Make way for more encore printings of Void Rivals issues #2 – #5, scheduled to arrive in shops January 31st.
Review the attached cover artwork, then sound off with fellow readers on the 2005 boards!
The full list of covers available include:
Void Rivals #2 Fifth Printing Variant Cover (ft. Darak & Minister Dulin) by Jahnoy Lindsay (Lunar Code 1123IM891)
Void Rivals #3 Fourth Printing Variant Cover (ft. Darak & Solila) by Elizabeth Torque (Lunar Code 1123IM892), featured
Void Rivals #4 Third Printing Variant Cover (Connecting) (ft. Shockwave) by Flaviano (Lunar Code 1123IM893)
Void Rivals #5 Third Printing Variant Cover (Connecting) (ft. Quintesson Judge) by Flaviano (Lunar Code 1123IM894)
Nemesisprime1975
Indeed but I'm only interested in one part.
Optimax Prime
and just one part of a whole interconnected Universe that Hasbro is making
Nemesisprime1975
It's a smaller cast. Anything is possible. A gritty take on g1.
Rodimus
Thanks for the info!
Optimax Prime
a new Transformer Comic that is decidedly G1 in appearance and setting and Transformers (2023 comic) – Transformers Wiki
Rodimus
Wow, I have been out of the loop. What is this series? Anyone have a link that explains the project?
SMOG
That was, in fact, a twist.
I always felt like Megatron's Fusion Cannon was just a conduit for his internal firepower capabilities, so it feels slightly weird to me, but I'm happy to run with it.
I don't think that actually describes the vast majority of IDW's art. Some artists do use specific toys as their character models, but I can't think of any really egregious cases of tracing.
OUCH. WTF? I assume that's just IDW trying to kick some Transformers collected content out the door without actually spending any money on it, since they lost the license… ?
DWJ clearly isn't tracing anything. His stuff seems to be based mostly right off the Sunbow models, with a few embellishments. Plus, he likes giving a lot of characters rounded legs instead of geometric ones.
zmog
Optimax Prime
And then replaced it with Megatron's complete with Fusion Cannon
WatermelonSpectacles1
fr tho, this looks like crap
![[IMG]](https://news.tfw2005.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/08/TF-V5-HNF-001.jpg)
WreckerImpactor
People saying the art for this is bad has the same smell as those people that say something with simple character designs is poorly animated (when simpler designs facilitates greater animation quality).
So much of IDW was literally just traced over toys that it was honestly embarrassing. At least DJW uses a Magic Square prime as a reference not a template for tracing.
SMOG
Quoted for truth. IDW had some great stuff. But if I wanted to recommend it to a friend, I had to include a truly arcane reading order document not only for things to make sense, but to steer them around the garbage.
For the record, I'm not sure the strictly chronological order they tried to apply in the IDW collections is the best approach… it sort of felt like they did that after they gave up trying to figure out a coherent narrative flow that included everything.
15% less philosophical brooding, 100% more pro wrestling moves.
IDW occasionally got it right, but usually when they were depicting his pre-Prime days as Orion Pax.
I think this Prime is actually in line with the IDW version, which also follows the Furman Marvel tradition of portraying Optimus as morose, reactive, depressive, and self-sacrificing to the point of being suicidal. He feels less inspirational and more like a punching bag.
On the other hand, he did rip off his own arm and beat Skywarp to (near) death with it, so that's got to count for something.
I still have to check out the GIJOE titles. The idea of Cobra Commander keeping Megatron in his basement isn't that much of a big reveal / surprise, is it? It sort of feels like literally every TF series, movie, or show since Dreamwave has pulled a similar move in the past. There's always SOME shadowy government or paramilitary organization revealed to have a big Decepticon hidden in a bunker for Nefarious Purposes ™. It's a pretty old trope now.
I suppose if you go back to Marvel's G2 comics, GIJOE would have been the original guys to be rebuilding Megatron in their basement!
I would say the writing is nothing special so far. It doesn't sparkle, but it moves along at least. There's something about the unfolding of the plot that's different too… with this isolated Oregon community under siege, it's no longer about wholesale destruction, or Thundercracker wiping half of China or whatever they were doing in AHM. It's a very local scale, and it feels like it's happening in the kind of small town that every 80s movie seems to take place in. This is Transformers by way of Red Dawn, or Tremors, or… Gremlins?
I think the art IS exceptional, in the truest sense of the word. We don't get Transformers stories told like this very often. This is really a story-in-pictures approach, and I don't think I've ever seen a TF comic with this degree of dynamism and breathless panel-to-panel action. It is quite different.
Part of this is because Transformers comics have become (and perhaps always were) very talky, and the artists of the genre were often so caught up with the intense detail of the characters that they lost a lot of the movement and expression. I think some people might get hung up on the raw cartooniness of the art (and it occasionally does oversimplify forms, I find), but other than the pure action, there's also a good panel flow, and lots of dramatic perspective, and cinematic composition and lighting, and a strong attention to conveying scale*
*Which is not to say that Johnson is consistent with scale – he's as idiosyncratic as any other TF artist, but he always makes you very aware of the size and power differential. It feels like you are experiencing a lot of the comic from a ground-level "human" perspective, but it's not just a bunch of low-angle shots of Transformers standing around like Figueroa used to do. These things are in motion and you have to watch out. They're are size of a house and they're doing power bombs.
I think the small picture is focusing on the dirty lines or how Prime or Soundwave looks flat in one frame or another. But the big picture is something else, I think.
So I'm liking it so far. However, I think there's a strong chance that I will lose a lot of interest when Johnson hands the art chores to someone else. They might be fine, but it will change the feeling.
zmog
WreckerImpactor
Your taking my statement to make a comment on whatever irrelevant point you're making.
The Advantage Manga has over Western comics is that the series are self contained. You don't have to read any volumes of Naruto to get into One-piece. You don't have to read any Bleach to get JJK.
You just pick up Volume 1 of whatever it is that you want to read.
I still shudder at the IDW read order. Not just how not fun it was, but how much utter dogshit IDW released along it's run. The highs were high, but the lows were below ground.
Swindlerfan
I understand this sentiment. So far it has been easy to put the different storylines together since there is only a handful of issues but western comics requiring fan-made read orders to do what a manga would have just had as sequential chapters can be exhausting.
Currywurst
Most fiction that has ever been created anywhere is selfindulgent normaltrash propaganda crap.
mangas contain the same evil normal prittleprattle as western fiction.
Very few works of fiction have ever aimed to tell an interesting and creative story that isn't dragged down by self-important normaltrash propaganda.
BB Shockwave
So Cobra Commander is keeping a damaged Megatron captive and playing Isaac Sumdac with him? We have seen that in like, TWO TF-Joe crossovers already. Usually does not end well for CC.
Honestly, the issues I read of the new TF comic left me just lukewarm. Neither the art nor the writing is exceptional or interesting. I was not blown away like with was with The War Within at DW, Infiltraton and Lost Light at IDW.
Dhu Nuwas
I will say, the inclusion of other franchises in this universe is way better than how the IDW comics did it, at least for now.
Anyways, the new Energon Universe (is that what it's called?) comic series seems to be pretty good, read a few issues of it already and I love the story already.
I've also just finished reading Cobra Commander #1 and I like it a lot, even though I'm not a fan of G.I. Joes (I read it only for the Megatron cameo).
Altogether I'm quite excited for future issues of this comic series. The art style is awesome, writing is great, the action feels rather necessary, it's not edgy, everything is near perfect. Skybound really knows what they're doing.
Banannixx
As long as the Transformers retain agency as characters and don't have it stripped from them in favor of the Joes (like nearly every single other time), then I'm good.
Skybound's stuff is extremely promising so far.
Their Optimus Prime alone blows IDW's clean out of the water, and I'll not hear any different.
SMOG
My feeling has always been that GIJOE goes fine with Transformers… but Transformers doesn't mix with GIJOE, if that makes sense.
This is because I've always been a fan of the Larry Hama Joe stuff (Marvel and beyond) and that kind of storytelling happens in a particular kind of universe and contains certain kinds of possibilities… and Transformers just mess all of that up.
(so yes, obviously the overt scifi treatment of GIJOE from the Sunbow series never appealed to me. It always seemed VASTLY inferior to the comics)
Meanwhile, if you're reading a Transformers series, who cares if there's an Earth-based special forces team with named characters? I mean, it feels like there should be such a team, so why not use Joes?
So I have mixed feelings about all of this.
zmog
RodimusRex
I think it's partly about giving these characters some story runway.
Mercer is also shown with Cobra.
Traditionally, Mercer is ex-Cobra (it's kind of his gimmick that he's a defector) but he almost always debuts in G.I. Joe as ex-Cobra. We never see him WITH Cobra.
Having Mercer with Cobra and Baroness with Joe does a couple of things:
It actually gives characters a storyline to follow if they have to switch sides before they get "where they belong".
It also makes these stories a bit unpredictable if those characters don't seem to go there.
It's also a classic prequel trick. The show "Better Call Saul" took sleazy, well-to-do criminal lawyer Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad. But they deliberately had him be the opposite of what he was on the original show in the prequel. Poor, living in a nail salon, struggling to be a good brother, and — while he had sleazy tendencies — he kept rejecting them to do the right thing, probably to the frustration of people who wanted the funny, sleazy guy. It made the character more complex and when the show ultimately told what happened after Breaking Bad, the character did things that you'd never expect from watching Breaking Bad. Critics who stuck with it called it one of the best prequels.
The Joe stuff especially here is a prequel/origin story. By having characters start in unfamiliar or unexpected places, how they get where they're going becomes interesting — and once they arrive in those familiar roles, we may see them do new things.
Maybe Baroness is a loyal Joe who hooks up with Destro due to their overpowering chemistry and they have a baby and she defects because protecting their kid means siding with Cobra.
Maybe Mercer ends up on Cobra's bad side over refusing to kill a kid and ends up on the run and defecting to G.I. Joe! But then maybe his character arc has a natural but surprising second swing when he actually goes through with killing a kid to stop a Cobra plot.
Just silly examples, really. But the underlying idea is that the characters get to be unexpected by starting on the "wrong" side and then when/if they do end up in their traditional roles then they now have backstory that can lead them to do new or unexpected things.