“He would not do that. Even now, he would not betray me like that.”
“No? I wonder if you know him as well as you once did. Or if spectacular misjudgement is contagious.”
Keep reading for a review of Transformers #16 (2019).
Some spoilers below.
I think the one thing I found unrealistic in this issue is how floored Megatron was at the idea of Orion putting a spy into the Ascenticons. Yes, they’ve both been friends for years, but Megatron has been systematically betraying Orion for a while now. I get that he’d be disappointed that Orion can be just as underhanded, but Megs looks flabbergasted at the very idea. You’d think he’d be cynical enough to come up with it on his own without Starscream smarming it in his face. (Love you, Starscream, never change.)
But that seems to be the theme of this new series: this is so far back in the Transformers’ history that everybody tends to be incredibly naive.
The plot continues to move forward incrementally, jumping from Megatron and his unravelling plans, to the fallout from the murder of the Voin last year. Side note: I love watching Nautica school everybody around her on xenobiology, and that new Voin representative looked cool as hell. Side-side note, they seem to be implying that a lot of people tend to fall for Nautica, and that she’s pretty uninterested in all of it. I miss all the interpersonal relationships from the old Transformers series, it’d be neat to have a little more of that, but hopefully not so much that it turns into a soap-opera, but I thought Starscream’s taunts were very interesting.
Most of the issue was a lot of talking between the various groups, up until the last part where things got surprisingly violent. Seriously, those deaths were brutal, wow.
Bethany McGuire-Smith and Anna Malkova had the art this issue, with Josh Burcham and Joana Lafuente on colors. I thought everybody looked good, my only quibble was when Megatron was chatting with Starscream, Megs had a sort of arms-forward, hulking gorilla stance that looked a little odd to me, but that might’ve been intentional to make him contrast with the much more slender Starscream (also maybe a call back to the power-up Megatron got last issue?) And I forgot all about it a few pages later when I saw the new Voin representative. That was really, really impressive.
My favorite image of the whole book was definitely the two panels of Hyperdrive looking down at Headrush. The poses were perfect, and the lighting and gradients were amazing.