Well, I've only read volume 6 of the hardcovers so.....
3/5 Transformers Ongoing #1-6 I believe
1.5/5 Bumblebee
4.5/5 Last Stand of the Wreckers
1/5 Prowl Spotlight

 

uh.. okay lets see

megatron origin 8/10
infiltration 7/10
stormbringer 8.5/10
escalation 7.5/10
devastation 8/10
revelation 6.5/10
allhailmegatron 8.5/10
ongoing 6/10
bumblebee 4.5/10
drift 7.5/10
ironhide 8/10
lsotw 9.5/10
chaos theory 9.5/10
chaos 8/10
heartofdarkness 5/10
deathofoptimusprime 9.5/10
mtmte 10/10
rid 10/10
autocracy 7/10
spotlight(overall) 9.5/10
i feel like im too nice but this is generally how i feel about idw overall

 

Wait what? This is the one with the Prime/Megatron stories in it penned by Roberts right? I love those issues and bought the trade just for them.
The other stuff in there is alright, certainly not whatshisname's worst.

My ratings based on what I've read:

3/5 for Infiltration - Really want to rate this higher, but that ending fight between Starscream and Megs ruins it a bit for me.
3/5 for Stormbringer - Furman's problem: Great at building up a story - Not so good at providing a satisfying ending.
4/5 for Escalation - Loved it, love the whole manipulating the human race through avatars idea.
4/5 for Spotlight #1-3 - Having a hard time remembering what issues were in each Spotlight TPB, but each TPB has at least 2-3 really good issues in it. Shockwave, Wheelie, Kup and Hot Rod are fantastic.
3/5 for Megatron Origin - Art ruined it a bit, and it really could have done with an extra issue, but I still liked it and feel this book gets way too much over-the-top criticism.
4/5 for Devastation - Very exciting book. Ratchet going up against a Phase sixer really brought back good Marvel memories
1/5 for All Hail Megatron #1 - Fuck McCarthy.
3/5 for Maximum Dinobots - Ehh it's ok. I like it, but it lacks...something
1/5 for All Hail Megatron #2 - Fuck McCarthy.
5/5 for "Last Stand of the Wreckers" - And this is when I realized I hadn't outgrown TF comics. This is when I realized that that the future of TF comics was actually a pretty bright and awesome place. Oh Ironfist, why did you have to die like that.
4/5 for Ongoing #5 "Chaos Theory" - The Roberts Prime/Megs 2-parter is awesome and really showed that this guy needed to get hauled onto the ongoing book pronto and given a 99 year contract.
2/5 for Ongoing #6 "Police Action" - Still dont care about Spike
2/5 for Ongoing #7 "Chaos" - Was this supposed to be an epic conclusion? What a snore fest.
4/5 for The Death of Optimus Prime - Great setup for both ongoings
5/5 for More than Meets the Eye - I am in TF heaven. Just more, I need more....MOAR Roberts!!!!
3/5 for Robots in Disguise - Some things have annoyed me and it's not really living up to its promise for me. Still, it's an enjoyable enough book and I'm hopeful things will pick up a bit.

Edit: Forgot about Revelations. I liked Spotlight: Hardhead. After that things were just so incredibly rushed and condensed that yeah......2/5

 

No it's more like they got rid of the people that were mucking things up (ex. Andy Schmidt and Costa).

Of course Schmidt is messing things up at Hasbro now.

 

3.5/5 for Infiltration - Good set up, some pacing problems.
4/5 for Strombringer - Love the art
3/5 for Escalation - Story didn't pick up as much as I would have liked.
4.5/5 for Spotlight #1 - Mostly great stories that do a lot of set up for things to come that the first two minis didn't.
1/5 for Megatron Origin - This could have fit better in DW Continuity.
0/5 for The New Avengers/The Transformers - Waste of time and paper. And this is coming from a fan of both franchises.
4/5 for Spotlight #2 - Not as good as the first round, but still a lot of great stuff here.
4/5 for Devastation - Loved seeing Sixshot in action.
3/5 for Spotlight #3 - A couple duds, and a couple good ones.
4.5/5 for Spotlight: Revelation - Wished this could have been stretched out into a full mini.
1/5 for All Hail Megatron #1 - Hated the change in direction IDW decided to take here.
4/5 for Maximum Dinobots - Glad Furman got a chance to tie up his loose ends.
2/5 for All Hail Megatron #2 - At least started to acknowledge what happened before it.
2/5 for All Hail Megatron #3 - Climax felt like the end of a random Season 2 episode from the G1 series. Only redeeming point was Thundercracker.
3/5 for All Hail Megatron #4 - Some interesting stories to tie up loose ends.
2.5/5 for Ongoing #1 "For All Mankind" - Mediocre
3/5 for Bumblebee - Interesting concept, but not fully executed.
5/5 for "Last Stand of the Wreckers" - This is why I love Transformers
3.5/5 for Ironhide - Surprisingly good, would like to have more payoff in the end.
2/5 for Ongoing #2 "International Incident" - Ok
1/5 for Drift - Only got a 1 for Lockdown
2.5/5 for Ongoing #3 "Revenge of the Decepticons" - Interesting concept, but was executed poorly.
1.5/5 Heart of Darkness - Interesting concept, terrible art.
4/5 for Ongoing #5 "Chaos Theory" - The first half was mediocre, but the 2 parter that explored the early days of Megatron was brilliant.
2/5 for Ongoing #6 "Police Action" - I do like Prowl and Magnus, but I could care less about the story lines on Earth.
3.5/5 for Ongoing #7 "Chaos" - Nice story, wished the art was better.
5/5 for More than Meets the Eye - Love it.
3/5 for Robots in Disguise - Like the concept, but there is so much more they can be doing with it.

In short, Furman and Roberts good, McArthy and Costa bad.

 

I'm reading IDW via the "The IDW Collections" so here's what i've read.

2/5 for Infiltration -- Soooo slow, the human characters were fairly lame (if it wasn't for Miiko in Prime Verity might go dow as the worst ongoing human character in a main Trasnformers series ever) and the art is just terrible. Some interesting ideas though.

4/5 for Strombringer -- much better pacing, Don just about at his best.

3/5 for Escalation -- better than Infiltration, but still pretty slow and "meh"

2/5 for Megatron Origin -- Muddled-yet-interesting story telling, overly busy art

0/5 for The New Avengers/The Transformers -- literally one of the worst comics i've read in 25+ years.

4/5 for Devastation -- this is where Furman's uber-story really started to hum for me (which sure made it sad when it got kneecapped.)

4/5 for Spotlight: Revelation -- So sad that this finale got mashed into 4 spotlights instead of a proper 6-issue arc.

4/5 for All Hail Megatron #1 -- i really liked the beginning of this, sue me. And Guido was knocking it out of the park.

3/5 for All Hail Megatron #2 -- choppy art (wish they'd let Guido take the time to do it up right) and the ending felt a bit rushed. Some good bits overall.

4/5 for Maximum Dinobots -- awesome finale for the Earthbound finale of Furman's arc: my only gripe would be the art assists in the later issues were so jarringly different, style wise and the horrible, horrible, stupid bug eyes Roche gave Swoop. Awesome seeing the dinobots mow down the Sunstreaker army.

3/5 for All Hail Megatron #3, All Hail Megatron #4, Spotlights. This are too all over the place on a story-by story basis from Awesome (SL:Optimus Prime) to Awful (SL: Mirage)

3.5/5 for Ongoing #1 "For All Mankind" Better than i expected, but fairly decompressed and some questionable story choices. and i hate that they made the Transformers speech bubbles go to circles here, i'm so annoyed they didn't use the relaunch as a good excuse to go back to the square bubbles. and Don's designs here, just yikes. Some of the redesigns were cool ideas, but the movie faces-on-G1 bots just flat out didn't work.

1/5 for Bumblebee -- i have no idea what the point of this story was. And the design inconsistency between the characters here and in the concurrently going on "ongoing" was just editorially comepletely unacceptable. I can't believe they let that happen.

5/5 for "Last Stand of the Wreckers" -- lived up to the hype and then some. Wish Roche's art was still like this, sure it got cartoony here and there, but never drifted into what i'd call out-and-out parody like i consider his MTME designs and work. Made Verity almost tolerable as a character. Almost.

4/5 Drift -- I really liked this mini, cool plot points i hope get followed up on with the New Crystal City bots, this series even got me to buy the ROTF Lockdown... never would have thought they'd get me to touch somethine with it's roots in "Animated" with a 10-foot-pole.

 

The thing I find with IDW is that, although Ongoing and AHM kind of sucked, the series really did need a reboot. Simon Furman got way too carried away with his plot and it just got lost. You shouldn't have to read a hundred different books to follow a single storyline.

Luckily though, it seems the latest reboot is far better than the first.

 

I'll give IDW a 2 out of 5 so far. The only good things have been RID, MTMTE, All Hail Megatron and some of Furman's early stuff.

 

I felt at the time that we just needed some fresh blood to bring new ideas to the table. Stuff like Spotlights Kup & Wheelie showed that there was definitely room for others to take a crack at it. I liked the world that Furman had created with the -Ation books, but his dialog for the characters felt really stale.

I didn't want to see them do a reboot though, and undo all the good work that had gone on before. RiD and MTMTE handled this much better.

 

Furman's --Ation series was cut short short due to outside influences. Given the time and space necessary, it could have been very good.

 

...Or so Furman convinces himself. I feel it wasn't the "being cut short" that made that collective series rather poor (and remember, it was only cut short because readers were leaving in droves and IDW needed to kickstart the G1 series), but simply that Furman believed the fan-worship that he was a writing God, threw loads of ideas into a huge melting pot without any real understanding of where he was going with most of them. He also took decompression and "writing for the trade" to a ludicrous level.

I've compared Furman to George Lucas before (hear me out).

1970s - Lucas has lots of restrictions on him (budget, studio interference, filming frustrations, everyone doubting him etc) - he produces a masterpiece that is "Star Wars"
1990s - Lucas has no restrictions; everyone tells him he's a genius and can do no wrong. He produces Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

1980s - Furman has lots of restrictions on him (having to constrict his stories to fit in with the US continuity; writing for a toy comic; 11-page limitation etc) - he produces classics like "Target: 2006", "Time Wars" etc
2000s - Furman has no restrictions; everyone tells him he's a genius and can do no wrong. He produces Infiltration etc.

To me, Furman works best with a strict editor reigning him in, making him justify where plots are going, what's happening next etc. If he'd had this from Chris Ryall during the "-Ation" years, we could have had a real classic.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds like I hate Furman: I don't at all. Great guy and a terrific writer when he's on form. But I do think his work in the IDW G1verse was heavily flawed and deserved to be cut short.

 

Actually, I think that you may be on to something there.
However, I do believe that Furman was setting up for the long game and had the rug pulled from under him. I wouldn't be surprised if that was something to do with the fact that readers were leaving, which is understandable. However, I suspect that we could have had an epic, slow building arc had it been allowed to run.

 

Overall, I think the whole series has been a 2.5/5. I own them all...I liked them all, but seeing how good MTMTE and RID are right now, makes me realize how subpar their initial stuff was.

I love furman, thought he was genius with his 1980s stuff...and maybe he was setting up for the long game (which is what I kept telling myself). But maybe if you need a couple years to get it going it's just not worth it.

Overall they've soft-rebooted too many times, and when they reboot that way it's difficult to know what old stuff is still canon, and which stuff is more being intentionally forgotten. That being said, I think they are currently in a good place and just need to keep it up.

and whenever any comic talks about a "slow burn" I now realize it's an excuse. It's saying "this comic is slow, not much happens yet you're still paying every month for it. Now tell yourselves it'll pay off so you don't feel like a fool....but you know it'll never get better."

 

Robert's TF books - 10/10

Everything else - doesn't matter....

 

Yep, I like this post, if you go back many many years, you'll find a thread I started where I complain that theres no point in buying an IDW comic that doesn't have a #6 at the top, because nothing happens until the final issue. his Energon book was even worse....NOTHING was happening...

well what about....no,....yeah....you're right.

 

While I do agree that Infiltration started off slow, he was building a whole new TF world from scratch. The whole idea was for them to slowly make themselves known yet still keep them in mystery, so naturally there wouldn't be a lot of Transformers-centric plots moving right away and most of the plot fell to the human characters. I think things picked up a lot more in Escalation and Devastation and were running at full throttle by Revelations. Throw in Stormbringer and all the Spotlights and you have yourself a great tapestry of stories to work with.

Oh well, to each his own. Judging by the drop in sales, I guess I was in the minority when it comes to liking those type of stories.

 

reading it back through the IDW Collections, I loved what Furman was going for and really appreciated it and will always be bummed he didn't get the space for a whole finale to the arc, but reading the first 2 -ations mini's monthly back when they came out was just painfully slow. Stormbringer was great though, because it felt like it had more story in 4 issues than either of the first 2 -Ations did in 6.

 

That's probably a good point. I picked up escalation and Infiltration as complete bundles of comics and read them all at once. If I had to wait 6 months for the stories it may have been a differs t more frustrating experience.

 

I honestly don't understand the love Furman's run gets.

2/5 for Infiltration
3/5 for Escalation
2/5 for Devastation
3/5 for AHM
1/5 for the Costa run
4/5 for LSOTW
3/5 for RID
4/5 for MTMTE