by Calvatron » Fri Jan 15, 2010 3:46 pm
But you have to admit the scene with red alert, Mirage, and swindle is pure expressive gold. ah heck it's just gold anyway you look at it. Though that said, his face is significantly closer to previous incarnations in style than to the nightmare that is bumblebee's face in issue 1.
Overall i have a much bigger problem with the inconsistencies across concurrent comics than the drastic difference of Don's redesigns. It bothers me a lot that bumblebee looks like sunbow Bee in his mini than how fugly his face is in the ongoing. Especially when cliffjumper retains the basic design he had in AHM and the ongoing, while bumblebee resembles none of his previous IDW designs at the same time he has Don's redesign in the ongoing which occurs concurrently. Some of Don's designs are really cool to me, like Swindle, Omega Supreme, and Thundercracker; some are horrible to me: like Bumblebee and Jetfire. Since they are giving artist license, i'm not bothered to see whoever is on art duty on the ongoing have control of designs. But I would like to see some level of in story reasoning if designs change when art duties do (we have a multiyear gap and a semi clean-start storyline in this case though, so now would be the time to do what Don did), and i fully expect consistency in a temporal form. No sunbow Bee on sundays and Matrixed out version the rest of the week. I know Chee's style isn't as technical or detailed, but then just simplify darnnit. Adaptation is what make for a skilled craftman. It's not the tools....
That said, there is one thing that bothers me very much about where the ongoing is heading. I like the whole setup, though i don't quite understand the need to show every possible random autobot on earth with out mentioning some sort of rounding up having happened. The decepticons make sense overall, they were all there so Megatron could keep an eye on them. Since most of the autobots are supposed to be dead having that many decepticons on earth makes sense. But this seems to be going back to the marvel days of circutbreaker and RAAD. And to be honest i'm sick to death of the whole "humans don't understand or care that autobots are good, autobots won't fight humans, and therefore will just suck at life" storyline. I didn't like it then and i don't now. I bores me more than i can politely express. But with the Hotrod plotline and Primes words to spike i have hope this is going somewhere new. Especially without anykind of JB Blackrock around. But if this whole thing doesn't start to advance by the time the bumblebee mini is concluded i might drop this series. I just really don't won't to read about autobots who are emo and humans who are arseholes. I much prefer the Machination/autobot interactions. The bot's were not particularly vengeful nor overly violent, but they weren't about to let themselves be dropped left and right and do nothing about it.
I'd really like see hotrod's group capture spike or the general and basically sit them in a cage and say, "we're going to talk now, and you're going to listen."