Review – Transformers More Than Meets the Eye #54

I swear, I don’t have any fingernails left. And we still haven’t hit the end of this arc. Click the jump for preview pages and the (spoiler-free) (I promise) review for Transformers More Than Meets The Eye #54.

While I want to go on and on about everything that happened this issue, I really don’t want to spoil it, because you need to read it. It’d lose all its power if I even gave you hints. Except for this: not everybody makes it out alive. And/or with all their limbs.

I realized I’d been wrong about one thing: Skids still doesn’t know what memory he’s been blocking. I think it was just the pressure of that unremembered event that was taking a toll, not the memory itself. It’s not going to be pretty when that dam bursts.

We also get an explanation for exactly what happened to Tailgate, why he’s now an outlier, and how this can help the Autobots get out of the mess they’re in. I have to say, I haven’t been 100% behind the whole super-powered-Tailgate thing, it always seemed a little too convenient. But when you get the explanation, and how it can help the Autobots, at a cost, it does make sense. We’ve had this solution set up for us over the past couple issues, so it didn’t appear out of nowhere.

(Also, Tailgate gets off a line that I swear James Roberts has probably been been wanting to use for 54 issues. It was totally in character for Tailgate, and excellently timed.)

We did get to hear, once and for all, why Megatron refuses to fight. Last issue he’d hinted that it was sheer cowardice. I think any of us who’ve known him since the G1 days figured that was a lie. We get the truth this time. And you know what? It makes sense too. And it was satisfying, for a lot of reasons.

There’s so many lovely moments in this issue, and heartbreaking too. Part of that is the story itself, but Alex Milne’s art just destroyed me in a couple places. Excellent work, not just in the figures themselves, but in how they’re placed in the panel, and what is and isn’t going on around them. And near the end there’s a page of a single soldier on the battlefield that I want to pin up on my wall, it’s just that awesome.

Last issue ripped my heart out a little, and this issue continued stomping up and down on the pieces. I liked it. Is that weird?

 

Preview pages courtesy of IDW.