up this event? You silly reader, You! Buy our NEXT crossover to get the proper finale AND later we're going to kill an established character to promote this too!

MTME/LL has nothing on this. At least it was self-contained. Whatever happened there stayed there.

TF vs VS? Now, that's doing dumb on a scale of a few ongoing titles.

 

Hasbro has Windblade toys to sell, and by god you are going to buy them.

 

Words engrained into my mind

 

I'd like to air my grievances about Slide, too. Sure, the concept of a Micromaster combiner team being halved is an interesting one. Oiler's death could have lead to some interesting consequences. Heck, if they wanted to actually have a little fun with it for once, they could've had Slide try to combine with other Micromaster halves, do some goofy bit referencing the fact that with those toys, you can have a vehicle that's half-truck, half-airplane. But fun play on character's original toy gimmicks were so sadly few and far between, to the point that even transformation itself got underutilized.

But then you get to Slide's personality. She's upset. Upset people can be irrational. That's fine. Have her butting heads with Optimus and being provoked by Pyra Magna and making stupid choices. But then give those stupid, irrational actions consequences. She, Pyra, Prowl, all these other bots were being set up as antagonistic forces against the character the comic is named after for goodness' sake. But I guess after Sunstreaker literally handed over Earth to the Decepticons that one time and was lightly ostracized for a little bit, just about anyone can get away with anything. Unless it's Optimus. In which case, screw you, guy-put-into-an-impossible-position. No, we shouldn't feel for Optimus, the guy who was constantly trying to do the best possible thing even though everyone hated him no matter what he did. Our sympathies should lie not with this iconic childhood hero, but with this rando half of a Micromaster team who never even comes close to anything resembling "likeable."

Which brings me to my last bit of this anti-Slide rant: Why did she get so much focus? I get wanting to expand your roster and develop characters beyond your Season 1 Sunbow favorites--I'm even in favor of it. But we were treated to page after page of her sour personality to the point where she took center stage while Unicron himself was attacking the galaxy. While all your favorite characters are fighting and dying in the background, we get to see Slide, uselessly complaining about Prime once again without contributing anything worthwhile. Trypticon died by a blast from Unicron, but there's no time to focus on that at all because we have to listen to Slide self-righteously insist that, no, Unicron's attack and the destruction of Cybertron isn't the real problem here. It's Optimus, making a few bad calls and overstepping his boundaries.

I love when writers take nobodies like Razorbeast or Swerve and turn them into amazing fan favorites. Slide is everything the opposite of that. She would've been better off remaining in obscurity.

 

Poor Optimus can never get a break these days. I appreciate IDW not making their take on OP this kind of bland paragon cartoon cutout caricature he usually is in the shows since TFP. But it doesn't mean that the alternative should be OP forever crippled by self-doubt and sh*t upon.

 

And then, of course, beyond Kup's death, the Visionaries are otherwise irrelevant to anything. They briefly appear during Unicron but it's only so they can cast a magic spell that saves (almost) everyone from Cybertron's destruction, while they get...Sent back in time? Sent to a restored version of their home world? Put in a time loop before their home world was destroyed in the first place? It's entirely unclear and I don't even care enough to try to figure it out.

 

Idw definitely were on a marvel and dc binge... And all their works were crap!

 

She's a female Japanese martial arts robot.

If we cross-reference "Enter the Nightbird" with the Ladybird books continuity, we can assume that Megatron just suddenly got older.

 

this. holy shit that hug at the end of unicron probly did more for OP than anything else anyone ever did for him in late idw. poor guy either gets written as a 2d punching bag or a 2d do no wrong boring hero. can't have any fun with our truck dad anymore.

 

Let him play basketball and talk trash again for god's sake!

 

Wasn't the Visionaries crossover also where the Talisman designed to kill Unicron come from? As well as what caused Unicron to activate in the first place?

I actually don't have a problem with the crossover comic itself being the first introduction of the final big bad, but the introduction of literal magic really messed with the world. I know there are technologies introduced in these comics that may as well be magic, but there is still a line between science fantasy and fantasy.

I was surprised then as I am now that the merging of these various different franchises wasn't universally seen as one of the worst decisions IDW has made, despite more than enough evidence that these massive crossovers just don't work. And what do you know, it broke the universe beyond repair, and all these other supplementary IDW runs had to conclude their stories in page-long vignettes.

I also agree with what has already been said, that at the very least LL knew what it was and told a story that had intent behind it. Was the Cyclonus/Tailgate dynamic annoying and pandering? Sure, but it at least started from an idea that saw fruition. MTMTE/LL got worse over time, but as bad as it got Barber's run started with a basic vision until nothing mattered anymore and it became receptacle for bad idea after bad idea, and essentially broke the comic's universe beyond repair. Ffs Barber had three Bumblebee's running around by the end of his comic.

 

The Talisman was introduced in Revolutionaries, the lead-up to First Strike. The Unicron comic revealed that it's in fact the same device responsible for Unicron's creation, and also apparently the Dire Wraiths. It's connection to the Visionaries was because it hijacked the magic of their home world to achieve it's function, in the process creating the Dire Wraiths.

Oh, there's something dumb to add to this thread: the reveals that basically everything bad that ever happens, and everything important to the universe at large, is all the fault of Cybertron. Unicron? Because of Cybertronian expansionism, which destroyed Prysmos, created the Dire Wraiths, and lead to the war with the Space Knights. The Knights themselves? Their armor is made from Regenesis Ore planted by Shockwave. MASK at least makes some sense to be tied to Transformers via reverse engineered tech for their vehicles, but everything else?

 

Wait, assuming the other two are the "original" Bumblebee and Hearts of Steel Bumblebee/Centurion, who's the third?

 

I just remembered: Sixshot died off-panel.

Sixshot, the absolute terror of the -ations era... died off panel.

So throw that onto the pile.

 

Goldbug

 

It's even worse when you remember that the end of Spotlight: Metroplex teased Sixshot still being alive. By all appearances, he was going to come back and be relevant again....until he wasn't.

Oh, one more thing I'd like to add, something IDW didn't do: Legacy of Rust. Punch/Counterpunch would've been so danged interesting in IDW's first universe. There were even ways of implementing him already built-in, too. Maybe he was a shadowplayed bot whose original personality comes to the surface on occasion. There was a theory he was Agent 113. He/they could have done something and I'm sad he was never brought in.