After the success of my last thread, I have decided to address another Comic people seem divided on: The Transformers by Mike Costa. The series seems to be linked very closely with popular stories like "The Chaos Theory" and "More Than Meets The Eye". is Mike Costa's : The Transformers required reading to understand later comics? Is the the series good or bad? Cast your vote in the poll and let the voice of the people be heard!

 

Bad. A writer who only had a surface level understanding of what he was writing, chosen to win back people after an incredibly divisive run. This was both a failure on the creative level.as well as an editorial one.

Chaos Theory is required reading, but those two issues are not written by Costa. You could skate by with those two issues and the Megatron Spotlight, I feel.

 

Yup, bad. Costa just didnt really get Transformers or have anything to say. The art is a mixed bag and every panel with Spike Witwicky is torture.

 

It had a couple of good ideas, I think. The most noteworthy is Costa's re-invention of Thundercracker, though at the time it was just to serve as another mouthpiece for Costa's whole "the Transformers are boring and I don't like writing them" thing that dominated his entire run, so I don't want to credit him that much - it was Barber who really ran with it and actually made it a fun and memorable (if eventually rather grating) character trait. I also liked the story where Hot Rod did a solo run of the Decepticon base and almost succeeded, though the events leading up to that - and his characterization during the run - were an absolute slog.

It's very obvious that Costa just had no real inspiration or vision for a Transformers story, and relied on stock action concepts (best encapsulated in the character of Spike) and very generic, half-baked ideas about how Transformers impacted geopolitics and society, all of which went nowhere and had no real point. (Remember when Kim Jong-il hired the Combaticons? No one else did, either!) The tail end of the run where it turned out Spike was actually bad and you were actually supposed to hate him felt like such a hasty, last-minute save that it never landed in any real way. Then there's Chaos, which was again just Costa doing a generic Crisis-esque story that had nothing to do with the themes of the book leading up to it, and was a confusing mess from start to finish.

The best thing about Costa's run is probably the fact that he knew his heart wasn't in it, and by the end he was ceding a lot of creative work to other writers, particularly Roberts and Barber, which allowed them to set the stage for their respective runs. Chaos Theory, of course, is an all-timer of a Transformers story whose influence on the franchise as a whole cannot be understated - and it's quite telling that that the most important and lasting concept from Costa's ongoing wasn't actually written by Costa.

 

mostly just remember it being boring and not making a lot of sense. The ending was just ridiculous. "Deceptigod"????

but I'd certainly take that over the absolute character assassination he suffered under Roberts.

 

I would actually place the blame on Costa for Hot Rod's character assassination. It was during his run that Hot Rod suddenly devolved into a whiny, immature idiot with an egotistical "chosen one" complex (remember that this was the story where Swindle was able to completely con Hot Rod just by calling him "Rodimus Prime"), a far cry from how Furman and Roche characterized him. Roberts, for better or worse, decided to follow up on that characterization and attempted to add some degree of nuance and depth to Rodimus... at first.

My biggest problem with Roberts' treatment of Rodimus is that he was never allowed to grow or mature in any lasting, meaningful way. Part of that was because the segment of the story that should have seen Rodimus grow (post-"Remain in Light") coincided with the Dark Cybertron crossover and the new plot point of Megatron on the Lost Light. My guess is Roberts decided to shelve any developments he had for Rodimus (assuming he even had any, to be fair) in favor of having him be a foil to Megatron. Which honestly works... if it's only briefly, and it gets addressed and resolved in the story. Unfortunately, by the time that character reckoning should have happened (Lost Light), Roberts was too far gone into his self-indulgent writing style where everyone shared the same voice and most characters were only there to make quips.

 

Bad.

However, although a lot of blame definitely should go to Costa, the biggest blame should go to the editor, Andy Schmidt.

An editor has several duties and Schmidt botched them all.

As editor it was his job to select the people who worked on the comics and he chose a writer that didn't know anything about TF's or even understood them, and several artists that couldn't draw robots.

As editor it was his job to proofread the work of the writer to make sure that the story runs smoothly and makes sense. But the series is full of empty moments followed by too tightly packed ones. For example, the International Incident story barely has enough content for one issue, but through redundant scenes and characters acting stupid causing a repeat to do it right, it's padded to three issues (I think). But then the next arc makes clear a lot of other things happened at the same time, all told through flashbacks, while there were also things happening at the same time on Cybertron told in yet another story. A good editor would've cut these storylines up to integrate them into one.

As editor it was also his job to make sure that what the writer wrote fitted within the established continuity. But he himself admitted to be very bad at continuity. The result was a story that just couldn't work because its premise was wrong. Just like AHM where it was unlikely that the established galactic operating Autobot army had been defeated because a simple soldier has codes that could shut everything down, here it's just as unlikely that one Decepticon defeat on Earth caused their entire army to fail. And even in the story tension and events were created by Transformers acting out of character, so the story he was trying to tell didn't work. And like AHM, additional stories were created to solve the screw up without actually helping. A good editor would've solved this: suggesting others characters that can work (e.g. the opening story would've worked with Streetwise and the Protectobots) or ensuring things are explained.


But still I think the story Costa wanted to tell was interesting enough. And he can definitely write. He just needed a good editor to keep it tight and point him in the right direction so that he used characters that worked better (and that usually don't get the spotlight).

Still makes the end of his run a disaster.

 

Schmidt 100% deserves some blame.

 

Unlike "All Hail Megatron" poll, this poll was not even a contest. After recently reading "For All Mankind" I pretty much agree with everything said here. although swindle was great, swindle alone could not fix the rest of the story.

 

Genuinely can’t think of anything good about it. The space opera stuff was only made good from Coller’s art, and that was just a sequence made for gathering the loose strand characters together

 

I didn't like Costa's run overall. But the Thudnercracker issue where he's lamenting how humankind is underestimated by Transformers was a good one, and as someone else mentioned, Swindle was enjoyable. I think there's a few gems in his run. Costa didn't annoy me like McCarthy did - anyone remember the 4-issue Drift series where Drift says to the reader: "My name is Drift" in all four issues even though his name is on the cover?

 

I'm still reading the Costa run, so take this with a grain of salt, but I mentioned in the AHM thread that, while Furman is much better at worldbuilding and storylines, McCarthy is much better at characterization and development.
Costa sucks at both, way worse than either McCarthy or Furman.

 

Yeah, the parts of Costa's run that people actually seem to like are the parts where he bothers to develop characters. I have already mentioned swindle, another example is the thundercracker issue and the Ironhide mini series (Alpha Trion was hilarious). Most of the time though he did not seem to care about making characters interesting or likable.

 

Ironhide is another good series! Coller is my favorite TF artist and I really dug that one despite being "meh" on Ironhide even as a child.

 

The Ironhide mini made me like Ironhide a lot more, but (surprisingly) it was McCarthy who turned me around on the character. Add in "Old Ways" by Simon Furman and IDW Phase 1 has shown me that, hey, Ironhide is pretty cool actually.

 

I’ve been reading via the IDW Collection hardcovers, and I’m on vol 7 out of 8. I’m actually really surprised at how many people seem to dislike this run. I’m kinda liking it so far. Maybe you could say I’m just enjoying the art? But as far as I know I haven’t noticed any writing or anything that I hate.

I was really digging Don Figueroa’s art style from the first arc of the book. It sucks that people hated on it back in the day. I’d consider his style and designs to be the closest to having perfect live action G1.

Hot Rod in that arc was probably my least favorite part about it. He was really unlikable. The way he talks to Prime and acts generally arrogant is not a good way of doing Rodimus. I’ve seen stuff from later IDW, and it also makes me dislike their Rodimus. I don’t know if I just have the wrong impression from what I have seen, but it seems like MTMTE or Lost Light Rodimus is almost comically immature/irresponsible?

I also enjoyed international incident. I didn’t like the issue where Spike killed Scrapper. Spike’s characterization seems overall pretty inconsistent so far. I didn’t like him when he was introduced, thought he was ok when he helped take down Megatron in AHM, didn’t love him at the beginning of For All Mankind but thought he was alright at the end, hated him when he just randomly murdered Scrapper for fun, then almost forgot about it at the end of International Incident. It can’t seem to decide if he’s “cool army dude” and “cool bad army dude”.

I’m only part of the way through the next arc, but I’m interested to see where it’s going so far. I liked seeing Rodimus get blown into space at Mach 10. I’m not even a Rodimus hater; I just don’t like this one.

I don’t know what’s happening for the rest of the phase, so maybe that’s what people don’t like about this part of IDW. I know there’s something about a Deceptigod that ties into the dead universe, and there’s also the Heart of Darkness miniseres which everyone says is terrible. But that’s all I know about the rest of this phase, so I guess I’ll have to find out why it’s bad.

 

I’m like the biggest Don mark in the world, but I just didn’t like this phase of style. The biggest thing for me was the faces, they just felt to skeletal and it made the eyes all look dead. It also felt needlessly complex… I don’t know whether or not it was Don’s own stylistic choice, but it always felt like something pushed on the franchise by the movie popularity/money (I really hated when they brought the High Moon designs in as their contemporary designs as well, felt so totally out of place)

Yeah, there are many, many things I hate Robert’s writing on TFs for doing, but the way they did Hot Rod dirty (especially with how I thought Furman’s take on him in the initial phase of IDW was about the best version of him ever) stands at the top of the pile of transgressions.

 

Yeah, I’ve noticed that I only started to dislike Hot Rod after the Costa run. I can’t really remember all that he was in before, though.

 

I really enjoyed furmans Hot Rod, and then Costa turned him into an I-Don't-Know-What.

 

Hot Rod is easily one of the most distinct characters in the -ations. He might even be the best character in Furman's entire IDW run. From his Spotlight all the way through the -ations and finally Maximum Dinobots, you get a really good idea for who Hot Rod actually is, really get an understanding of his personality and what drives him.

AHM comes and goes, and Hot Rod doesn't do anything aside from talk about his message once or twice. Not out of character here, he's just not a main character which is fine.

Then Costa comes along and basically butchers the character in his opening issue, and it somehow keeps getting worse. By the time the opening arc is done, he's Rodimus now because Swindle really stroked his ego with that one, which is absurd on its own considering how blatantly obvious it was that he was being manipulated, but I guess Costa just decided he's a narcissist. Oh, and the arc ends with him stealing Ultra Magnus' ship and just fucking abandoning everyone. That's, like, wow. Legitimately just awful.

I haven't started MTMTE yet, but based on the way people talk about Rodimus in that series, it seems like Roberts is just following on from Costa's characterization of him. Which is, you know, definitely a choice.