I admit I haven’t kept up with the Optimus Prime book as much as I should’ve (the story and art are good, I’m just fond of the snarky humor over on Lost Light) but now that we’re down to the last two books, of course I’m going to read it. See below for a review of Optimus Prime #24.
Warning, some spoilers below.
My first takeaway is that up until Jazz said “she” I had no idea Slide was female, and I’m not sure if that’s something I missed or something we didn’t know till now. Not that it matters one way or the other to the story, I just thought it was interesting.
I see that this issue actually comes just a little bit before last week’s Unicron issue, so the printing delays of the past few months are still playing havoc with the timeline, but only by a manner of minutes. It’s not a big deal, though I’m hoping Unicron #6 really is the last book we see in the series, it feels like that would be more satisfying.
Optimus’ journey has been really interesting in these 24 issues, we’ve seen him struggle with leadership: whether or not he wants it, and what leadership actually means. I think he’s assumed for millions of years that most of the former Primes were completely corrupt or misguided, and in this issue especially he’s seeing that what he hoped made him different from all of them is actually what makes him the same.
And I had absolutely no idea Soundwave felt that way about Mainframe. It was awesome and heartbreaking to see that level of emotion from Soundwave, though (spoilers) he also lost at least one of the tapes a month ago, I wonder how that affected him. (I remember his reaction to Ravage, which also broke my heart.)
I enjoyed Andrew Griffith’ and Sara Pitre-Durocher’s art, with Josh Burcham giving everything a very Kei-Zama-esque retro feel. The shot of Unicron looming over the Earth was particularly cool, in addition to subtler details (I don’t know if it was Sara or Andrew who drew Marissa on the phone, I’m thinking Sara, but I was struck by how natural her expression and poses were, that scrunched-up-face you make when you’re trying to hear someone on the phone.) The two-page spread of most of the main characters was very cool, especially Windblade. (I like her with a slightly more robotic look to her face, sometimes the tendency is to make her almost human, and I thought here she looked more like a Cybertronian. Sorry, Camien.)
