Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye Annual (Primus Part 1)
James Roberts (writer)
Jimbo Salgado & Emil Cabaltierra (artist), w. Guido Guidi (flashback art) and Juan Fernandez/Joana Lafuente (colours)
Transformers: Robots in Disguise Annual (Primus Part 2)
John Barber (writer)
Brendan Cahill (artist) w. Guido Guidi (flashback art) and Joana Lafuente (colours)
Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye #9 (Shadowplay Part 1)
James Roberts (writer)
Alex Milne (artist) w. Josh Burcham (colours)
I'm reviewing three separate - but interconnected - comics this week. Transformers: Robots in Disguise (issue 9 of which I reviewed two weeks ago) and Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye are both ongoing series in IDW's own Transformers continuity, which began in 2005. The former is written by John Barber, the latter by British writer James Roberts, and both kicked off at the beginning of this year, each following the adventures of a different cast of characters but proceeding the same starting point.
This month, IDW release an annual for both RiD and MTMtE. These are not annuals in the British sense of the word - that is, hardback compilations featuring a mixture of puzzle pages and original or reprinted stories - but bumper length chapters in their respective narratives. Despite not forming part of the series numbering, they both contain critical progressions in the plot.
Why proceed down this potentially confusing route? Well, the goal of the annuals seems to be to link the two series more closely together via an ambitious third narrative that cuts across both of the main ones, as signified by Jimbo Salgado's interconnecting covers. The MTMtE annual is part 1, the RiD annual part 2. The story that connects them is superficially the rediscovery and subsequent cross-universe portalling of a titanic robot (a Metrotitan), but this is really a device to allow Roberts and Barber to delve into the ancient history of the Cybertronian race in a way that is relevant to their casts' current situation.
I've rolled More Than Meets the Eye #9 into this review because Roberts effectively performs a similar trick single-handedly in the next chapter of his own book, interweaving more recent history (the period just prior to the outbreak of the Autobot/Decepticon war) with the present, and finding grim parallels. Roberts also self-consciously plays with unreliable narrators, switching between different story-tellers who occasionally bicker about the details and even having one character intervene with a cry of: "Unreliable narrator alert! Do not, I repeat, do not listen to what he says!" The subtitle of the issue is also rather mischievous: A Totally Epic Story Based on Real Events That Definitely Happened.
It's worth stepping back to appreciate just how intrepid it is of these writers and their publisher to attempt ambitious narrative gymnastics - as well as a self-reflexive tone - with a franchise that is still predominantly aimed at children, which makes millions in the movie theatres treating its entire audience like children and which many people will never take seriously as an intelligent fiction. The gap in sophistication between Michael Bay's Transformers and IDW's is yawning.
Consider, for instance, how confidently Roberts makes use of the major defining aspect of his cast - the fact that they are sentient, transforming robots - in his development of both individual characters and lore. Whereas Marvel's 1980s-90s interpretation generally made do with referencing machine parts in place of their rough human equivalent (servos for hands, optics for eyes), Roberts gives us Rewind, a character whose primary function is to record and archive everything he sees that is of potential significance, supplementing it with digital information from other sources whenever he can. He doesn't need a separate computer or video camera to do this; his body is built for it. In issue 9, it's Rewind who is able to piece together pieces of other people's personal journeys, verify them against carefully collated fragments of historical footage and discover that at one particular point before they all knew each other, their lives came briefly into each other's orbit - what he calls 'sociotemporal hotspots'.
Chromedome, a mnemosurgeon, is able to directly access and partially experience other characters' memories. His surgical equipment literally sprouts from his fingertips, plugging him directly into their cerebral centres. He makes this wittily metatextual remark as part of the justification for raking over history:
"Stories rely on the listener making a subconscious effort to bridge gaps in the narrative - and that exercises certain higher-level brain functions."
As far as the transforming goes, Roberts depicts the pre-war Cybertronian society as a rigid class system based on a person's alt-mode. If you turn into a drill, you are a miner - effectively working class. If you turn into a microscope, you're one of the intellectual elite and thus afforded a degree of freedom. Resistance movements not only take the form of Decepticons - initially working class activists who later turn to violence - but other groups such as the Militant Monoform Movement, who remove their own transformation cogs.
Cybertronians even have their own mythological figures to account for their ability to change form (as well as ones that pertain to their brain and their 'spark', their life force). A key feature of the annuals is to explore this mythology through the use of a third artist, Guido Guidi, who draws semi-historical, semi-mythological flashback sequences in a style reminiscent of 80s comics, repleat with colouring that successfully recreates Silver Age Ben-Day dots. These sequences thread together both books and their deployment is a masterful utilisation of the graphic fiction medium - our own association of their appearance with the past immediately tells us that the story has shifted back several ages. (Conversely, but in a similar vein, Alex Milne uses deft visual parallelism across the final two pages of MTMtE #7 to add a layer of nuance to the cliffhanger).
There are some nods to the wider franchise throughout these issues too. In the RiD annual, one particular panel in Guidi's segment is a clear homage to the very first panel of Marvel's 1984 Transformers #1, when it was first mooted as a four part limited series to promote toys. Another instance has characters of the distant past making their introductions by referring to themselves in the third person while describing their defining personality traits - pastiching the way the expansive cast were clumsily introduced in the original series and ingeniously binding together the in-fiction history with the beginnings of the franchise. And in MTMtE #9, another pastiche: this time of the illustrative style of the instruction leaflets that came boxed with the first generation of Transformers toys.
There is an awful lot to praise about both these series and particularly the way the annuals have been handled. The emphasis is not on gunfights and simplistic heroism; it's on well-drawn, often deeply flawed characters whose conflicts and concerns frequently mirror our own, even while they retain their alien strangeness. The writers aren't afraid to layer in social segregation, Machiavellian political manoeuvring, religion, drug addiction, grisly murder, body part black markets and Frankensteinian gothic body-jacking experimentation.
But there are also criticisms to be made: the MTMtE annual was drawn by an artist new to the continuity, and the result is rushed and often confusing. Characters appear out of place, anatomy is jarringly imprecise, occasional panels are obvious copies from ones in previous issues and some of the humour falls flat without the subtlety of expression that regular artist Alex Milne brings to the cast's faces. It's a big disappointment, especially since the annual is being sold for more than twice the price of a normal issue, is perfect bound and generally presented as a collectible. Cahill, Guidi and Milne, however, all deserve high praise for their efforts on these books, each managing to suffuse the characters (many of whom lack discernible mouths, noses or eyes) with an appreciable degree of human expression.
For all the work that the writing team has done in mending IDW's messy history of continuity glitches and plot holes, Roberts introduces more problems here, failing to make his depiction of events leading up the war marry up (at least on the face of it) with previous IDW series Autocracy and Megatron: Origin. To an extent, he has the get-out clause of his 'unreliable narrator' premise, and to a greater extent, it's a tale that should always have been left to Roberts in the first place, since as a writer, he's far better equipped than the writers of those series to handle complex political storytelling. Nevertheless, it's a case of two steps forward, two steps back.
RiD, meanwhile, as I mentioned in my previous review, suffers from a visual/textual inconsistency: while the art appears to depict a tiny group of misfits living in a shanty town, the story rests on the premise that most of the Cybertronian race, including two large armies, are populating the settlement. Barber has a theoretically intriguing cast with the reformed Decepticon Starscream, the pacifist deserter Metalhawk and the pragmatic but increasingly fascistic Prowl, as well as their insecure and extremely provisional leader, Bumblebee, but he is slow to move these characters in any particular direction, instead letting them merely snipe at each other while they deal with various crises. A valedictory moment for Starscream in the annual is just one more mysterious ingredient added to an already bubbling pot, rather than the culmination of an existing plot thread.
There are also more momentary weaknesses: one particular point in the RiD annual has about ten or twenty people somehow sneak up behind Prowl and Starscream. Metalhawk's epiphany on the final page feels inevitably short-lived and thus tacked on to provide some closure.
It's a shame these flaws exist but at the same time not entirely surprising, given the wide-ranging and commendable ambition of Barber and Roberts in creating a multi-faceted and coherent fictional universe through the collaborative interweaving of several thematically complex narratives.
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