IDW Transformers: Windblade #5 Review

Optimizzy wrote:you know, my biggest gripe is the cartoony city that's bigger on the inside. I just don't think the artist is skilled enough to really convey the idea of moving cities. They should be huge. Honestly, I hope she improves or they replace her. Its not terrible, its just not ... quality

DeadCaL wrote:

Optimizzy wrote:you know, my biggest gripe is the cartoony city that's bigger on the inside. I just don't think the artist is skilled enough to really convey the idea of moving cities. They should be huge. Honestly, I hope she improves or they replace her. Its not terrible, its just not ... quality

Transformers + Scale = Oh dear, I've gone cross eyed

Optimizzy wrote:

DeadCaL wrote:

Optimizzy wrote:you know, my biggest gripe is the cartoony city that's bigger on the inside. I just don't think the artist is skilled enough to really convey the idea of moving cities. They should be huge. Honestly, I hope she improves or they replace her. Its not terrible, its just not ... quality

Transformers + Scale = Oh dear, I've gone cross eyed

Ha ha. But really the city should have been huge.

CBR News spoke with Scott and Howell about what's next for "Transformers: Windblade," what it means for their title character to learn that Prime may not be the 100% altruistic hero she once believed him to be, and why giant, battling robots provide the perfect allegory to explore themes like politics, war, gender and more.

[...]

Starscream has been handling this all magnificently, maneuvering everything into place. Has it been fun to get to have him outpace the others and show off his political agility?

Scott: Starscream is one of my favorite characters and I've had a great time revealing just how cunning he is. He also has a big advantage because everyone else in the book wears their heart on their sleeve. Windblade wants to save Caminus. Optimus wants to save Cybertron. And Starscream just wants to do whatever's best for Starscream. That makes him a lot more flexible than our other characters, and he uses that flexibility to its fullest extent. When Starscream sent Swindle and Menasor to Caminus, I saw a lot of people exclaiming that this would be Starscream's last mistake, and by the end of "Combiner Wars" he'd be ousted from power. I think underestimating Starscream is a lot of people's biggest mistake.

Scott: So at the end of "Combiner Wars," Caminus and Cybertron are now connected via SpaceBridge, and the Cybertronians have learned of at least four other colonies. Windblade's new mission is to make first contact with these worlds and somehow convince them to ally with Cybertron's new Council of Worlds, but each colony will have its own unique challenges she'll have to deal with. We're also kicking open a lot of doors to continuities that haven't been explored much in IDW. We're including a whole lot of new Transformers, many of which fans will know from other iterations of the brand throughout the years.

[...]

The Transformers comics seem to handle sci-fi as allegory more capably than anyone else is able to right now. What is it about the Universe which makes them so suitable to introduce themes of politics, war, gender and the like?

Howell: I think it's because when you get to see huge talking robots fighting, you can be sneaky with some bigger themes like political disputes and rivalries or the cause and costs of war. Everyone reads it to have fun, but they come away with a little bit more than that -- or at least that's the hope, anyway.

Scott: When you are dealing with alien robots, you have just enough distance between you and the subject that you can explore difficult ideas and themes much more comfortably. "Transformers" as a brand has always dealt with war, battle fatigue, prejudice and factionalism. And while our main goal is to tell a really great story, it's always my hope that we're giving people the chance to explore the rationale, emotions and beliefs of people they wouldn't get the chance to do in real life.

[...]

Was it a conscious choice to pick characters from so many different versions of the franchise and unite them here?

Scott: My goal for introducing more diversity to the brand has always been about opening as many doors as possible. I never want a writer to think "I can't introduce Character X because they have no place in this universe." So Caminus got the ball rolling on introducing female Transformers, but now all these other colonies will have female Transformers, too. My next thought was how can we push this further and introduce more bots. I realized that we had a lot of G1 and G2 bots but what if you grew up with "Beast Wars" or "Animated" or any of the later generations of Transformers? I wanted something for those viewers, too. These colonies have allowed me to open even more doors and create a whole universe of possibilities for future stories and future characters. I want any fan no matter their age or what iteration of the brand they grew up with to be able to see their favorite Transformer fitting in to the story.

SillySpringer wrote:Corin Howell is my favorite TF artist of all time, just saying.
I gotta say I LOVE Moonracer's design by her, she looks amazing! We REALLY need a toy from this design!

Black Bumblebee wrote:Quite frankly, I like Megatron as Autobot (and I know I'm far from the only one. After all, the most recent Megatron figure came with an Autobot sticker!). If you keep telling the same stories with no character growth, the brand becomes stale. As far as Star Saber and Deathsaurus... well... they're hardly iconic outside of Japan, are they? The comic needs to put their own twist on things. The old cartoons and old comics are still there. This is a new story.

And then there's the arrival of Knock Out, as you mention. What drives (pun intended) the character, to your mind?

Scott: So many fans know that I've wanted to introduce Knock Out to the IDW verse for a while. Velocitron gave me a great way to introduce him and keep much of his personality intact. For this iteration of the character, he is still very vain and obsessed with his appearance, and thinks of practically everyone as beneath him. Corin did a great job of making Knock Out "act" with as big a personality as he had in "Transformers Prime." He makes his grand, sweeping gestures. He's designed to take up a lot of room on the page and it works tremendously well with Moonracer standing next to him looking completely over it. There's also a little bit more pathos we were able to give a nod to in this version of Knock Out, but you'll have to read closely to catch it.

Howell: Knock Out in terms of design was simple: take his "Transformers Prime" design and tweak it just a bit to make him more slender. Knock Out is kind of like Starscream in my mind minus the wings: he likes to race, he likes to look good and he likes to be the best of the best. I often referred to Knock Out as "The Sass-Master," considering the amount of sass-tastic, smug attitude that he constantly portrays. He's the complete opposite of Moonracer.