“If you want to break someone — mentally, physically, emotionally — wait until they’re happy. Let them live and love and thrive. Once they recognize the value of a life well lived… THAT’S when you move in for the kill. Because you can’t take anything from someone who has nothing to lose.” –Tarn
The Decepticon Justice Division has the crew of the Lost Light pinned down (except for the crew back on the shop who are busy staging a mutiny) and Megatron’s acting very strange. Click the jump for preview pages and a review of Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye #51.
Not that it matters, but I noticed something interesting this issue: it sounded a lot more British than it ever has before. I know James Roberts is British, but I don’t think the accent has come through so strongly before. I liked it. Nautica teased Swerve by pinching his cheek and saying “Aw, bless” and now I think I’ll imagine Nautica with a British accent from now on. And someone else talked about people getting their arses kicked, but I won’t say who said it, because it’d give away a surprising ending.
Megatron, meanwhile, is going down the same path he’s been walking since we first saw him on the Necrobot’s planet. If you don’t remember, it was when the Necrobot mentioned that the flowers that grow on the planet come from the sparks of bots who’ve been killed; several hundred (or thousand?) make up one flower. And the Necrobot plants them near the statue of the bot who killed them. At the end of the issue we see Megatron looking at his statue, and it’s surrounded by flowers, acres of them, as far as the eye can see. It was a nicely chilling moment, and it affected Megatron pretty deeply, which explains why he’s being weird.
Weird for Megatron, I mean. Which is calm, rational, understanding, and…peaceful. And in this issue he makes a surprising decision about “fleshlings” (that’s us, or people like us, non-Cybertronians I mean.) He’s just now coming to terms with how many he’s killed: several species are extinct because of him, all because, in his words, he thought “the Universe should be armor-plated.”
I’m starting to like this side of him. I think there’s still a core of rage in there somewhere, though.
The rest of the issue was equal parts funny and violent. Roberts is excellent at writing our favorite Cybertronians when they’re slightly panicked, they just get funnier and funnier. Which doesn’t make the moment when one of them is jumped by the DJD any less scary. Someone gets mostly ripped apart, and I’m not sure they’re going to make it.
And the art, well I say it every issue: Alex Milne’s lines? Check. Joana Lafuente’s colors? Check. Hilarious expressions, gorgeous design on figures and faces, dramatic action? Check check check. And don’t forget to check out Livio Ramondelli’s variant cover: over on his deviantart page he said it’s “Tarn enjoying a lovely day in the office.” It’s very nicely chilling.
Preview pages and description courtesy of IDW.