All Hail Optimus part 3! Optimus Prime has declared the Earth to be his territory… but even he can’t go it alone. Now he reaches out across the galaxy to form a coalition — of old friends and older enemies.
Click the jump for preview pages and a review of Transformers #52!
There were three things I really liked about this issue:
One: no humans. I know I sound like a broken record on that one, but fewer humans means more robots. I know the humans are important to the story, but everybody’s either mad at the Transformers or they’re very grudging about their support. Having a whole issue to take a break from that was nice.
Two: Seeing what Optimus is slowly turning into. Not that I think it’s a good thing, it’s just very interesting to watch. It’s easy to think that Optimus becoming a “real Prime” would be a lifelong goal, something to aspire to. That’s only if you forget that a lot of the Primes weren’t very nice people. Taking over a planet against the inhabitants’ wishes, making questionable alliances, blackmailing people…those aren’t always Decepticon traditions, a lot of the Primes could outdo Megatron in underhandedness. I’m looking forward to seeing how far Optimus is going to go down this road.
Three: Livio Ramondelli’s art. The texture of his work is fantastic. These are creatures that have been around for millions of years, they’re going to show some serious wear. But they’re still so beautiful. And the way the light pours out of their eyes is always amazing to look at.
And as an attachment to number three: seeing Livio Ramondelli draw my favorite Transformer, Soundwave. He looks amazing. And watching Optimus put the screws to him was seriously impressive: we’ve got two Transformers who don’t have mouths, and yet every emotion in their faces was clear as day. A lot of that is due to John Barber’s excellent dialog of course, but I think we could’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what was going on without any words at all.
(Also, did anyone catch that conversation between Starscream and Bumblebee, and how it ended? What’s that all about?)
Preview pages and intro courtesy of IDW.