Ah, Transformers.  Striking while the iron is hot, DreamWave bring you another Transformers miniseries.

My head says I should be avoiding this like the plague.  But this is Simon Furman writing Transformers, you see.  And Furman's work on the UK weekly Transformers comic was what got me into comics in the first place.  Back in those days, Furman seemed to be writing almost the entire Marvel UK line singlehandedly.  Bearing in mind that the line consisted almost exclusively of toy licences, this was not easy work.  You try wrenching fifty solid issues of stories out of the frigging Thundercats.

In fact, at around this time, Marvel UK was almost superhero-free.  They had two superhero titles - one was Secret Wars, treated as a toy tie-in for the action figures, and the other, thanks to the fabulous British tradition of merging unrelated weekly titles and hoping the sales would combine, was the immortal Spider-Man & Zoids.  Now there's a concept.

Ah, happy days.

Furman's approach to writing toy tie-ins tended to be that he would embrace the concept head-on, and write it as if he meant it.  If he was going to write the Transformers, then dammit, this would be a series that acted as if giant transforming robots was the most natural and sensible idea in the world.  His Transformers stories were bizarrely epic in scale and are still being reprinted today.  They were, it must be stressed, a thousand times better than the crud in the American title.

Continuing in that vein, this is the origin of Optimus Prime, a largely character-driven story about him being selected as new Autobot leader from a lowly position as archivist and promptly deciding that this war thing's all a bit shit, so they should probably just give up.  Grimlock, of all people, is given the role of arguing for a more violent approach.  (He was always a much brighter character in the UK version of the comic.)  Taken at face value, it pretty much works.

Artist Don Figueroa is apparently a huge Transformers fan and certainly seems to be having a whale of a time here.  With the story set way back in continuity, none of these characters transform into Earth vehicles yet, so Figueroa has evidently spent ages messing about with everyone's character designs to make them recognisable while stripping out all of the Earth-specific elements.  His redesign on Grimlock is a particularly good piece of work.  None of this will mean anything to anyone other than the fans, of course, but then nobody else is likely to buy it.

Geektopia.  The target audience should love it.  Anyone else will stay well clear.  Everyone's happy.

Rating: B+

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