Last review I promised to not spoil Endgame, so let’s see, what am I not spoiling this week…Game of Thrones? Sure, this review is 100% Game of Thrones spoiler-free. However there will be some small spoilers for this comic. Keep reading for a review of Transformers #5 (2019).
There’s a lot going on this issue, and we pick up a few more pieces of the puzzle.
Megatron records a propaganda message, which makes it a little more clear as to what the Ascenticons are mad about. You can almost hear the sarcasm as he talks about Nominus Prime, how Cybertronians are supposed to have peace through stability and security. No more colonies, and the forging of new Cybertronians has been scaled way back. He sneers about how they all have to “hoard energon. We must never, ever, risk shortages again.” It’s the “again” that jumped out at me. I wonder what happened in the past that made everybody so energon-conscious.
Also, I’m not sure the style of Megatron’s speech really worked for me, the repeated references to chains and links in the chain sounded a little too intentionally dramatic to me, and not quite as menacing as was probably intended.
As much as he’s against how Cybertronians “must not antagonize other lifeforms,” I’m sure Megatron’s not happy that he has to share Cybertron with organics. Is anybody else both weirded out and kinda delighted at seeing Cybertronians living alongside non-robots? During one speech I saw a couple small ones perched on a Cybertronian’s shoulders…am I the only one who ever daydreamed about living with Transformers and going from place to place on their shoulders when they weren’t in alt-mode? That wasn’t just me, was it?
Meanwhile, the search for the person who chucked a bomb at Megatron continues (my bet’s still on an inside job, Megs did it himself to stir up trouble) and we see one Cybertronian actually try to switch sides, and it’s definitely not who I would’ve suspected.
And we had a pretty big cliffhanger of an ending, but it may be a false cliffhanger, where at the beginning of next issue they say “HA, betcha thought we did it. We totally didn’t do it!” I’m hoping they wouldn’t resort to something like that five issues in, but at the same time if they did what I think they did? Then wow, that was fast. So now I don’t know what I want.
Now that it’s been a month I feel okay about spoiling this: Cyclonus is talking to horribly mangled dead Cybertronians in the desert and we still don’t know what that’s about. The panel from issue 4 was featured in the “previouslys” at the beginning of the issue, but wasn’t mentioned again. I need to know if Cyclonus is losing it (most likely) or if ghost Transformers are a thing (less likely but wouldn’t that be cool.)
I’m still enjoying Angel Hernandez’s style of art, the strong lines and use of space is good, and I think the faces are improving with each issue, except for Rubble: there’s a slight lack of expression in all of Hernandez’s faces but with Rubble it’s especially blank, I’m having trouble connecting to the character because of it.
Sara Pitre-Durocher returned for five pages this issue, and I can’t think of anything to say about her work that I haven’t said a million times: it’s beautiful.
Anna Malkova had the art for the first few pages, and I thought they were all decently done.
But I’ll tell you one thing: the Prowl groupies (and those are a thing, o my yes) must be going nuts. Not only does Malkova show us Prowl feeding his pterodactyl (Prowl has a pet!) but we’ve got a lovely image of Prowl looking directly at the reader and saying, all sultry-eyed, “Come on, beautiful.” That’s the most fan-servicey thing I’ve seen in the new series, it’s just blatant. I highly approve.
