I just finished reading AHM for the first time over the weekend and it was definitely the art that kept the pages turning and not the writing. I wouldn't go so far as calling the story terrible, it was just really uninteresting and bland, even though it did have some great ideas (the Con's swooping in and enslaving the earth was a fun concept).

I had to re-read LSOTW and some MTMTE afterward to remind myself how IDW can do great art and great writing together now.

 

It took a developing series that was interesting (if a bit flawed) and was developing it's own take on G1, and turned it into pile of crap that tried to be 'adult' and 'edgy' by making everyone an unlikable asshole. It is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the franchise under IDW's run. It is one of those rare works that manages to retroactively ruin everything that comes before it. Something that even the Prequel Trilogy from Star Wars couldn't manage.

Yep.  

 

I definitely agree that Shane just wanted to do a mature version of the G1 cartoon.

 

Yep

 

It still has great artwork IMO.

 

AHM wasn't good. Not Costa-ongoing bad, that was brutally terrible. But more of a "Meh."

First the high point: it was beautiful. Fantastic artwork across the board. Ignoring the random alt-mode changes, which never really bothered me, the thing just looks glorious.

But it chucked out the -ations. I know a lot of readers were turned off by Furman's work, and the slow burn of it. But I loved it. It let situations breathe, and let tension build. I still remember the utter thrill of Megatron's first appearance on Earth and the resulting confrontation with Starscream. That was earned by the pacing. And AHM jettisoned the lot of it. This isn't McCarthy's fault, mind you, but bad choices from IDW are bad choices.

Also, despite what one poster repeated multiple times earlier in this thread, AHM WAS ABSOLUTELY ADVERTISED as being in continuity. I can't find the article in question at the moment, but I remember there being some confusion after the announcement, and then IDW starting their big push waving the "still in continuity" flags. The series may not have been developed as being in continuity, but it was presented to the reader as very much being the next step.

And finally, it just wasn't very good. An earlier poster mentioned "wide-screen" storytelling. Which is totally a viable approach to comics. AHM is a terrible example of it, however. What story is there is a tenuous, barely thought through mess. But it does make for some really nice set-piece action beats. But the pacing is awful, the characterizations are completely off, and the ending makes NO SENSE. Though again, not really on McCarthy, as somebody at IDW simply decided that facts be damned, the Autobots had won the war.

That said, the discussion between Starscream and Megatron that forms the philosophical backbone of the relationship between the two in that book is actually interesting, and could have been explored in a meaningful way. It wasn't, but it could have been.

 

Were they? I've never read anyone say one bad thing about the Furman story. It's only the art that makes the -Ation books difficult for me to read.

 

Not really. Yeah, it was slick for the time and still holds up as pretty decent nowadays, but we've seen FAR better artwork in recent years. Not to sound like one of 'those guys', but Nick Roche's work is a lot more expressive than AHM's style. You can see a lot more emotion and expression in one panel of MTMTE than in that one scene where Bumblebee is talking to Wheeljack on Cybertron.

Granted, it could always be FAR worse.

 

Which is a pretty terrible idea, TBH. Even though it's got one of the guys who did Megas XLR, I'm concerned the Combiner Wars series on Machinima's gonna end up bein' "Transformers Resolute".

 

Admittedly, I like GI Joe Resolute. And I'd be curious to see what a Resolute-style series would look like, since Transformers is technically a war story.

 

Clearly you didn't see my discussion with Hound89 earlier in the thread/year.

 

I liked Resolute, too, until it fell apart into lame cheesiness towards the end.

One guy?

 

AHM was awesome ! That's all there is to it.

AHM was the only TF fiction that made me give a damn about the 84 cars and seekers.

 

Honestly I kinda want to see how this plays out first.