Iacon's Last Stand

This blog, and indeed much of my work, wouldn't be possible without the help of talented collaborators.  One such person is Javier O. Reyes, who did much additional coloring for both AllSpark Almanacs.  The other day, he sent me a new original piece and I wanted to share it with you, the readers.  He calls it Iacon's Last Stand.  Here's what he has to say about it:

This is what happens when you crave a game but don't have anywhere to play it. This piece was inspired by the game Transformers: War for Cybertron. I tried to achieve quite a couple of things, especially in the colouring. I really like how this one turned out.

If you'd like to see it in glorious high-resolution, head on over to Javier's Deviant Art page.  

Review: War of the Worlds, the series ep 31

The thirty-first episode of War of the Worlds, the series, is titled Night Moves.  Following its usual formula of parallel story telling, both the aliens and the humans are running low on food.  Suzanne takes Debi to the countryside to live with Rebecca Owen, her mother, Debi's grandmother.  There, they find that the aliens have done the same thing, taking over the farm and using it to incubate alien plants to harvest for food under the guise of working for the Department of Agriculture.  Much alien carnage follows, though sadly Mrs. Owen perishes in the crossfire.  Suzanne and Debi go back to the city, realizing that there's pretty much nowhere to run from the aliens.  The aliens, in turn, find the loss of one farm acceptable; they've got 10 more, with an additional 20 under consideration.

The Good: This is a well paced, well acted, logical adventure with a lot of action.  All around, the quality was quite high.  We even got a nice explosion when Kincaid chucked a grenade at some aliens. 

The humans get some good characterization this time out.  When Debi wonders why things always have to change, Kincaid replys that they don't.  It's such a naive view for such a worldly character to take.  He also characterizes her purportedly permenant move as "getting out of here for a while."  He may be tough and world-weary, but he's very immature in some ways.    I also like the drunken brawl that Harrison and John get into in a strip club.  It seems very natural for some healthy male bonding, now that the girls have gone away.

The healthy male bonding through conflict, by the way, is immediately followed up with an ugly physical confrontation between Suzanne and Rebecca, drawing a sharp contrast. Violence is also used well earlier on in the episode, when Debi tackles and then starts kicking a food thief.  The city is certainly making her vicious!  The scene that lead up to Debi's confrontation with the thief was rather fun too, with the barter economy of "Almost Tomorrow" explored.  Harrison wound up trading a pair of boots and a nice knife for some apples.

The alien interaction, too, is mostly terrific, though this is no great surprise.  Forest and Disher continue to have delightful tension between them.  I'm thinking in particular of a scene when Malzor asks her when new food will be available, and she dodges the question by talking about her experiments.  He's too shrewd for her, though, picking up on the ploy.  Richings' Ardix, too, gets in a juicy line here or there, especially when he confronts Suzanne's mother.  "Mrs. Owen.  I'm glad you could join us."  It looks so flat in print, but the menace just drips off his tongue!

Well, what appears to be coincidence turns out to be not so much.  Suzanne's family farm being targeted would be a bit much, but if it's just one of eleven...

The Bad: That said, eleven farms, each one of which has some three or four guards, means around 35 aliens devoted to the food-raising operation.  Since it seems like Malzor's forces number, at most, a couple of hundred, this seems like quite a lot.

In the aforementioned strip club, we meet a new recurring character; Belinda Metz's Scoggs.  She's a stripper-hacker.  Though I like recurring characters, this seems like pandering to me.  That said, it also seems somewhat ahead of its time in a way, juxtaposing her physical vulnerability and exhibitionism with a big juicy brain.

Paul Fox, the main alien, seems way too human.  He seems to have genuine psychological insight into the relationship between Suzanne and Rebecca, and exhibits none of the alien's characteristic awkwardness.

Alien plants grow awfully quickly!  They seem to have set up the greenhouse and grown a garden in about two days.  More time passing wouldn't have been a bad thing. 

The Ugly: Right at the beginning of the episode, a starving alien made the mistake of ingesting some human food.  He boiled, then popped.  Malzor's reaction to this was fantastic, by the way.  To Mana, he quipped that this saves her the need for an experiment.  Cold, Malzor, very cold!

Overall, a surprisingly strong episode.  Maybe getting out of the city gave the writers a bit more freedom; it certainly feels like a breath of fresh air after the gritty urban stories we've been getting.  It also expands the world, showing that really the countryside isn't much better than the cities.

War of the Worlds: The Final Season, will be out on DVD this October and is available for preorder now.

Review: Marvel G1 #64: Deadly Obsession

Deadly Obsession is the sixty-forth issue of the US G1 Marvel Comics run of Transformers, and the third chapter of the Matrix Quest.  It was written, as always, by Simon Furman.  Pencils are by José Delbo, with inks by Dan Reed (along with Al Williamson for the first four pages.)  Massara and Yomtov provide lettering and coloring.  The cover is by Ian Akin.

The cover is very comic-booky.  Longtooth stands on a ship, spear in hand, as the tail of a techno-organic whale splashes away from him.  They're block-colored, which actually makes them stand out fairly dramatically from he background.  In two circles on the right hand side, Longtooth's fellow Autobot Pretenders look on in shock.  The cover narration explains the action: to save Longtooth from himself... and a race from extinction... his fellow Autobots may just have to kill him!  I think the Longtooth cover would have worked well enough without the words or his Autobot brethren.  With them, the whole thing seems a bit too busy.  The shame is, I rather like both Longtooth and the whale (technically a Klud) in this rendering.

Once we move into the issue, we're confronted with an odd morass of flashbacks.  We open well enough, with a one-legged Longtooth hunting the whale-like Klud, overlaid with Melvillian narration, beautifully rendered by Massara as a scroll.  "Call me Longthooth..." perfectly sets the tone of what is to follow.

Before he can pull the trigger, we slip to a point a few minutes earlier in the story, where we see Pincher and Doubleheader zipping along the surface of one of Pequod's mercury seas in their modified shuttle craft.  Their goal is to save Longtooth from himself, we find, before they shift into a nested flashback sequence where they start with some exposition about the Matrix Quest and go on to explain the interest in the Klud in the first place.  This race, long thought extinct, seems to have made a comeback, and the Autobots suspect Matrix involvement. The narrative structure is clumsy, though, with a flashback within a flashback, and is therefor more confusing than it had to be.  One can certainly follow along, but it seems like a long way to go to open on the image and the phrase that Simon chose to go with. 

Back in the present, both the Autobots and the Decepticons act to safeguard the Klud from Longtooth.  Thunderwing wants to mindlink with the beast to find out where it encountered the Matrix, the Autobots just want to save Longtooth's spark.  Echoing the theme of obsession that Longtooth exhibits, Thunderwing too seems to be going over the edge, though in his case it's with Matrix-fever.  His backhanding of Ruckus is rather nice.


The Autobots show up in time to save Longtooth from the 'Cons, though not before Longtooth is dumped into the drink.  We go to the rest of the flashback, where we see Longtooth loose his leg to the beast in the course of their investigation.  This, combined with the vision of the creature sends him over the edge. Again, there's not much reason to have this part of the story be in the middle, rather than the beginning, but at least the artwork is especially gorgeous.  (More on that later.)

All that's left is the shouting.  Needlenose and Windsweeper engage the Autobots, while Thunderwing learns what he can from the beast.  It's enough; he's to go to the third moon of the fourth planet, VsQs, where the Matrix awaits!  Pincher convinces Longtooth that it's his sacred duty to allow the Klud to live, though he has to leave Doubleheader all alone in the sky to do so.  Sadly for the Decepticons, they're unable to exploit this vulnerability due to Thunderwing's own deadly obsession; he yanks their leash and they abandon this briny world.  Pincher doesn't see it as a defeat, though the Decepticons apparently got what they wanted.  In his mind, the real victory was Longtooth's choice. The climax feels rushed and somewhat perfunctory.  One or two more pages might have helped.  I'd posit that a more linear plot might have given Furman some extra room to play with.  It also hurts that we never really see Longtooth make his choice, or indeed the aftermath of that choice.  For a story ostensibly about him, this seems like a big oversight.

Overall, a somewhat odd middle chapter.  After the strong start the Matrix Quest got itself off to, I'm finding myself less and less interested.  The genre-straddling narration seems to divide rather than unify the five-part story.  It almost seems self-indulgent.  Keep in mind, Furman hasn't been on the book all that long at this point.  This is only his ninth issue in the US, so it seems odd that so soon into his run he'd shift the book into this sort of experimental phase.  (As it turns out, I needn't worry; from issue 65 on he'll return to more traditional comic-book storytelling.)  It's not a bad story, it just seems like there's a bit too much going on.  On the plus side, unlike last issue it seems like the story is legitimately advancing now.  We know where the Matrix is, and we have two whole issues to go.

The art of the issue is a bit mixed.  Reed's organic inking and Delbo's mechanical drawings don't always mesh well.  However, there is an absolutely gorgeous splash page that's well worth the price of admission all by itself.  It's a BEAUTIFUL piece of Delbo / Reed / Yomtov / Furman / Massara collaboration, absolutely gorgeous.  The colors, the inks, the pencil, the prose, the lettering... this one page is what this whole book was about.    

Next issue, we're promised Bumblebee, Jazz and Grimlock, along with Thunderwing's Decepticons, in an all-out war with the DARK CREATION.  That sounds fairly exciting.  Deadly Obsession is available in IDW Publishing's Classic Transformers, Vol. 5, at Amazon.com.

War of the Worlds, Season Two, coming out on DVD!

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.   War of the Worlds: The Final Season , is to be released in DVD format.  It'll be out in October, and is available for pre-order now. 

I've been reviewing them, episode by episode, on the blog.  I'm still relatively early in the season.  I think I have to say that it doesn't deserve the horrible reputation it has.  Its biggest sin is deviating from the format of season one, but it still manages to tell some interesting stories, many of which really couldn't have happened with the old format.  That said, neither season one nor season two can really properly be considered good.  Interesting, sure.  Campy fun, especially season one, yeah.  But they're not actually quality.  I'm going to be picking up season two, but I'd really only recommend that you the reader do so if you've already got some kind of nostalgia connection to the series.

The Ark Addendum - The Destron Base of Masterforce (part 1)

Is it that time already?  Yup, it's Tuesday, and that means that it's time for another edition of The Ark Addendum.  This week I thought I'd expand out the models of the Destron base, as used in Masterforce.  In  Transformers: The Complete Ark (order it today!) , page 353, I included a one-pager on the Destron base.  This was also in The Ark II, though I don't have the page number handy.  That shows a map of the base, and some exterior shots.  What I sadly didn't have room for was extensive close-ups of several of the rooms in the base.  If only I had some kind of forum with which to share these models...

Wait a moment! I do!

This will be the first of several close-ups of the Destron's underwater base.  I don't want to repeat the external and map shots of the base that I used in the book, so you might want to flip open your Complete Ark or Ark II for reference.  These pages work best in tandem with the published page of the Destron base.  (What's that you say? You don't have the book? For shame!  Get thee to an Amazon noweth!)

Once again, I find it fascinating how organic and natural everything about the Destron base is.  The roof of the base is full of rocky crags, and the openings looks like some kind of ominous orifice, ready to swallow you whole.

Deviations from the Norm

It's that time again; my esteemed colleague Bill Forster has updated his Deviant Art gallery with yet more of his original artwork from  The AllSpark Almanac II (order it today!) . 

This time around, he's uploaded our Reverse-Pretender alter-egos, Octus and Megadeath, some heads from the Great War like Moonradar and Gigatron (a.k.a. RID Megatron, Animated style), some Maccadam's heads like the adorable Clipper, and more.

I think my favorite might be Skids.  While, obviously, it was movie-style Skids that inspired the design, the idea that he'd be infested with brain parasites came from G1 Skids, where he spent well over 100 UK issues in limbo after Galvatron time-displaced him there.  I thought it funny to include this element, but with the much uglier RotF Skids.

Swing by, let Bill know what you think of his work!

Review: Marvel G1 #63: Kings of the Wild Frontier.

Kings of the Wild Frontier. is the sixty-third issue of the US G1 Marvel Comics run of Transformers.  Yes, there's a period in the title.  No, I don't really know why.  Furman stays on as the writer, and indeed will do so through the end of the run, and for all of the G2 run.  In fact, the only stories I'll be reviewing in this series not by the esteemed Simon Furman are Larry Hama's G.I. Joe issues guest starring Megatron.  José Delbo returns to penciling duties, with David Hunt as inker.  Jim Massara and Nel Yomtov remain as letterer and colorist, respectively. Ian Akin, who had done inks on many previous issues, does the cover. 

Sadly, it's not a great cover.  Thunderwing and his Decepticons stand amid the backdrop of a old west-style town.  "Ah've come fer mah MATRIX!" he proclaims, rather amusingly.  The idea is great, but the exection is lacking.  Thunderwing has some kind of bizarre contrapposto going on, and his gun is off-balanced to his fist.  There's a strange off-model Decepticon symbol floating above Needlenose, and there are serious perspective issues.  Jim Massara, though, does some amazing stuff with the logo.  It looks fantastic.  The cover gets the job done, just not very well.  (EDIT: That's a branding iron - I totally didn't get that, thanks to a coloring flub and the incorrect perspective on the symbol.)

Inside the book, we open on a lovely sight, the Autobots coming in out of the sun with sand sweeping by.  Furman cleverly juxtaposes a bombastic, western-style narration with deliberately pedestrian dialogue for the characters.  To wit: Narration: "They came with purpose! They came on a mission! They came with dual phase concussion blasters on their hips!"  Override: "Nng.  Got sand in my optical sensors!"  Funny stuff.

The comedy ends soon enough, when some  rapscallions nearly bowl the Autobots over in their pursuit of a harmless-looking alien child.  Wearily, the Autobots spring to the rescue of the child, ignoring some subtle warning signs that there may be more than meets the eye going on here.  Nevertheless, they drive off the lizard-riding banditos and are soon enjoying the rather insistent hospitality of the family.  Furman does a good job making us believe that the Autobots would pick this fight, while planting little textual and visual clues that there's some kind of deception going on here. 

Up in space, the Decepticons approach Cheyne, the western world, while interrogating Hosehead, Nightbeat and Siren.  I love the visual of the interrogation chamber, and Thunderwing's status as a majorly cool Decepticon leader continues to grow. 

 Planetside, things keep getting weirder in the little alien homestead.  Every time the Autobots try to leave, they're gently but firmly rebuked.  Soon they're hoeing away on the farm, wondering what it was that seemed so important that they've forgotten.  Ironically, it's Thunderwing who saves Dogfight from his raptured statue.  The Decepticon leader and his posse show up and question Dogfight while he's escorting the seemingly docile alien around town.  Dogfight thinks that Thunderwing his here for the alien, prompting Thunderwing to conclude that the Autobot is under mental control.  The cruel Decepticon abandons the Autobot to his fate, though fortunately the distraction has given the townsfolk time to drive off the alien.  Dogfight realizes he's been befuddled and goes to rescue his fellows.  After Thunderwing's surprise introduction at the end of last issue, this confrontation is a little unsatisfying.  True, the real climax of the book is yet to come, but he almost can't be bothered with the Autobot.  It works for the character quite well, but it doesn't service the story  as well as it might have.

In the climax, the aliens reveal themselves to be psychic vampires who have molded the Autobots into passive food sources.  They're far less friendly looking in their true forms, with tentacled mouths and huge eyes.  The Autobots kill them off, which is something we don't often see in the G1 comic, though the one death that occurs on-screen is really initiated by the alien firing a bent weapon.  They wax philisophical for a moment, lamenting having their brief peaceful interlude snatched away, though it never quite rings true.   

I see what Furman was going for, but I don't think he quite achieves it.   He doesn't quite make their life on the farm idyllic enough for their sacrifice of it to have the resonance that he wants.  It's also clear that the Matrix Quest is something of an excuse for Furman to play with different genres of storytelling; last time it was detective novels, this time it's the western.  It's an interesting experiment, but it sort of undercuts the idea of this being a mini-series within the main series.  The Matrix hardly seems to be Germain to the plot here at all.  Overall, a somewhat weak issue, especially following last month's much stronger offering.

Next issue, we learn that Longtooth, Doubleheader and Pincher are facing the last of the techno-organic whales in DEADLY OBSESSION!, which sounds Moby Dickish.  We'll have to see how it turns out.  Kings of the Wild Frontier is available in IDW Publishing's Classic Transformers, Vol. 5 at Amazon.com.