“Now kneel, before I dispose of this disposable.”
“I know you won’t believe me, but I was going to kneel anyway.Makes it easier to aim.”
James Roberts and Alex Milne team up for an issue where we see what happens when the Lost Light crew is locked inside a small ship for way too long: in order to keep from going crazy, they get a little bit nuts. See below for a preview of Lost Light #13.
(As usual I’m going to do my little dance around the major plot points, but if you’d like to go read the book first just to be safe and then come back here, I won’t mind.)
First off, I do want to say that I’m very much enjoying Jack Lawrence’s work on the series, he really does an excellent job with the art. That being said, ALEX MILNE I MISSED YOU. It was wonderful seeing everybody in Alex’s style. (And in Joana Lafuente’s lovely colors as always.) In Jack’s defense, I had dozens of issues to bond with Alex’s art, and I hate change. But for me it was like seeing old friends again after a long vacation. Yes I know they were there all the time, but they were still back. And they looked great.
As for the story, in some ways it was…almost an intermission? Most of the book dealt with Swerve and Anode trying to get the better of each other and that was all kinds of fun. In the dozen issues that we’ve known her I can definitely see Anode being the kind of person who can’t resist tormenting Swerve, though she’s also the kind of person who’d say he started it, and she’d be right. It was hilarious. (Especially the bit where Swerve’s trying to keep from talking by chewing on his own hand. I guffawed.)
But it’s also the Lost Light crew we know so well stuck in a small ship (see a couple issues ago where Roddy decided to use the corpse of a Decepticon as an inert ship and holy cow I’m still creeped out by the idea.) In those crowded conditions we got glimpses of the characters’ personalities, aspects of them that we knew but haven’t seen in a while.
Cyclonus has a conversation where he asks Ultra Magnus about the future, which had tons of James Robert quippyness.
“What will you do when we reach Cyberutopia?”
“Well my immediate priority will be the paperwork.”
“I don’t know why I expected a different answer.”
But Ultra Magnus’ vision of Cyberutopia is actually sort of sweet, in a really weird, slightly disturbing, and typically Ultra Magnus kind of way.
And I have no idea what’s going on with Ratchet. His appearance changes, in a way that’s a giant call-back to Optimus in the 1986 Transformers movie, but we don’t know exactly what’s happening. And let me ask you this: when you saw Jack Lawrence’s cover, did you look at Drift and Ratchet’s expression and think “holy cow…I think they’re about to make out?” Because I SURE DID. Do I even want that? Maybe? I’m so confused.
And, in true James Roberts fashion, we get the answer to a Transformers question I’d been wondering about: for the bots with big cargo spaces in their alt-modes, the ones who are still alive I mean, and not the big ones like Omega Supreme or Astrotrain…does anybody ever use those spaces? For, you know, hanging out or something? And are there rules about that kind of thing? Spoilers, the answer is yes. And yes.
We also got a revelation at one point, a very sad gut-punch of a revelation, and I have to say I’m not buying it. Too much telling, not enough showing. However, being that it was quite the gut-punch, I may just be in denial.
The issue ended on a great note, in a way that makes me think the craziness isn’t done yet. I’m happy about that, because things have gotten awfully heavy with the Getaway storyline, and watching the Lost Light folks get sucked into a bizarre situation while trying not to kill each other is really making my day.
