The Revolution continues! In this issue the Transformers enter the Microverse and have to decide if they want to dip their toes in yet another war. Click the jump for preview pages and a review of Transformers Till All Are One: Revolution 1.
I have to be honest: the Revolution storyline hasn’t been grabbing me. I never watched/read Rom, Micronauts, Action Man, or M.A.S.K., and the only reason I ever watched G.I. Joe as a kid was because it came on right before Transformers. It’s certainly not IDW’s fault that I was so narrowly focused, but it means a crossover event that features all these franchises hasn’t intrigued me.
Also, as a long-time Transformers fan, the fact that every G.I. Joe crossover story I’ve seen lately seems to feature lots of humans yelling about how the Cybertronians are a menace and should be destroyed…well this means I see G.I. Joe as the bad guys and I don’t want to read their comics.
In this issue at least it was the Micronauts we were meeting, and they do seem intriguing. Lady Shazraella chews the scenery a little, but she’s fun to watch and I’d read a comic with her in it.
The treatment of Windblade in this issue is pretty off-putting though. We have an honest to god fan-service, chained-up-and-tortured scene with Windblade screaming and in the end spilling information to her torturers. The heck? I know the style of the art is manga but I didn’t think we’d go full on into the helpless-female-straining-against-her-bonds-with-boobs-prominently-displayed route. (The fact that it was a woman torturing her added another unsubtle fan-service element too.)
I did think the conversation she had with Optimus when she got back was interesting: it’s about what he’s doing on Earth, and what she thinks of his choices. He was quietly dismissive of her concerns, but in that respect it’s a good storytelling element: he’s underestimating her at his peril, and her sarcastic statement in the end is a good lead up for what’s to come.
I thought Naoto Tsushima’s art was very fun: a strongly manga style but without any of the overexaggerations you see in some manga. The shading and detail on Optimus was particularly cool. It’d all work extremely well in an animated form, and while I like my Transformers looking a bit more grown up most of the time, I enjoyed the art here.
I hope we can do without the mild torture-porn in the future though. I think it’s hard enough for a lot of casual readers to take Windblade seriously (fan-created, ultra pretty, one of few girlbots in the book) but I really like her when she’s a tough, no-nonsense Camien. If she becomes just an object for the guys to rescue and protect, I think IDW runs the risk of alienating a growing female readership
