…you will never be brought home. You will never be celebrated. You will live out the rest of your existence in squalor and half-function because of fear.
Keep reading for a review of Transformers: Galaxies #2.
(Some spoilers below, you might want to shelve this review until after you’ve read the issue.)
Fear was the main theme of this issue, cropping up three times:
Scrapper is trying to train the more fearful members of the team to be more aggressive, to not let fear keep them from defending themselves. Unfortunately, he’s using Bonecrusher to teach them that lesson, and Bonecrusher is just a bully, full stop. Between him smashing their faces in the dirt, Mixmaster blissing out on energon distilled from recycled waste (seriously, the intake valve is a needle sticking out of his elbow, it ain’t subtle) and Cybertron ignoring their calls, the Constructicons are at their lowest point.
Then Bombshell shows up and tells his own story about fear: how the Insecticons had been helpful during the war, eating up the wreckage and bodies and turning it into energon. But once the war was over they were more scary than useful, and Cybertron shipped them off planet, not because of anything they had done, but because of what they might do.
Between you and me, his story’s suspect. I’m betting it wasn’t just the idea of them doing something bad that got them exiled, I’m sure they did something specifically bad.
And I think that’s the case for the Constructicons, but we haven’t been told that yet. Bombshell told them his story because the Constructicons were shipped off planet out of fear too, but that’s all the information we’ve got. I’m betting there was some specific incident, something they did as Devestator, that got them the boot, but nobody has said anything. I’m hoping we get that next issue, or the fourth issue at the latest. If we don’t get a specific story about how they screwed up, I’m going to be a little disappointed.
Livio Ramondelli had several standout panels this issue, my favorite was when Bombshell introduced himself (loved the colors of that one) and one of the panels when he’s talking about the war (a beautiful, bright, firey yellow with the carnage in silhouette.) And I always love how Ramondelli paints glowing eyes and textured metal. I don’t know that I needed to see Mixmaster do that hacking cough thing when he got a hit of the waste-product energon, but that’s a personal preference.
Aside from a couple panels of Bonecrusher being a bully (and later getting a little comeuppance) it was more of an issue for conversations than action, and felt like an interlude: the bridge from our introduction last issue to something even bigger happening next issue.