“Aaah, Cybertron. What’s become of you? All this chaos, all this destruction.
I love it.”
Keep reading for a review of Transformers #33.
Minor spoilers below.
So Swindle’s being Swindle, always out to make a profit from every situation, which is why he’s getting Decepticons drunk and talkative so he can squeeze out some useful information. A few tidbits are no doubt setting us up for future issues (the Enigma of Combination is mentioned) but right now the important tidbit is that Elita-1 is being moved to a new prison cell, and Bumblebee wants to do right by her and break her out, since it was kind of his fault she got locked up in the first place.
(And why does Swindle care if Bumblebee breaks her out? Because Bumblebee needs help doing it, which puts him even more into Swindle’s debt, naturally.)
I feel like this issue is the beginning of the end of Bumblebee’s current arc, winding up his journey from mentor to revenge-obsessed rage bot. We see him make a conscious decision about the kind of person he wants to be, and I’m a little surprised by at least one of his decisions, though it makes complete sense. I feel like the arc will be well-and-truly wrapped up when he gets away from Swindle, though that could take a while. (Or not, if he pays the right price.)
We also see Skywarp wandering around, after having followed Jumpstream back on her trip through Unspace. I don’t know enough about this current incarnation to tell if his time in between time made him loopy, or if he’s always this weird, or….something else.
We learned last issue that Jumpstream didn’t land in an alternate dimension, she landed in the future, which means Exarchon really could take over Cybertron some day. Waaaaay back in issue 15 (thank you TF Wiki) we saw Skywarp save Exarchon. Does he have the power to bring the Threefold Spark back? Or is this not really Skywarp anymore? (This “Lord of Misrule” thing sounds sort of overblown for it to just be Skywarp, but maybe I don’t know the character well enough.)
I’m sure we’ll find out next issue, if the last panel’s any indication. Whoever he is, I don’t think he’s very good at keeping his mouth shut, so he’s bound to drop a few clues to his next audience.
Best part about this issue? No speeches from Megatron or handwringing from Optimus!
Beth McGuire-Smith had the art this issue, with David Garcia Cruz’s colors. Each of the artists in the 2019 incarnation has a very distinct style, and I think the expressions on Beth’s faces are probably closest to a G1 look, which I always enjoy (some of Bumblebee’s scowls this issue were particularly fun.) There were a couple panels where I couldn’t quite get the hang of what was happening (in Swindle’s bar we’ve got two drunk bots dancing and it took me a sec to parse out which legs belonged to who) but for the most part her layouts are very good, I like how she switches up the perspective to keep the flow of action interesting.
And Alex Milne and Ed Pirrie both had excellent covers this issue!
