I gave that up with issue 12.

And that's why sales are in the garbage.

 

So true. Even robots changing modes seems to be a relatively rare event in some of the runs

 

I like Transformers comic dipping into politics and societal unrest, but its too much when such things become the only focus for 20+ issues. And Ruckley's books don't feel like comics. They read like novels with illustrations.

 

I am okay with that long slow burn. I think when it comes to the comics I am also okay with all political drama all the time. Mainly because outside of the comics this is only hinted at, if at all.

Most Transformers media outside of the comics is VERY safe. Which is totally cool, but the comics for me are the source for more ‘deep’ story telling.

 

What new transformers comics are out there exactly?

 

1. Transformers (The main book where the Internationalist (galactianationlist?) Autobots fight the deregulation isolationist Decepticons).
2 Escape (essentially about refuges trying to escape Cybertron)
3. Galaxy (Constantly changing character focused series)

 

Worth mentioning that Transformers: Beast Wars is also coming out this week, although it doesn't appear related to IDW 2.

And welcome to the forms That one cybertronian!

 

Yup! Forgot about that one, I hope it’s good.

and yes welcome that one cybertronian!!!!!

 

Thanks for the welcome guys

 

You deserve the Orsen Welles clapping gif for this, but I’m too lazy to find it.

The fact that the Wreckers Saga is probably the most popular, impactful and widely recommended Transformers comic really drives your point home. I don’t think the conflict in and of itself being uninteresting is unique to Transformers. Ultimately world building and backstory will always be secondary to developing emotional bonds with the characters. We’ll watch or read similar stories over and over if they can elicit emotional reactions. IDW2 feels old hat because it relies so heavily on your past experiences outside of the story for emotional bonds.

 

It took a while, but IDW1 posited perhaps the best reasons for the War starting ever. If IDW1 has any single legacy, it's "functionalism" being an emerging pre-war political philosophy that threatened (and did) to further undermine the freedom of a race where they are born into varying forms that intrinsically serve a function. Against such a backdrop, both Megatron and Optimus Prime are inevitable. The reason it's so goddamn brilliant is that for the longest time Transformers were hard to empathize with in any way. How can you establish a human connection with million year old, 18 foot tall robots from another planet who don't have our every day wants and worries? It's "the Superman is hard to write" problem, for an entire franchise. But functionalism solves that because it resonates with the very real world concerns people have about THEIR ability to transcend their economic or social status. We live in a world where, in a different (but not too different) sense, what you're born as will have huge implications to what you'll become, be it rich or poor or middle class, white or black, or your gender. Functionalism is both relatable and logical as the extreme version of this, in a race whose species' trait is their ability to take different physical forms.

The problem with IDW2 is that it is telling perhaps the least interesting version of the "start of the war" ever, on top of coming after arguably the most interesting. War Within did it better (and also first, so it's comparative lack of depth is explainable by its trailblazing nature). The original WFC/FOC Games did it better. Heck, the Bayverse tie in comic books did it better.

IDW2 lacks the "big idea" and it shows. It's boring. It's unfocused. And on top of that, most of it's characters have no distinct voice and are forgettable and also has perhaps consistently the worst art Transformers comics have had in memory. But the core problem is that it's soulless.

 

I think you're overselling how interesting the start or reasons behind conflict can be. Conflict always boils down to one side wants what another has or is keeping it from. No matter how much you complicate it you can't escape the fundamental nature of conflict. The problem with IDW2 isn't that lacks a "big idea", that's irrelevant, what it lacks is a reason to care. I think your assessment of the characters is spot on and it's the reason we don't care and the biggest problem with IDW2. IDW2 reads more like a history than a story, almost like The Silmarillion for Transformers. We hop from event to event, never getting to really see who any of the characters are or their motivations beyond the shallow and obvious. I don't feel like we know who the hell anyone really is in IDW2, besides maybe Bumblebee.

A big idea is more important in a mystery, thriller or horror story. The audience for those stories can be hooked by and relate to the circumstances of the story.

 

Comics in general have been awful frankly in the past decade or so. I have more fun reading 80ies/90ies DC and Marvel then any of the current runs.

I don't even know how they make any money. Apart from living embodiements of Comic Book Guy - the types who buy every variant cover and live in their mother's basement - who even buys printed comics these days? When there are several sites blatantly allowing you to read them online for free...
I only ever checked the sales numbers of IDW TF comics and last time I did that was maybe when Lost Light was still out, and even then the numbers were abysmally low considering these things are sold worldwide. And I can only guess if IDW with its nostalgic properties is doing so badly, how not well DC and Marvel's more obscure superhero comics must be doing, where nobody apart from us old codgers even heard of these characters...

How Ruckley, a guy who never ever wrote a comic before and is only known for a series of novels that don't even have a wikipedia article/summary, got the mainline TF comic ongoing is beyond baffling. I am not implying anything but the whole Monty Python "I am not sleeping with the producer again" thing comes to mind.   IE, I feel nepotism was behind this choice. Certainly I doubt this was a financially sound choice. But IDW is on its last legs anyway and its other titles are similarly going creatively and financially bankrupt.
Brian Ruckley - Wikipedia

The only TF comic I liked in the past year was Tranformers 1984, ironic that both my favourite comic and movie of the year is 1984 related, LOL. I don't understand why it was not allowed to be an ongoing. It was great and entertaining, I felt like finally reading a real TF comic again, while the main story is a snorefest and Galaxies feels like glorified fanfic.

This, so much of this. It's like IDW editorial staff is adamant on making Transformers NOT be about the war. When, as Big Top in Marvel put it, their million year old civil war is what defined Cybertronians. So it was strange how IDW did its darnedest to stop the war. Not just after Death of Optimus Prime... All Hail Megatron basically had Megatron win the war and then, like if he was some little kid who got his Christmas present and was disappointed, he did not know what to do with victory, as if he was not an almost ageless being of great intelligence. Then came Costa, which had the Decepticons remain basically refugees and terrorists, scattered and without leadership. No sooner Megatron came back, he was caught and sent on a trial. Then Barber came and essentially ended the war forever. Everything after that was politics, speeches and endless meandering, while people who fought each other and likely caused the deaths of loved ones on both sides just decided to abandon all that hatred. I see now why Grimlock was turned into a vegetable and the big name Decepticon leaders taken out or written out... 'cause none of them would have stood for this for long.

And the same issue plagues superhero comics too. It's like they forgot about what they should be about. If we wanted to watch family dramas or politics, we would watch soap operas and parliament discussions.

That sense of "epic" is missing from IDW, frankly, and have been for some time. Oh there are "Crisis of something-something" events for sure but nobody is memorable and we know some witty quippy dialogue Dr Who wannabee will save the day with a technobabble deus ex machina, or it turns out everything was already predestined to work out this way because someone went back in time and made it so. I mean, we had Unicron, and... he was a yawnfest. He destroyed planets and I could not care less. There was no gravitas, no agenda, he was just a giant doomsday device built by some disgruntled alien. I actually yearned for the sweet dumbness of the Sunbow cartoon's Primacron origin. Roberts clearly hates religion and that's his prerogative, but he did not realize that by removing the mystic connections from TF mythology, basically made the cosmic scale of an entity like Unicron just nil because he is no longer a god of chaos mystically linked to Cybertron, just another crisis event, and there have been many before.

Except, I feel here the book is just so bland and boring, people don't even read it to hate it. I did that, frankly myself, already around the time IDW1.0 ended I checked out. I realized there was no point in riling myself up about the fate of a universe and characters I no longer cared about. I was content with reading a synopsis on the wiki. IDW2.0 however, to me it seems it doesn't even bring up discussion. This topic started in 2019 and only amassed 10 pages? I remember IDW1.0 pro/contra topics being 5 times this long and in a shorter time. I feel Ruckley is so boring (because as a novel writer, he has no idea or experience how to tell a short but impactful story in 22 pages) since he is playing for the long run, but these days not many people have the patience for that. It's like Game of Thrones (the books), after things got more and more drawn out many people have already gave up hope that Martin will actually even finish the series.

Wait, like... in the WORLD??? That's ridiculously few. That means more people preordered the 615$ Unicron toy than people forked out the... I dunno, 5$?... that a comic costs.
I mean I know there are also digital sales, but are those included in this number?

 

Digital is not included, nor are trade paperbacks

 

First, you are NOT in a position to complain about, or attempt to analyse or give meaning to, these sales details, if you a) immediately criticise them for low sales, followed by b) admitting you've been reading the material for years via pirated means. Get down off your damn cross, hand it on to the next person.

Anything you've said after that I'm ignoring due to the above, as you are the admitted part of the problem, other than to quickly say that Diamond Est. Sales Data does NOT cover all sales markets. It's quite specific, and if interested, one can look up and see who (generically) is covered, where, and why.

 

I binged issue #1-#20 of IDW2 and it's just so fucking boring!

Say what you will about the man, at least Simon Furman knew how to kick off a comic-book series.

 

The series actually only starts taking off at #23.

I actually like the world building that Ruckley's doing (just because it's Transformers doesn't mean it'll only be interesting when it's rock em sock em )
but I'll agree that his style is more suited to a novel not a monthly comic series.

For a monthly comic, you really need someone like Furman or Roberts to kick things off from the get go, world building as they go.

 

I mean, that's a giant indictment of the whole thing, IMO.

 

It was when I sat down and read the first 10 or so issues all in one go that things really started to click for me. I was on board before then, but this is definitely long-form storytelling, not so much individual issues that each tell a complete self-contained story. I think that might be the cause of some of the discontent some of you have expressed, because there is often no story resolution in an issue. Plot threads pick up from where the last issue left off and continue into the next issue, so even though a lot happens, much of it more significant than it first appeared, there might be nothing that feels like an issue-ending stopping point where the events of the issue are punctuated and the reader can stop and process what's just happened.

A novel in comic book form might be a good description.

I had the same problem with the previous continuity that some of you are having now. Some of those story arcs bored me to tears while reading them in monthly 20 page installments, but turned out to be pretty good when read all in one go.

 

I'm in a similar mindset. I have been reading few comics as faithfully as TFs (Marvel) as a kid, so I was under the mistaken belief for a long time that most companies let a writer establish their idea and bring it to fruition over the years without much corporate meddling. Heh, I was so naive.
Looking back I now see that I liked the Marvel TF not just for the characters and writing, but because it was basically mostly written by 2 people more or less consistently. Characters did not do a 180 turn, events were not suddenly retconned, you knew that Shockwave would stay an emotionless logical guy and Optimus would be plagued by self-doubt because he is too diligent. After the internet (and tools like DC++) when I got a wider view and access to comics (we barely had any Marvel or DC in the country before, iron curtain and all that), I was surprised to find out most comics save for the exceptions like Savage Dragon and Mirage TMNT's Volume 1, are NOT like this. That at the first sign of a comic sales dropping most studios will boot the established writer and artist and hire someone else, who often only marginally adheres to continuity. That sometimes reboots are so drastic they essentially kill off or depower all the established cast and start from scratch (looking at you, Kyle Raynor...)

Anyway, hence for me TF was really what should have been one creator's vision, established and let to develop on its own.
Dreamwave started off terribly uneven IMHO, with Pat Lee doing a G1 cartoon sequel where Megatron acts like Magneto and tries to prove to Optimus humans do not deserve his protection because they hate TFs, and that they should team up... while Furman instead lay the foundations to a much more interesting story that also resembled the Marvel comics era more. These two identities meshed... poorly, and later writers like Brad Mick only added to the mess.

IDW started off well. They brought back Furman who had a plan for how the plot would develop in the long run, while the ongoing was a slow burn, the spotlights and Stormbringer showed the aspects of a larger universe where other alien races and various players like Scorponok or Shockwave and Soundwave also had their plots independent of Megatron's galactic conquest, an interesting world where Ultra Magnus was hunting down violators of accords who sold cybertronian tech to other races. There were other writers too joining in, and some of their work fit the universe perfectly (Spotlights Kup and Metroplex) and some completely stood out like a sore thumb (Spotlights Cliffjumper and Mirage) as belonging to another universe...
And then I guess sales dwindled below some mystical margin and Chris Ryall decided to bring in a relatively unknown writer, whose only major previous work was to completely reinvent the Riddler for DC as a violent Saw-style murderer (a decision hated by DC readers so much they effectively forgot this special in later stories) to write Transformers. The result was a giant mess where even Shane himself did not know what he wanted to write, as evident by how he killed off the established human main character and replaced him with Spike out of nowhere, and which changed more than just the designs but the established warfare and lore. And I feel Transformers never recovered from this. Barber the lorehound might have tried his darnedest to make continuity work seamlessly, but it just didn't work, there were, as the youtube parody says, "Too many cooks!" at this point, all trying to tell their story and ignoring or twisting prior continuity in ways to suit their need. By the time Costa left too and we had two ongoing comics, it wasn't a relationship like in Marvel where Furman wrote around the established framework set by Budiansky, trying to keep stuff match up with the US comic... it was more like two kids playing with their toys and splitting the toybox. As evident by how characters used by both writers (particularly Shockwave and Prowl) couldn't be more different in MTMTE and RID.
I admit I originally liked MTMTE, and only slowly realized how at its core, it wasn't really a Transformers comic but more like a sitcom pulled over the established characters and universe. It came to me slowly how less and less the characters transformed, how same-y some characters felt, how uncharacteristically chummy people were with the leader of the opposing faction they have been fighting for a million years... I think it was Megatron's still unbelievable heel-face-turn (made worse again by how it was split between two writers) that was the turning point for me.

Ruckley is not really the downfall of IDW, he is just the latest symptom of the industry. I feel they should have had more faith in Furman, let him continue the ---ations series, and if they wanted another type of book, just start another story with another writer set in another universe. I think they were too afraid readers would not understand the difference, as if we weren't used to multiple continuities. I mean, even TMNT once was split between Mirage and Archie comics and the cartoon yet people understood each was its own continuity. Even as kids we too had no trouble understanding the Marvel comics and Sunbow toon had different settings.
Instead, they did what DC and Marvel has done, replaced the creative teams far too often and lost just as many readers as they gained. I give Ruckly maybe a year, then he too will be replaced once sales go below the magic threshold.

LOL, dude, live in the real world. You are posting on a forum where whenever a new TF cartoon pops up they create a topic for torrents. People talk big, but trust me most of them read the comics the same way by pirating them. Especially true for countries like mine where torrenting stuff is perfectly legal as long as you don't sell them.
I don't feel like paying money for bad stories. I only buy actually good stories. I own all the IDW series written by Furman and Sins of the Wreckers as TPBs, and bought MTMTE up to volume 7 when I started to lose interest in it. I am the same way with shows and movies. I only own stuff on DVD and BR that I like. And why would this not legitimize my points about sales? You make it seem like reading comics online is a new thing. Such sites existed for more than a decade. I recall times when even legitimate sites like TF The Moon and Seibertron hosted all the Marvel TF comics online for reading. My point is people who are happy with the comics will buy them even if they pirate them first. If I liked IDW 2.0, I'd be buying the TPBs after reading them online for free, because I would want them in printed format too. But they have done nothing to warrant this... and likely I am not the only one who feels this way given the sales.

It's because that's what he is, a novelist. It was a mistake to give a comic to this man who never wrote for one before. I have to wonder why this ever happened... nepotism, or they just could not find any comic writer at this point who had any interest in writing for IDW?

I never felt functionalism worked at all... We are talking about a race of machines who can easily be rebuilt into other forms. At this point we had issues showing in prisons, prisoners have their bodies disassembled and are stored as brain modules. We had Grimlock and his team take on artificial-flesh covered earth beast modes for just one mission. And prior non-IDW media had this too, like DW's Trypticon being upgraded to a gigantic battle station from a smaller form, or Marvel's bio on Lightspeed who would like to turn into a spaceship and only the dwindling resources stop him from changing his alt mode.
It felt like a stretch why Transformers would be restricted from simply changing alt modes or bodies in IDW, why in a society built on change, they would be restricted to their forms when their world is so rich in resources. I hated the whole miner backstory for Megatron because it felt too human. The technological superiority of Cybertron to Earth made it seem silly they would even need real people with picks and drills to mine energon instead of automatons, especially when we today already live in a world where every manual labor is getting automated. Megatron Origins essentially turned the civil war into being about the worker class against the upper class, and we have seen that in human history so often it's a cliche. I preferred the Megatron in the movie prequel comics, who rebelled because he wanted to expand the Cybertronian empire over other species he deemed as lesser beings, rather then Megatron, the socialist revolutionary of the worker class. It was so cliche.

I do agree with you that IDW2.0 is essentially telling the same story again, but this time even slower and more boring. It feels more of the same instead of being a radical reimagination, and I feel it's because this is SAFE. Ruckley or the editors in charge are afraid to try something different and alienate the fanbase.