http://www.bzzurkk.com/2009/10/transformer...ron-16-preview/

Oh Spike, swoon!

we can almost see the light at the end of the dark tunnel that was AHM.

So I figure this will be a big #0 for the Bumblebee miniseries.

A couple weeks ago Mike Costa had a special on Tomax and Xamot which was a follow-up to his Cobra miniseries, which is why I'm so excited for the ongoing.

"Peter Dille" and "Frank Shin"...Really?

My thoughts exactly.

Also, wow, most blatant fanboy fetish fuel I've seen in a long time.

Doesn't exactly show much but it's still a pretty big meh to me.

Wow. What a cheesy comic.

I kinda like the old school Bumblebee cover, but thats about it.

I hate how they're turning the Witwickys into bad ass male fantasies.

Not much story in the preview, unfortunately. Clearly, Roche has spoiled us.

...is it wrong for me to be envious of Spike here?

They couldn't decide which girlfriend to give this Witwicky, so they gave him all three; Carly, Jesse and Mikaela

I adore the Microchange reference on the Bumblebee cover. That's just brilliant.

I'm torn between rolling my eyes and having to admit that if the rest of the story is as cheesy as this bit I might as well sit back and get a chuckle out of it. The IDW continuity has been pretty light on the light-heartedness so far, and I did enjoy SL: Ramjet and Metroplex because they were a bit of unabashed fun-ness.

For me it'll come down to whether they know this is cheesy and silly, or if they're going to play it dead serious, with Spike just being the action hero badass we've been missing from our list of AHM clichéd badasses.

Because frankly Spike was a bit of a cock in much the same smug way in AHM, and if the few times he appeared then made me want to punch him, this will just annoy me to an astonishing degree.

If they can actually pull off a light-hearted, fun romp, then I'd be delighted, and it would go a long way to making me stop wishing Spike dead, but the last time we had that properly was the first half of Maximum Dinobots. I've not read SL Metroplex, but even counting it, it's one issue amongst a sea of angst.

True, true. I'm just... having a hard time thinking IDW is that far gone that having hot bimbo nurses with cleavage and miniskirts and high heels is supposed to be serious.

That last face makes me think Yaranaika.

Groan... do not want.

You don't know IDW, then.

A recent GIJoe issue had Shipwreck crash a one-man submarine craft near their base solely so they could have Cover Girl rescue him in a skimpy bikini.

With that in mind, bimbo nurses with cleavage is right on track with IDW.

Jesus McChrist I hope so, because my first reaction to that was 'They do realise women read this comic as well, right?'. And we're not reading it for the T&A. Eh, maybe Costa'll pull it out of the bag later in the story, but it's not making me want to give any more of a jive about the character than I already do. I believe I'll be reading this issue primarily for the Bumblebee story to see if Canon can write.

That was kinda my reaction as well, and I told Guido at SDCC 09 along the lines of me not being happy as a female member of the human race when I got to that page. =P

Well Mike Costa also deliberately put a lot of women in various states of skimpy outfits and sexual situations in GIJoe: Cobra, so again... right on track with IDW.

Oh jeez. Action Man Spike Witwicky surrounded by Hot Comic Book Nurses*. The only way this could be reasonably not unbearably stupid is if this is all a fantasy and he's dying in a gutter somewhere. Or if he's paralyzed for life and the nurses are strippers hired to comfort him.

_{*I get that comics cater to guys and all, and that Sexy Nurse is a big thing, but come on. It's 2009, those outfits only exist in costume shops.}

Not impressed...

Heh! Well, I'm not really that offended for various reasons (I know I've got no problem with drooling over cute fictional guys sometimes, so I can't talk there, at the very least); it's just impossible for me to think of such a situation as being anything other than really, really tongue-in-cheek.

So... if it's supposed to be cheesy and silly, then, you know, I can live with it. But if we actually are supposed to be taking that sort of thing as remotely serious, I am going to epic facepalm and give up on IDW, cause damn.

I want it now so I can scan it and redo all the dialogue.

I for one am outraged at the idea of hot comic book nurses being in comic books, and stories about giant robots from space not being given the serious, no-nonsense storyline they deserve.


I do wonder if some people actually read these comics to enjoy them or just to find something else to complain about.

Hm. So IDW's going the Dominic Deegan route, then.

Edit: Also, while cleavage and short skirts abound on the nurses, none are wearing heels.

There's not really that much cleavage and the nurses aren't acting or looking at all slutty.

If anything we need MORE cleavage and sluttiness. There's been a distinct lack of bosomey goodness in AHM so far, dagnammit.

Ooooh, please do!

Yes. I loved it when JESUS did it.

Speaking as a guy? They aren't hot. Guido's humans are always so stiffly posed that they're like Barbie dolls. There's no curve, no flow to them. There's none of that feminine wow that can make comic chicks hot... they're just...

They're shop window dummies. Doesn't matter how skimpy he dressed them they wouldn't be sexy.

I dunno how much offense one could take to that.

--Boltax.

Frankly, "Peter Dille and Frank Shin" is infinitely more irksome to me than a few cartoon knockers. We've done quite fine without Dreamwave-style incesseant homagey easter-egg in-jokes up till now, thanks, and I really don't want to believe that Costa is going to be bringing those back.

Alright, I give. What's the deal with these names? I appear to be missing a reference.


Edit: Nyuh, realised as soon as I posted it. Nelson Shin and Flint Dille. Of course. Although my question still stands. Even though I've finally picked up on the homage, I can't see how it's annoying. Certainly nothing as ridiculous as Simfur.

Flint Dille was a story editor on G1, and contributed to the '86 film's story development.

Nelson Shin was a producer and animation director for G1, particularly with the '86 film.

I don't mind the references myself, but I'd be happy not to be deluged with them.

Transformers eats its own tail so very much that those sorts of 'homages' really can be really annoying.

We get it.

You know who worked on the original cartoon.

Wow.

But at the same time... they're pretty harmless. It's not the same as quoting TF movie dialgoue just because you can... or some of the "IT'S LIKE THIS BECAUSE IT WAS LIKE IT IN G1!" homages or, "LOOK AT THIS RANDOM G1 CHARACTER IN THE BACKGROUND!" type homages that artists during Dreamwave (And portions of IDW) have thrown in... which end up ACTUALLY messing with continuity.

"Peter Dille and Frank Shin" at least aren't like EVERY SINGLE G1 CHARACTER EVER appearing in the background of Megatron: Origin.

Okay, it's not clever... but... it's harmless.

--Boltax.
(Wow, my edit completely changed the emphasis of this post! Woo me!)

(And for the record, surely it's PETER Cullen + Flint DILLE and FRANK Welker + Nelson SHIN.)

Comics as a medium cater and shound cater to everybody. Individual titles have individual readerships.
I like it when sexy gags are clearly gags. This give the suggestion it should be read as one but it's off and just fubles into a whimper.

Ofcourse I shouldn't comment at all since i don't know how Spike whas introduced in AHM.

uuugh


So all this time Spike has been a dreamy-manly-man's man— and the "closest thing we've got to a superhero". Holy Jive. Somebody should've told me. I've got alot of swooning to make up for.


please please please Hime make this happen

Man I am so observant today it hurts. I blame it on going to bed at 1AM then getting up well before dawn.

But still. This is the whole Drift fiasco all over again. Sure, he was a pointless fan-character who has no business being anywhere, but it was one page. Like this is one page. Sure, it's not a great page to show off the series, but does it really warrant all this bitching? I'm more than happy to take the odd tasteless half page like this when the writing's actually decent for the first time in 18 years.

Wait, I missed the part where any bit of this had decent writing even disregarding the bimbo gag. Or really any part of AHM outside of Roche's story. (Well, Costa's Starscream story wasn't bad, but IMHO it wasn't great either.)

Generic Hollywood-style schlock is "decent"?

What exactly is "decent" about the writing in those four pages compared to anything we got in the 18 years before that?

Seriously? You missed the fact that it's actually paced instead of making as many different plots as they could think of, setting up an epic storyline then trying to finish it in as few pages as possible? You missed guys like Skywarp actually getting a personality beyond "generic bad guy"? And dialogue which isn't completely absurd?

Sure it's not great literature or anything, but it's still leagues ahead of the -ation garbage which was frankly becoming a chore to read by the end.


Generic Hollywood-style schlock is as decent as AHM is Generic Hollywood-style schlock. Also, that seems like a queer complaint coming from someone who went on and on and on about things moving too slowly, which is exactly what Hollywood films about Transformers don't do.


Wait, what? 4 pages?

..now, what's more likely; I was referring to just those 4 pages, or McCarthy's work on AHM in general?

I thought about addressing some points here, but the issue has apparently resolved itself.

Well...thinking about it, take away his teleportation, and Skywarp at his core pretty much IS a "generic bad guy"...

Yeah, actually, I did miss all of that.

I missed actually having interesting, in-depth plots that were foreshadowed properly, instead of paper-thin cliched plots that were stretched over way too many pages and picked up and dropped without warning and managed to pass over all of the interesting details in favor of people standing around talking about them instead. Especially when McCarthy actually had plenty of room to work with instead of getting his buildup abruptly forced into an inadequate number of issues just as it was starting to pay off.

I missed having lots of characters get unique characterization, including several previously obscure characters, as opposed to the same characters we always see getting suddenly warped back to their cartoon personalities. And I missed human characters that were likeable and/or interesting. And I missed dialogue that was at least intelligent as opposed to cliche and/or cheesy.

And a lot of other things I miss in AHM that we used to get in the -ations. Are you sure we read the same comics?


See, I guess that's why I don't like AHM... I've already moved past primary school levels into adult levels. As such, I don't find a comic that failed at a lot of basic writing principles interesting at my current age.

AHM is terrible compared to the -Ations, they should have just finished the -Ations like they were supposed to and not cut them down and squeezed six issues into four and made AHM just six issues.


On 16, the part about him being a real life super hero was painful to me, the nurse's didn't really bother me, and I'm buying this for Bumblebee so nothing was spoiled.

I'd just like to say that anyone who insults Roche's writing (which is, in fact, the best we've gotten with IDW) is going to regret doing so.

Comparing this to his stuff?

It's like comparing the worst pieces in a dime store pulp to one of Richard Matheson's better short stories. Sure, both share a format, but one is vastly superior.

Its all about who is better in bed with IDW than other writers.

Ryall didn't give McCarthy twelve issues to tell his story based on his writing skills.

Now THAT'S a story worth telling...

AHM would still be a bad story if we got it after Simon managed to get another 12 issues with Expansion/Revelation. But it wouldn't sting as much if Simon managed to wrap everything up more neatly and how he intended.

In retrospect, truncating the -ations for AHM just seems like they were pre-salting the gaping wound.

Maximum Dinobots was a lot of fun, but I can't help but wonder how many threads from there would have ended up in Expansion/Revelation.