A big battle emerges over Termagax: Spoiler Pyra Magma, Wheeljack and Optimus Prime board into Termagax’s house. Turns out Termagax has the Engima of Combination. But she is not interested in the Autobot’s cause, and also admits it was wrong to trust Megatron. The Decepticons launch a counter attack with Sixshot commanding the army. This fight leads to Termagax sending her drones to defend the house. Meanwhile, Skywarp meets Shockwave…and is also interested in the Engima of Combination. Highlights: If the next cover is an indication of anything, it’s to watch out for Skywarp…
This issue felt kinda short, but I feel the series is definitely picking up as time goes on Spoiler Is this the first major pitched battle of the Cybertronian Civil War in this continuity? I can't recall any other large battles like this beforehand, mostly it was clashes between small groups of Autobots and Decepticons
@SerBuckman Battle of this scale isn't stranger in this continuity. It's just the effort of the artist (to save a bland story) which gives that impression. We're still looking at clashes between "small groups" when there aren't any combiners, Leviathan's or Titans on the battleground. We get some nice panels of bots fighting each other, but the story... meh, it can be told in one sentence: they start fighting each other.
Welcome to the world of most transformer comics. Autobot v decepticon. Civil War. Casualties. Explosions. Etc etc. About time the war kicked off properly.
So last I remember seeing her, Arcee was with Greenlight and that other bot at the end of her Galaxies story. When did she hook up with the Autobots?
I wonder if she was supposed to be drawn as Elita-1 and if not we will probably get a mini-series later on about her, Greenlight and Gauge. Man, that intro battle at the beginning was fun and beautiful. Huge thanks to Malkova/Gauntt for creating these nicely colored art pages. Sky-Lynx was packing some good heat here while be amazing about it as usual. Really interested to learn more about the past between Skywarp and Shockwave now. Skywarp seems more then ready to show everyone on Cybertron how much of a fun loving guy he is. Love the fact that Optimus put his foot down and straight up told Termagax that she can not stay neutral after everything that has happened and especially her self-made choices. This tells me, little by little, that Optimus is not only going to be hard-fighting leader but also a commander that won't be pulling back any punches once the Great War starts reaching levels of Hell. The meeting between Skyburst and Subsea was nice and I'm all for making the Drought an official militant group just like the Wreckers. Really enjoyed the issue.
Well the dialogue has improved, mostly. Parts of it are still very jarring and unnatural. Skywarp will prove to be some entertainment. I think Optimus is just entirely unlikeable though.
I still really can't decide whether or not I'll continue reading this series. I feel like It's just a lot of talking in this series. I think this is the first real battle we've seen, and given it's been 2 years since the series began that's a bit sad.
The whole idea was to explore the run-up to the war and its onset, not just jump into the war like every other TF series (except Animated, in which the war has already been won). To properly do that, you have to show what things were like before the war, how resources were obtained, allocated, and actually distributed, who controlled what, how, and why, what the social fracture points were, how the order got destabilized, what caused people to choose sides, what happened in terms of foreign/xenorelations, and who the "establishment" major players are while introducing the main characters and positioning them to assume their eventual roles. Given the magnitude of actually conveying a REALISTIC prewar society -- not a mythical golden age, but a real, functional, flawed society with economic and diplomatic agendas, a history of trauma and an evolving approach to dealing with those traumas collectively (and the individual costs when society as a whole tries to put the trauma behind itself, because not everybody can, especially a race of nigh-immortals) -- I think it's commendable they were patient enough to take two years before showing us, for the first time ever, the first REAL battle of the Great War of the Autobots and Decepticons. We've seen what these players can do in smaller skirmishes, we know who they are from years of visiting them periodically. I also think it's perfect that the first real battle involves major players whom we've never heard of before this series. It's almost fridge brilliance: of course we've never heard of Termagax, the Ascenticons or the Rise before, because why would anybody mention them millions of years into a war? The whole world's moved beyond them. I love that the first battle was fought over a HUGELY important person who will be almost completely forgotten by the time the TFs get to Earth! This unapproachable genius, a person who created a moon that created endless energy resources and also founded the political movement that would eventually become the Decepticons, is still alive (for now) and has already seen all their work undone! Millions of years after her death, why would she matter? Everything she contributed has been gone even longer than her! Think about how we think of history. We know who the Mongols were. We know who Genghis Khan was. But that was just one dude, he couldn't have conquered basically all of Europe and Asia by himself. He had subordinates, generals who commanded their own armies, who acted on his behalf, semi-independently; I bet the Khan never personally set foot in most of the places who paid tribute to him or were massacred in his name. Nowadays, though, how many people know anything about any of those other Mongol leaders, these hugely influential warlords that pacified and governed over areas as large as modern countries? Even if you did, what occasion would you have to bring it up in conversation right now? We'd only learn about them if, say, one of those historians helped make a movie or TV show focusing on those people... kind of like how Gladiator brought Commodus into the zeitgeist when prior to that he wasn't one of the Caesars anybody was likely to remember. (IMO those were Julius, Augustus, Claudius -- there was a whole prestige TV miniseries about him back in the day -- and Caligula and Nero for both being batshit crazy. Maybe Constantine if you're religious.) Well, this is that for Transformers. It's TFs for actual history buffs. Brian Ruckley is a very skilled world-builder. He's patient, he takes his time, he moves around and focuses on different characters and groups, then revisits them a little bit later and picks up their story which has moved on by itself out-of-focus in the meantime. It's kind of like a Game of Thrones (the book) approach to TFs, complete with the "anybody can die" aspect. It's not what we're used to from TF comics, but that's why it's good! If you want the war... well, you're in luck, that's where we are now. But those of us who wanted to actually see it start got our flowers for the first time in the process. Now we can all sit back and enjoy the mayhem that's certain to ensue, and people like me who really care about why can enjoy it more than ever before.
You raise some very good points. But as someone who's never read the TF comics prior to this (with the exception of the Transformers/Ghostbusters miniseries), it just seems like it's a lot of talking and not enough action. I just find it strange that it's taken 2 years, 35 issues (plus the annuals and tie-in miniseries like Escape) to get to this point. It also feels like there's a lot of information that's missing, though maybe that's because I hadn't read the stuff from the past IDW continuity.
I can see that. I don't think the current comics' future is exactly one of the previously done media (Dreamwave, IDW1, Marvel, TV, etc.) but the broad strokes of how the Great War plays out when it's in full swing have already been explored pretty thoroughly. Also, even though this is the first major battle, there's been plenty of action for quite some time in this title. Small-scale skirmishes are still entertaining. We had false flag operations, sniper battles, bombings, Cyclonus vs. Flamewar and SecOps vs. Sixshot and his team, the extraction of Quake and his subsequent battle and death, Arcee fighting her way off the planet, the Constructicons destroying Mayalx, Cliffjumper vs. Deathsaurus, the entire Ultra Magnus Galaxies arc, Treadshot's assassination attempt on Bumblebee, the attack on the Senate and the killing of Sentinel Prime, the battle for the Winged Moon, the fight between the Titans, the Technobots vs. an asteroid full of enemies including Thunderwing and Airachnid, Bumblebee's breakout of Elita-One, the end of the Escape series, the Companions versus Strika's assassination team... not only is there a lot of action, IMO it's generally well-rendered. Honestly, I only really disliked the first few issues, and that was mainly because of the primary artist. Upon rereading, I like the story even more. My guess is that Skywarp has TONS of dirt on this dude. And to top it off, he's clearly gone completely insane. None of those battles involved AUTOBOTS vs. DECEPTICONS. We were shown glimpses of the War of the Threefold Spark, but looking back I like how vague some of those images are; they're people's subjective memories, and if you're fighting a group of people you don't have a bird's eye view of the entire battlefield. For the most part, when we see clear images of prewar battles, it tends to be towards the end (like Megatron meeting Exarchon) or the aftermath (what happened AFTER Abominus was stopped). The actual largest-scale battle of the current bot-con war before this was the Autobots vs. the Insecticon Swarm in Exodus, led by Dai Atlas. In comparison, the first part of this battle involved fighting the Swarm, then Autobot reinforcements arrived, then Sixshot arrived with basically the entire Decepticon air force to lead the assault.