AllSpark Almanac II: Deviants

Bill recently updated his Deviant Art page with some more pieces from the AllSpark Almanac II.  Once again, he's uploaded a wide selection of pieces from various parts of the book.  Represented are Project Omega (such as Railspike, to the left over there, and Override), the Great War boardgame (with characters like Hound and Frenzy), the Maccadam's Menu (Cy-Kill and Antagony) and some other nifty pieces.  Swing on by, check out his work and let him know what you think.

Review: War of the Worlds, the series ep 29

The twenty-ninth episode of War of the Worlds, the series, is titled Seft of Emon.  The Morthren power supply is running low, prompting them to raid some nuclear material.  Unfortunately for them, what they stole doesn't play nice with their existing systems, prompting them to bring out of stasis Seft, high priestess of the planet Emon.  She is a crystal master, able to transmute raw materials into energy-generating crystals.  Her species was conquered, then obliterated, by the Morthren, though they kept her and her son on-ice in case of emergency.

Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, she reaches out telepathically to Blackwood and they form a bond.  Eventually, she conspires to make physical contact with him by convincing the Morthren that she needs to select her materials in person, then slipping away.  This contact puts strain on the relationship between Harrison and Kincaid, who is rightfully distrusting of non-human life.  Seft gets recaptured (or goes back willingly, the story's a bit of a muddle), and is released again as a ploy by Malzor to find her human contact.  His plan works, and our team is pinned down by Morthren fire.  She and her son transcend to a higher plane, which allows our heroes to escape. 

The Good:  There's some.  I rather like the aliens in this episode.  It's cool to find out that, indeed, they've done this sort of thing before.  As always, the performances are solid, especially from Julian Richings, Catherine Disher, and Denis Forest.  Richings had a nice moment during the battle where he gave the order to fire and crouched, while his men let loose. 

Harrison has now made peaceful contact with a non-human life form, one that wasn't based on deception as was the case with Katya and Quinn.  Over the course of this season we'll see Kincaid, Suzanne, and Debi each do the same.  It's nice to see, and will pay off in the final episode of the series.

It was fun to see the old alien costumes trotted out, in flashbacks and dream sequences. However, points off for reusing footage from The Second Wave.

The confrontation between Kincaid and Blackwood near the end of the episode was well done.  Kincaid's perpetual distrust and Blackwood's optimism were bound to come into conflict sooner or later.

The Bad:  This story seemed jumbled and confused.  Seft's first contact with Harrison must be a dream or a telepathic outreach, but there's nothing actually in that sequence to suggest so.  Seft slips away, then gets recaptured, but it isn't clear how she accomplishes this.

There's also a bit early on where the aliens are cloning someone who can lead them to more radioactive material, but it's not sure who that someone was or where they got him.  He fried anyway, so perhaps this isn't a big issue.  However, Kincaid is asked by one of the market folks to help him figure out who's raiding radioactive supplies.  The story just doesn't seem well constructed, like there were a few too many revisions in there.  The scenes with payoff are still in, but the transitions got lost along the way somehow.  Bad editing, perhaps, or bad story editing.

Suzanne gets shot in the arm during the final firefight, but her injuries are minuscule, just a tiny patch on her shoulder.  I've heard of glancing blows, but that's crazy.

Finally, Harrison's 'love' with Seft seems way too fast.  They dream of each other, meet, he plies her for information... there's no soul there.  I do like the crystal she gives him in the end, though sadly I don't think it shows up again.

The Ugly:  It's not all that ugly, but the Morthren nutrient tubes are kind of cool and alien in a weird way.  Unless my subconscious is completely fabricating this, I seem to remember an interview with Disher where she talks about pushing for stuff like this.  I'm glad she did, the strange and bizarre are one of the fun aspects of this show.

So, Seft of Emon.  An episode with plenty of potential, but it seems to have gotten lost somewhere on the editing room floor.  Had they been a bit less ambitious, I think this could have been a quite good episode, but as it is it doesn't really hold together.

Review: Marvel G1 #61: Primal Scream

Primal Scream is the sixty-first issue of the US G1 Marvel Comics run of Transformers.  Having a bit of fun, the creative staff played around with the credits.  This issue purports to be written by Simon Furman Maximus, drawn by Geoffire Senior, lettered by Jim Lock Massara, colored by Shrapnel Yomtov, and edited by Megadon Daley, under the auspicies of Editor in Chief Double Dealer DeFalco.  Cute.  Don Perlin returns to the comic after a lengthy absence to draw the cover.

The cover is an interesting piece.  Grimlock, Jazz, and Bumblebee fall towards a stylized, enormous face.  The glowing mouth and action lines make it clear that the face is screaming.  It's an interesting piece, and certainly thematically appropriate, though I'm not sure that I find it aesthetically pleasing to look at.  Don't get me wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, I just don't like it very much.  "The Primal Scream!!" it declares, in case you, I dunno, missed the artwork completely.

Once inside the book, things immediately look up.  A mysterious robed mechanoid shouts at the Autobots for daring to intrude on this sacred place, while narrative captions handle the brief exposition.  Furman even integrates these two elements rather slickly.  The narration ends by saying "and face to face with their maker" while the Keeper mechanoid ends by saying "your living god--".  Both of these elements are answered with an oversized "PRIMUS!" on page two, tying them together well.  While the Jazz, Bumblebee and the Micromasters are quick to kneel before their living god, with the Rescue Patrol going so far as to prostrate themselves, proud Grimlock wants answers.  He dismisses the Keeper as a charlatan and demands to know how he was "created."  (The quotes are Grimlocks, by the way, not mine.)  The characterization of Grimlock is rock-solid.  He's a strong-willed robot, one who doesn't accept things at face value.  Demanding the creation myth seems just a bit clumsy, but I'm willing to accept it

What follows is the first US telling of the origin of the Transformers race.  As the age of gods ended and the age of life begun, Primus had a task to accomplish before he could ascend to better things; defeating Unicron.  The two battled across realities, but Unicron proved the stronger.  Nearly obliterated, Primus tricked Unicron into manifesting himself in a lifeless asteroid.  Each of them was locked forever in metal lumps.  In time, Primus learned to psionically shape their new forms, and so Cybertron was born. Unicron, too, shaped his world into a planet-destroying engine.  To combat this menace, Primus created the Transformers, and gave them a genetic matrix containing his life essence.  Unicron scoured the cosmos endlessly, searching for his old enemy, while Primus slumbered to hide himself until the day when the Transformers were ready to do battle with this greatest of threats.

And there you have it, the cosmic origin of the Transformers, almost as far from the Quintesson origin of the cartoon as one could get.  I love this tale; I find that it elevates the Transformers into something timeless, like ancient Greek heroes.  Senior's visuals make a great accompaniment to it too, very stark and powerful.  I love his use of ink, especially on the panel I selected above.  Also, note how the mythological panels have wavering, uneven edges to them that very effectively set them off from the rest of the story.  All around quality, this part of the book was, and we're only seven pages in!

Of course, it wouldn't be a Transformers book without a ginormous fight.  As Emirate Xaaron, frantically working to repair the teleporter, feared, the Decepticons have caught up with their quarry.  After a brief but very effective interlude on Earth, where Starscream's presence has caused the other Decepticons to question Scorponok's judgment, the battle is joined!  Unfortunately, the Autobots have to hold back, lest a stray shot awaken Primus and doom their whole race to extinction.  The Decepticons have no such compunctions and are running wild.  Again, great artwork here.  Furman's dialogue is punchy too: "Prattling fool," exclaims Bludgeon to Jazz's banter, "Your warrior heart is tainted by an idiot's tongue! Perhaps I shall remove both for you!"  Where before Grimlock motivated things, now it's Bumblebee.  When his cries for help to Primus fall on deaf ears, he decides that they've sacrificed enough already and shouldn't have to lay down and die here.  He rallies the troops and leads the Autobots to victory. 

Unfortunately for all of reality, their victory is not absolute.  Octopunch blasts Grimlock in the back, a shot which ricochets  and strikes Primus directly.  His primal scream "shatters audio sensors and rocks Cybertron itself!"  At that moment, the teleport is fixed and all are sent to Earth.  Grimlock worries that perhaps Cybertron was doomed to get them there, but Bumblebee has less faith.  It's possible, he reasons, that no one but them heard the scream.  He's wrong.  In deep space, Unicron senses the return of his primordial enemy and begins his long, slow march to Cybertron.

All in all, this is an extremely powerful and effective bit of storytelling.  Great artwork, high stakes and fun dialogue make the final fight sequence whiz by.  By having the inevitable awakening occur after the battle is over, Furman manages to instill a brief sense of security, then shatter it.  We get an origin, two Autobots having some great character moments, a bit of foreshadowing about the main Decepticon camp, a fun fight, and much much higher stakes than we're used to going forward.  What more can one ask for in an issue?  It doesn't get much better than this.

Next issue, "the only thing that can save them is the thing they haven't got--the MATRIX QUEST begins!"  Of course they don't have the matrix, it died with Optimus back in issue 24... or did it?  Intriguing.  Primal Scream is the final story in IDW's Classic Transformers Volume 4 (v. 4) , and if you haven't read it you really really should pick this up from Amazon.com.

The Ark Addendum - Planet Sandra shuttle

About a year ago, I posted an Ark Addendum for the inhabitants of Planet Sandra, from the SOS from Planet Sandra episode of the Takara Headmasters series.  Today I figured I'd finish off that episode with some models of the shuttle that the Autobots pilot to that world.  Rather than reuse the existing Autobot shuttle models, as they had done in earlier episodes like Approach of the Demon Meteorite, they got a brand new one.  It's massive; according to notes on the model, it's even larger than Fortress Maximus!

The Autobots pilot this behemoth to Planet Sandra to render aid to that world’s inhabitants.  Note the huge size of this ship, a bit larger than Fortress Maximus.

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Oh, by the way, Bill Forster has updated his Deviant Art page with some of the original art  for the AllSpark Almanac II.  You can get a closer look at guys like Longrack Major from the Omega Sentinel page, Astrotrain from the Great War board game, and  Sky Lynx from the Maccadam's menu, plus plenty more.  What are you waiting for?

Hasbro Q&A

Every few months, Hasbro engages the online fan communities in Q&A sessions.  This offers the fandom a great chance to get answers directly from the horse's mouth.  Some of the answers that have been given out over the years have been remarkably informative.  There was one in particular that I loved, pertaining to the nature of The Fallen.  You can read it over on tfwiki.net.

Well, this week the latest round of answers are coming out, and one of the answers over on Parry Game Preserve was a particularly detailed and well written one.  I, uh, also have a selfish reason to like it, which will become clear:

Preserve: My favorite Transformers: Animated episode has to be Thrill of the Hunt which brought back the legendary Sue Blu as Arcee in the touching Ratchet wartime flashbacks. It was spectacular that it was recently perfectly captured by the Toys R Us Exclusive wave of those two figures. I'm wondering if the Transformers Brand team has any favorite episodes of that series that they would like to share.

Hasbro: Some of the team's favorite episodes from the past include War Dawn from the Generation One series, Other Visitors from the Beast Wars series, and the popular Armada episode Carnival. As for Animated, one of the most beloved episodes is the two-part series finale End Game. During its production, both the studio and Hasbro believed that End Game could very well be the final episode of the series. So many of the loose ends from the previous seasons were tied up and the escalation of the stories written by Rich Fogel and Marsha Griffin are the most action packed in the entire series.

There's this immense amount of tension built up during both episodes leading into the final battle between Optimus Prime and Megatron, while the rest of the Autobots tend to the Lugnut Supreme problem in their own ways. There was so many layers of story telling going on, and each Autobot had their own tasks to accomplish to make everything work out for the better. One of the most moving moments in the entire series also happens during the last episode, where Prowl sacrifices himself to save the city and his friends. I feel like that moment in particular really added a dose of reality to the animation and helped really drive home the difference between Autobots and Decepticons. Additionally, although the episode was written in a way to leave the door open for a potential season four, that never materialized, but the story concepts did! Those concepts are laid out in the The AllSpark Almanac II which is available at stores now.

So, uh, yeah.  Wow.  Thanks for that, guys!  I really appreciate it.  And thanks to PGP for asking the question in the first place.  Keep up the good work, great questions garner great answers.  BTW, there's a whole 'nother question about the logistics of international toy distribution too, so check them out.

SDCC 2010

Wow, what a blast.  This was my very first time going to a San Diego Comic Con, and I didn't QUITE know what to expect.  I'm not a fan of long lines or big crowds, so I was a bit daunted.  However, Bill was very keen to go and with a free Pro badge I didn't see much downside.  We resolved to attend but not try TOO hard to see everything.

Impressions:
EVERYONE was here.  I got to talk to EJ Su and Marcelo Matere over at the IDW booth, David Willis over at his booth, Aaron Archer and Eric Seibenaler just randomly walking around, my former editor Denton Tipton, amazing pin-up artist Olivia, Bruce Timm, Art Adams, J. Scott Campbell, Sean "Cheeks" Galloway, Greg Weisman, and a ton more.

DCAU figures aren't down for the count just yet!  We're finally getting a Kalibak, which is the DCAU figure that I've wanted the most for the longest.  We're also getting a Toyman, a Killer Frost, Guy Gardner, Parademons, Golden Age Flash, The Grey freaking Ghost, and plenty more.  I must have turned to Bill at least five times during the convention and said "Kalibak! Kick-ass!"

Lots and lots of costumes!  I love a good costume, so it was fun to see so many beautifully done ones walking around.  We snapped a few photos here and there, but really couldn't get close to having all of them represented.  The one I enjoyed the most was probably Archer and Lana, from the spy-spoof cartoon Archer.  Storm Trooper Elvis and The Colonel were also pretty cool.  I think Bill was most smitten by Black Cat.   Last Halloween I dressed up as Tony Stark, but this guy put me to shame!

Neato props and set pieces, including Terminators, the mech from Avatar, stuff from Tron, Toy Story legos, a fully mobile Astromech Droid, the complete suite of Iron Man suits, full sized Transformers, naturally, and plenty more.

Street signs in Klingon?  Good.  Those same signs in romanized Klingon?  Great.

The shanty-town behind our hotel? Wow.  It makes me thankful for what I've been blessed with.

So, those are my initial impressions.  I'm sure more will come to me in time, but that was what stood out.  Made some good contacts, kept up with even more contacts, got a few cool souvenirs, and generally just had fun. Oh, and check out my Flickr set for the dozens of photos Bill took.

More behind-the-scenes from The AllSpark Almanac II

The AllSpark Almanac II (buy it now!) would not have been possible in its current form without the help of a host of very talented individuals.  One of them, Javier Reyes, also worked with us on the first Almanac to make sure that we had as many of our models colored in as possible.  You see, the originals for many of the models, especially backs of models that were only used in one episode, were sometimes left as black & white line art.  That worked really well for us in the Ark series, but for the most part that wasn't jiving with the aesthetics we wanted for the Almanacs.

That's where Javier came in.  He tireless colored quite a few of our models, and did a bang-up job of it too.  In this new book, he did even more for us, designing several additional characters and a few props. 

Now, Mr. Reyes has posted up some of his work over on his deviant art page.  Go on over and see some of what he did, then drop him a note to let him know what you think.  He's got a page of his new designs, and a page of his coloring work. 

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By the way, Bill and I will be heading on over to SDCC tomorrow morning.  If you see a red-faced ginger in an Iron Maiden tee shirt, that's probably him.  We'll see if we can set up a time to sign some of your books over at the IDW booth.