And this is the problem.

Out of the people who talk shit about IDW1, I think only a couple have actually read it. The whiners definitely have an agenda, if you know what I mean. You can tell what it is by what they complain about.

 

Judge for yourself.




I don't think it's as pedantic as "he's not a woman", but it was Barber's choice to make him a problematic character where he was not one, and it was his choice to make an issue of him being a symbol for colonialism, which he was not.

It's made worse from the fact that while Windblade is making this spiel about Optimus Prime being a killer and a liar, almost all of those female characters in the second last panel have killed and lied as well. Shit, Chromia targeted and killed civilians and Windblade chose to lie to cover that up. And Slide straight up tried to murder humans at one point. Pyra Magna, just as well tried to scheme for power under Optimus, justifying it that she would be better suited for the Matrix because she wasn't an atheist. And Rum-Maj launched an assault on earth with Sharkticons like less than a year ago. And it's not even that these characters having done bad things in the past is the issue, just that it just so happens that the overwhelming majority of characters who died in Unicron were genuinely good and decent people, and characters like Pyra, Slide, and fucking Rum-Maj were forgiven, and promoted. It's just the least satisfying funeral sequence you could think of, especially when much of Prime's decisions can be justified due to his cause of protecting the Earth from Decepticons, whereas many of these survivors have done these abhorrent acts based on emotion. Like literally Chromia killed civilians because she hated Cybertron and wanted to go back to Caminus, Slide did everything because her brother died and needed somewhere to vent, and Rum-Maj comitted the full-scale assault on Earth out of petty revenge. They survived and were rewarded because Barber wanted to say fuck you to an imaginary group of people that didn't like these characters because they were female, when for the most part it was because of their hypocrisies.

 

Is that seriously how they eulogized Optimus Prime and ended that continuity? That is really terrible.

 

EXTREME conjecture on your part, first off.

Second, how many people have avoided reading/watching/listening to a thing because of incredibly bad reviews? That's not necessarily a bad thing, though I'd personally recommend people find out for themselves. Mostly. If someone had told me how bad "The Other Guys" starring Will Ferrell was, I'd have 2 hours of my life back that could have went into doing something more constructive and emotionally rewarding. Like picking dog shit up out of the yard.

I see people "whine" about overhumanization, poor cramming in of ill-conceived plot devices, and reliance on cultural references and norms that wouldn't even have a base on Cybertron. Is that an agenda?

My go to image is the one of Roller vaping speed out of a Kremzeek vape pack. At first I thought he was sipping out of a juice box, which may very well be the intent, but I decided to go with something LESS stupid. You know, like machines breathing

Is this the part where you fabricate some sort of -ist or -phobic movement against the book? That one never gets old, and neither does every way it's dispelled.

 

Shit should have ended after Infiltration.

 

I'd say everything before All Hail Megatron was good.

 

Great post, those panels sum up, for me, everything that made late IDW just awful. Pointless crossover characters, unlikeable OCs, Decepticon murderers that were suddenly "good guys" and Windblade spewing righteous DRAMA everywhere. All at Optimus Prime's funeral. *vomit*

 

So I'm currently reading through IDW Phase 1 for the first time, I'm doing the collections vol. 1-8 and I'm on vol. 6, about to start the Last Stand of the Wreckers. So far, I've enjoyed everything I've read and can't really complain about any of it (although some of it definitely isn't perfect). Anyway this dead horse has most certainly been beaten to death over the years from what I've seen; But so far in my experience, the absolute dumbest thing I've seen in the IDW comics so far is the artwork for For All Mankind. I get it, maybe they were trying to go for a more movie kind of look, but the Transformers themselves look absolutely horrifying, ghastly even. Their faces all have that weird almost human joker grimace kinda thing, and like in the Bay movies, it's hard to make heads or tails of exactly what you're looking at with each character, with so much detail and panels and wires and metal bits and it's just gross. It's a shame too because the story is decent but good lord I could not look at the art as I read through it.

 

Any idea what the point of the Reapers was? With the whole Dead Universe thing going on in the background they just feel like surplus to requirements, and Furman must've agreed considering how he had them all killed off the instant Galvatron showed up.

 

The old continuity ended being so high on its own Kool-Aid the fumes were intoxicating everyone working on it. It was high time for IDW 1.0 to end.

 

  This is well put. I notice this kind of didacticism in stuff a lot nowadays, and I'm not even against a little didacticism in a well told story, escapist stuff can (and should) come with a lesson of some kind. But there's this trend of taking something, and turning it into something it wasn't, just to score easy layups and call it a deconstruction. Like yeeeeah, finally someone's taking on the Jedi, that absolute dogwhistle for... Themes of oncoming adulthood?

But Barber's dumb take was something that's been building for a while. Problematimus was pretty much inevitable somewhere down the line once the character made the leap from "General of an army," to "The Chosen People's Undisputed, Unelected God-King Made Flesh". It's telling that IDW's big swing at moral complexity was making Prime bad and Megatron good, simply by ascribing both characters completely new traits in a Post-War setting. Which is obviously the lamest, dumbest way to do that, and it's coming by way of less talented writers directly aping the small, subtle complexities Roche was painting into the picture. It's like watching Animated Grimlock make the leap from "Prowl shady? Prowl villain in several story arcs!"

 

I don't think I continued reading idw after more than meets the eye, so I can't say what the dumbest thing was. However, I think the IDW comics demonstrated that TF could be a good political show. The early books were pretty good, even if they changed the usual characterization of certain characters.

 

I think you answered your own question. It's really the only logical conclusion when you go back and reread the material. I think that was the better choice than trying to salvage them and make them something they weren't.

 

Man, even Tony Stark's funeral was quieter than that.

 

Eh, I liked what they did with prime in the later part of idw. I think the thing about the put-down of Optimus Prime was that it was less about him as a person and more about how the legacy of the prime title is so tainted. Sentinel was a dick, zeta was even more of a dick, Nominus pretty much started robo-racism, Nova was a little less racist but ended up becoming a madman, the og primes were all just pawns in shockwave's game and Onyx was just Shockwave himself. Even Primus wasn't what everyone thought he was. The Prime title meant jack, and Optimus had to learn to accept that. That's at least how I interpreted it.

 

When it comes to Prime's funeral, in the context of everything he did post-Dark Cybertron, I kind of think of Dinobot's last words from Code of Hero.

So from a certain point of view, a eulogy that recognizes his flaws and mistakes in addition to the good things he had done, his failings hand-in-hand with his accomplishments, would be appropriate. The existing eulogy tries that, I think. Maybe it could be more nuanced in it's delivery, but the idea wasn't bad, though I suppose that depends on how one feels about a Optimus Prime who was so uncertain of himself and his actions in the first place. I often find the problem with things like this lie more in their execution than in the ideas themselves, and I think that applies to a few things in this thread, too.

Except for TF vs. Visionaries. That was a bad idea from the outset.

 

Agreed. IDW Optimus, despite some of the flaws in the storytelling, is probably my favourite take on Optimus, as well as the Prime in general.

I never saw Optimus's funeral as disrespectful to him as it was just describing what he was. A morally grey Optimus that fought a 4 million year long war like how he was presented in the very beginning, Windblade literally says he was "A Warrior. A Hero". They morn for the lose of Optimus/Orion as a bot but acknowledging that the idea of the Prime part of Optimus is no longer needed and can now be put to rest.

And there's the more literal reason as that they didn't have a body to bury.

 

Tfvv will never get my forgiveness for killing Kup.

 

We don't talk about TF vs Visionaries.
I was so happy with it forgotten until now.
God the art...

 

I hate how that's the one Crossover comic you HAVE to read to understand everything.