Roberts just wasn't given the amount of issues he had planned to wrap up his story in. IDW1 was cut by several issues and both Barber and Roberts had to wrap up their storylines in much less issues. So yes, there was the feeling of the last few issues feeling more rushed and glossing over past story points and characterisation had to be ignored because of this. There were things we really didn't need to be introduced in the last few issues. The Decepticon baby came out of nowhere and didn't really amount to anything worthwhile. But I can't blame Roberts for being forced to end the series sooner than he would have liked, as it was out of his hands. At least there was an ending, unlike the end of the Dreamwave Transformers comics.

 

I don't disagree. The premature end did a lot to disrupt the plots for both books, which really hurt the experience overall. But, given that it was cut short, I wish that Roberts had just cut things like the Deceptibaby, Nautica's arc, Anode's dead girlfriend thing, etc, and focused on the mutiny and the Guiding hand, the finale was more coherent.

 

This seems like a good place to ask this, and I apologize if this is well covered ground, but-

I just finished reading the IDW phase two Volume 12, the final phase two collection book in the series. Started at the beginning of Phase 1 a few months back and finally made it to what I thought was going to be this big finale. Except, there was no big finale. And I'll try to avoid spoilers here but basically at the end of phase two, there are a bunch of things still happening across the multiple different comics by the time you get to the end of the book, there are still a lot of irons in the fire. For example, the GI Joes are introduced as a part of the big overall story like 50 pages before the book ends, and that story doesn't conclude by the end of the book. And the end of phase 2 isn't like some kind of cliffhangers, there are stories still in the middle of being told where the book ends. I guess maybe I expected it to end like Phase 1 did, where there was absolutely no doubting that phase 1 was over. So why does phase 2 end so arbitrarily? I looked it up today and it turns out, the actual proper ends of these stories and apparently "the end of this transformers universe" spills over into phase 3 with a big gigantic climax. But why did they do it this way? I'm assuming there were business reasons and Hasbro reasons etc. for just drawing a line in the sand right through the middle of a bunch of shit going on story-wise, but I'm not finding much about it online other than a bunch of news about some pretty significant things that happen in phase 3 that, until today, I assumed were in phase two. Can anybody shed light on this for me?