Shutdown! A vengeful god stalks the corridors of the Lost Light, murdering everyone who makes eye contact. The crew must answer two questions: Why have they been singled out for punishment? And how do you stop someone who can kill you just by thinking about it?
Click the jump for preview pages and a review of More Than Meets The Eye #49.
So last issue our Lost Light resident shrink Rung had been catching up with Froid, his, well, nemesis for lack of a better word (former colleague turned friend turned enemy turned colleague that you don’t turn your back on.) And Froid let Rung know that he’d secretly brought a psychopath on board: Sunder, a mnemosurgeon turned addict turned mass murderer. And what Sunder feeds on is terrible memories, the more repressed the better.
It turns out that Sunder doesn’t even have to touch you to feed on your memories, or change your memories, and he has a creative way of using memories against people. I won’t give it away, but he can twist people’s transformation abilities so horrifically, it’s probably up there in the top ten most disturbing things I’ve seen in this series.
The horrific parts I liked, but the rest of the book felt a little odd to me. We’d have these frightening images of people being maimed, right next to some slapstick comedy when someone gets taken out. We’ve got wonderfully creepy images of Sunder with all these teeth, and Megatron acting one hundred percent unlike Megatron.
It was jarring, some of the things Megatron said. He actually uses the word “kindness” at one point, without any irony. I’m all for character development, and Megatron’s being going down a certain path for a while now, but I couldn’t help feeling his switch was out of character. I can see him making the decision he made, but not saying it the way he said it.
There were so many awesomely dark developments in this book (spoilers: we finally find out what happened to Skids, and I think it was worth the wait, in a terrible, terrible way) but they were right up against scenes that seemed a little unsophisticated, almost as if they were meant for a younger audience. It felt a little like it’d been written by two different people.
I’ve no complaints about the art, though: Hayato Sakamoto does a brilliant job in giving us G1 designs, but still making them distinctively his own. (And yes, everybody’s got noses, except the bots who never had them to begin with.) Joana Lafuente’s colors are also excellent, I’m always stunned at the depth she brings to the line work.
Next issue, the landmark number 50, is certainly going to deal with Megatron’s big announcement. I’m hoping James Roberts somehow makes this development seem more like something Megatron would actually do: some gritty, terribly depressing phrasing, some speech from ol’ Megs that’ll really kick us in the feels. (And Roberts never lets me down, so the odds are good.)
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Preview images and description courtesy of IDW.