I thought it was always good. Now there is more ‘action’ if that’s what you are looking for, but quite frankly if you just jump on, it won’t have much meaning or pay off.
It’s less that it didn’t feel like there was much payoff in the first place to exposition, it felt a little like treading old ground at first, so I’ll probably pick it back up from issue 1
Ah I gotcha, it’s pretty much spends the first issues giving you the world that exists and the opposition to this world. This opposition has violent extremists in it and they escalate and the opposition leaderships’ hand is forced as a result, and then war. For me Transformers’ stories which mirrors real world politics is the best way to tell the story in comics. You can’t have them fighting each other all the time, for that, you have the movie and cartoons.
I dropped off after 15-ish issues and am also waiting to see if it goes anywhere. For me, the big problem is the characters - no one feels larger than life, and hardly anyone feels central to the story. It's mostly dozens of randoms from the franchise history talking and acting like generic archetypes. Two Autobots died in a recent issue (I bought it experimentally to see if I could get back into it) and they could have been swapped for almost any other character featured in the issue without consequence.
I've gotten every issue from this new continuity thus far and my biggest problem is that there are way too many characters to keep track of. Nobody really sticks out and I tend to forget a lot of characters introduced. The story also drags (as many others have stated) and without any distinct characters to pick up the slack the story just feels...uninspired. I don't hate this new continuity but it certainly feels lifeless (although I'll take "lifeless" over "cynical" as IDW Phase Two was). Honestly, my favorite comics are Bob Budiansky's run on Marvel G1.
No. The dialogue is still really bad and the action is uneven. No one really has any personality, they just kind of refocus on whoever they feel like adding to the story but they never feel like they've really been "added to the cast". Most disappear for issues at a time with no repercussions to the story and certainly no development. 95% of anyone who has ever spoken more than twice is interchangeable with anyone else you can think of. Hell, it's gotten to a point where we now have had Optimus Prime around since about November and I'm not even really sure he's appeared again since, outside of maybe a cameo spot or two. I'm truly not sure how anyone feels like this series is worth it.
I generally feel like this is the wide opinion I see on this series from fans and critics, and it truly baffles me that IDWs stuck to their guns on it this long with how quickly they've rebooted or soft-rebooted some of their other series. (look at the disaster of their post Dixon-verse GIJoe initiatives) at the sub-10,000 units these are estimated to be selling at, I really wonder how they keep the thing alive at all.
I do like seeing the cameos. We have Dai Atlas' Micromaster companion Speeder showing up in the next issue.
If I have to read through 20+ issues of bland OCs and limply reheated takes on legacy characters going through a series of *extended nasal inhale* robot crime scene investigations and overwrought political discussions to get to something that’s maybe sort of kinda good somewhere down the line, I don’t care enough to get to it. Shadowplay was really good. I don’t need a Shadowplay ongoing.
Especially since this series woefully turns Cybertron CSI from fun multi-themed world building into tedious whodunnit threads that really don't seem to matter once the answer happens along. Who killed Brainstorm? Fucked if I know, I didn't even remember he died.
I think you missed the point. What I was saying is that the whole over-arcing plot of the start of this series was so muddled that it ultimately became irrelevant and non-important.
They ended up focusing more on Rubble's murder which far as im concerned was the better decision, Brainstorm's death was pretty much for shock factor and this version of the character had almost nothing in terms of characterization and relationships with other characters, that in itself was a mistake but thankfully Rubble is a better attempt specially for it's impact on Bumblebee, the problem in it being, which i'll agree with you, there's way too many subplots, so Bee's story doesn't come up regularly as it should
It seemed more appealing after the first arc. I only dropped it due to having to use my finances elsewhere for now, but the look into their culture and politics was interesting for me, as well as introducing more characters that I like such as Swindle, Trickdiamond and Pyra Magna. I'd be interested in digital trades down the line in place of having to drop the floppies.
I’ve realised what I don’t like about IDW2. The stories are not compartmentalised so I struggle to retain anything of what I’ve read because there is no real flowing narrative throughout the issue. There are several different groups of characters and although I recognise them all, it’s hard to keep track of them so it just comes across as stuff happening and not an actual story, not even a multi-part story written for the trade. Sure it’s an ongoing series but good ongoing series compartmentalise a story to fit within one to six issues while still having an ongoing narrative that links the stories together. What IDW2 is doing is like if Marvel only released one or two books a month and has all of their active teams and solo characters having a few pages per month doing their own thing within the same book.