“It feels a kind of madness for Titan to fight Titan. We were never meant for that.”
Keep reading for a review of The Transformers Annual 2021.
Minor spoilers below.
It sometimes feels like the primary goal of the current Transformers series is to introduce every single character who’s ever been a part of any Transformers franchise, and this issue is no exception. As soon as they mentioned Strafe, Afterburner, and Scattershot I should’ve known what was going to happen, but with all these decades of Transformers history I sometimes forget who’s who. I won’t spoil it, but it’s sort of an origin story.
On the surface, this issue is about the group who’s been sent to track down Vigilem after he snapped the Tether on Cybertron, killing who knows how many people. But the real story is about Lightbright and Lodestar, the speaker and Titan combo I fell in love with in issue 17.
After their fight with Vigilem, Lodestar was repaired, rearmored, and weaponized, and neither she nor Lightbright are happy about it. They really just want to be left alone, the two of them exploring the universe; neither of them asked to be made into weapons. And they definitely didn’t sign up to transport a weapon that was made for killing Titans.
“You’re never going to make yourself popular with a Titan, bringing an Imploder on board.”
I just can’t get enough of Lightbright and Lodestar’s relationship, they just seem perfectly matched.
They and the Technical Solutions team do eventually track down Vigilem, and everyone seems to think he’s confused, that his brain is unstable. I think he’s just angry, spiteful, and dangerous, and that the Autobots still aren’t used to violence. Lightbright and Lodestar are determined to talk him down, but I don’t think any of us thought that was going to work.
Once again, the Autobots take forever to get a clue. From the first second they talked to Thunderwing it was clear that he was a big old ball of bad news, but they still walk in like everyone’s going to listen to them because they report to the Senate. I mean, I have no problem with people trying to talk their way to a solution, but every issue lately has had some variation of “whhhhaaaat? They want to kill us? Why would they do that?” I really wish the Autobots would just wise up.
I can’t say more about the story because I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say several familiar faces show up. (According to TF Wiki we only had 18 characters in this issue, which sounds like a lot but some of the previous issues have had 50.)
And it goes without saying, but the best part of this issue is the art: having a double-sized issue featuring Alex Milne’s art is such a luxury. Everything looks amazing: the action, the background, the faces (Milne’s G1 style faces will always be my favorite) and there’s so much detail you just want to linger over every page.
The space battle was amazing, and we see a seriously impressive explosion when someone has a very big problem with being touched. (John-Paul Bove’s colors making it just leap off the page.) Also, there’s a hell of a moment after several people fall into an experiment. (Which, as I said above, I should’ve seen coming, but I loved being surprised.) And that cover. I would absolutely love to have that cover hanging on my wall, it’s just brilliant.
The ending was wonderfully sad; the expression on one character’s face was perfectly done, it didn’t require any text to get across what they were feeling. I know Milne was working on this issue for a long time and I hope they threw a ton of money at him, because it’s my favorite issue of the new series so far. (Second favorite being the issue with Nautica, but Sara Pitre-Durocher and Joana Lafuente did the art on that one, so no surprise there.)
