...fallen?
(Spoiler free-ish)
Synopsis“The Falling,” Part 6. Bumblebee and Optimus Prime make a last, desperate bid to return to the real world as Shockwave teams up with the Autobots! Can Optimus stop what’s coming, or has he played right into the hands of the ultimate destroyer?
supAnd lo! we reach the end of this penultimate narrative arc of the ongoing Optimus Prime series, and.. it gets weird? It definitely does things, and quite a few, but it also feels like it's trying to do more things than it wanted to do - to varying degrees of success - and The Falling just sort of hobbled and stumbled a bit there. Let's see...
thanks, BeeIf you've followed the Seibertron.com reviews of several of John Barber's work, you'll have noticed that one element keeps coming up when we reach the climax of his stories - two, actually: first, the climax is always magnificent and much earlier than the denouement; second, the latter, the endings, can have a tendency to not land entirely satisfactorily, to be generous in my wording.
...yeah..If the script wanted to play more on Shockwave's evolution in time - plenty of it - it did so with probably too many tropes and clichés, reminding me too much of the Galvatron resolution in Combiner Wars, and an over the top, super evil villain element to an otherwise nuanced take on the senator's story, and his influence on titular character Optimus.
this guy, yknowThat said, there are still some very good individual character moments and scenes, mostly featuring Arcee and Aileron, Pyra Magna and her reluctant partnership with Optimus, and Bumblebee's presence as an almost outsider to the entire story - plus, some very nice callbacks to very early storylines seeded in the very first Shockwave story, and everything since, in true Barber continuity style. And final bang for the universe to go out on, for which a clue may or may not be in the cover...
ArtWe have previously seen how Kei Zama and Sara Pitre Durocher can work really quite well together in the same book, even with theyir recognisably own style - and there are some very much both moments, spotlighting strengths from each of the two artists - but adding the third, very distinct style of Livio Ramondelli to the mix might not have worked that well. It does. Oh if it does: giving him the infraspace sections allows his style to be justified by the narrative itself, and the end result - of all three - is nothing short of masterful.
Arcee is the still the bestJosh Burcham is doing nothing short of a miracle, bringing a cohesion to three very distinct visual styles that would not have otherwise worked at all - and even with what may be Ramondelli's colours on his own lineart (has always been so, I wouldn't expect that to change), the final effect we get out of the three is truly a sight to behold, and probably the redeeming element of the whole book this time round.
I MEAN JUST LOOKWith the script being so baffling at times, in terms of its narrative linearity, I was a little thrown off at one specific instance of balloon placing in the very first pages, that threw me off entirely for a whole two days, until my third read. The rest of the lettering was Tom B Long's regular top shape, but I felt like my disappointed feelings just tainted a lot about this book.
As for covers, the Aileron / Arcee cover by Zama and Burcham is splendid, though without the colours it can be a little harder to decipher, though the spotlight still goes to the Pyra Magna-centric Casey Coller and JP Bove silhouette variant, the last in this gorgeous series (see thumbnail). Check them all out in full size in our
database!
ThoughtsSpoilerish aheadIf the previous couple of issues was starting to feel as if the story was dragging on, this issue put a stop to that, and one that was a little too abrupt and perhaps undeserved - in its convoluted path to the end point, at least - to make up for the jarring feeling that came out of the close proximity of these last two issues. The story is tepid at best, thought there is nothing inherently wrong about it, but his landing not sticking well, even with that one scene with its wholesome, touching moment, and its lead into the Unicron happenings, just soured the whole experience for me.
oh, Starscream is in here too, yeahThere is some really good art present in this book, though, with some exquisite colours in the Ramondelli sections, and some poignant moments kept well balanced even with three separate sets of hands being worked on by a fourth, and some of the scenes alone are worth the scope of the book - but still not always enough to supersede the disappointment of a tepid resolution. I do want to see how this all ends, of course, but I'm less inclined to fully appreciate the Unicron story now that these cards are sliding off the table.
