Out Wednesday March 25, 2009.

damn! my comic book shop didn't have this today

It was terrible.

A mad rush to get things set up for ROTF and that means killing every character that isn't going to be in it. And not even killing them in neat ways...

Damn. Between his assault on Starscream in Defiance 3 and him totally skewering the one decepticon in this issue, Movie Optimus is not one to mess with.

As an actual comic book, it wasn't that enjoyable. Too much gloom and doom from Lennox and too much pointless/repetitive talk in general. I was glad to see Soundwave again, and the other bits at the end that actually tie it directly to the movie were nice. But overall, Alliance has been much less entertaining/interesting compared to Defiance.

Not a bad comic - I'm certainly not complaining, as it set things up pretty well for the next film.

Makes me really wish we knew who the ice cream truck bot was...HIGHLIGHT to view:
assuming it isn't Skids and Mudflap...or the names of all three motorcycles.

Also, that scissor-handed 'Con...anyone know who that is?

Arg.

Arg.

Arg.

Arg.

I kept hoping there'd be some kind of payoff to this. Honestly, I didn't even know/remember how many issues there were.

But this is just a huge letdown. Mowry had done such a great job on Reign Of Starscream, I had high hopes for this too... Instead I can sum it up like this.

Issue 1: Post Mission City cleanup.
Issue 2: Wreckage gets revived... and then killed.
Issue 3: More Decepticons arrive.
Issue 4: Those Decepticons die even faster than they got introduced.

That's just.... blerk. It all went so badly downhill after issue 1...

What, exactly, was the POINT of all that? Seriously, everything that is actually relevant to setting up ROTF itself happens in, like, the last four pages of this issue. The other three issues serve absolutely no purpose, except to quietly tidy away (read: kill and never reference again) things left over from "Reign of Starscream" that don't fit in with the movie.

Yeah, all this seems rather pointless. Just a bit of "have some non-movie characters show up, then kill 'em off so they're not around for the Movie."

Honestly I'm just interested in seeing how much ROTF itself overlaps with what we see here (Sideswipe et al meeting up with the other Autobots on Earth). Or if it'll explain why Bumblebee's back to talking through his radio...

AHM#9 was a better story than this. Seriously.

Whereas Defiance was an interesting look into the movie universe, Alliance was terrible in almost every respect. Wreckage was the only good thing about this story and once he died, the series completely fell apart.

I'd have waited to buy the trade if I had known it would have been like this or just not bothered with it at all.

Yeah, I can't help but agree with the overall "meh" feeling. As much as I liked RoS and have been liking Defiance, this just left me flat. The "fillerness" of it is obvious (and, based on Mowry's blog, the fact that he had to write under a ton of restrictions).

I sorta figured, but it's nice to have confirmation.
Shame that such a good writer gets so restrained.... meanwhile McCarthy gets to wreack havoc onto their G1 continuity without any reins... it ain't fair, I tells ya.

I don't know where Chris Mowry's blog is... but is there any chance he can share what his plans for Alliance would've been had it not been so restrained? Considering what wonders he did with Reign Of Starscream, I'm curious what he COULD have done with this. Because seriously, the series started off so well, but fell apart as soon as Wreckage died, as Bass pointed out.

I hear ya... but I guess it's hard to write around a movie where the story's set in stone and the director wants to keep mum except for a little trickle of info.

He said he had less restrictions on Defiance, though.


It's at: http://chrismowry.blogspot.com/

There's also his comment at the bottom of this page:

So they clearly depicted the deaths of "Dead End" (rammed by Prime in truck mode), Swindle (shot in the back by Bumblebee), Fracture (pushed over a cliff by Ironhide), Overcast (shot out of the sky) and Incinerator (stabbed in the back by Prime!). The "Middle East" death was hard to see, but I'd guess that was Jetstorm. There was a bot laying down being shot by humans behind incinerator, I'd guess that's Dropkick. They never gave a definite concolusion to Reverb and Gunbarrel though, who were in Italy with Fracture. Barricade got away, Soundwave is still in orbit, and Demolishor is in Shanghai.