“Oh Perceptor, I’m going to kill you.”
Keep reading for a review of Transformers #31.
Minor spoilers below.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of the current Transformers series, but if I have one complaint, it’s that I’m a little tired of the Autobots being clueless when it comes to the Decepticons. There’s been enough of the perplexed “how could they do this?” We get it, the Autobots didn’t expect the Decepticons to throw out the rule book, now let’s move on.
What I have enjoyed are the stories of individual bots, on both sides. Cyclonus’ PTSD, Lightbright and Lodestar’s wistfulness, Bumblebee’s slow transformation into a hate-filled rage bot, the cheerful psychopaths of Team Stream…all these stories are much more interesting than speeches from Megatron or handwringing from Optimus.
Which means this issue was fun for a couple reasons. First, the story picks up 40 cycles after last issue (according to TFwiki, in the current continuity a cycle is a little shorter than an Earth day) and the Decepticons have taken over most of the planet. We’ve been carefully tiptoeing our way through the Decepticons’ rise to power, now we’re in full-out war. I’m happy to skip a lot of that progression.
Secondly, one of Perceptor’s teleportation experiments goes haywire (Jumpstream frantically pushing buttons was hilarious) leading to a lot of literal jumping around on the planet, so we get several quick updates from both Autobots and Decepticons, moving from Sideswipe’s security team to Flamewar to an Insecticon swarm to the Sea of Rust to….somewhere.
That “somewhere” sets us up for the next arc in the story, and I’m curious to see where it leads. It looks like the current story of the war will be on the back-burner for an issue, maybe more, and that’s fine by me, because this looks like it’s going to be interesting. And super dark.
As for the art, it was split between Anna Malkova and Angel Hernandez, and I liked the way it was split: Anna has the majority of the book, but as soon as we hit that “somewhere” section, it switched over to Angel. It’s sometimes jarring when two artists have the issue because the style changes so much, but having the switch in artists indicate a switch in the story makes a lot of sense. Plus, we haven’t seen Angel’s work in the past few issues, and I enjoy the dark outlines with David Garcia Cruz’s bold colors.
I don’t want to spoil it any further, but if you read the last panel and wonder what’s going on, TFwiki (bless you TFwiki) has a very detailed explanation that should clear things up.
