Optimus Prime is my boy. No question of it, for men my age, Optimus Prime is one of the first ultimate bad-asses you can remember, and he made an impression. Men (and not a few women) my age will appreciate the sheer joy of finding out that Hasbro had decided to create its own comic universe. Transformers, G.I.Joe, M.A.S.K. etc all existing in the same world and interacting with each other would have made 9-year-old RCR very happy indeed. And yes, that is a hint to check them out, IDW are turning out some great stuff featuring characters that will hit your nostalgia chord, hard.
This issue, however, isn't the strongest thing they have done, and I decided to review it because it perfectly frames my main gripe with this book: it doesn't need to be called Optimus Prime, and it hasn't justified that title for a while now. Prime is barely in this comic, and the focus has been moving further and further away from him for the last couple of issues. I'm all for fleshing out (can I say flesh when we're talking about robots? Is that insensitive? Probably. Ah well) the other characters in a story, but this book might as well be renamed Transformers at this point. It would still be good, that would just be more honest. Is my adoration for the title character clouding my judgment? Probably. But I won't be alone in that, Optimus is hugely popular and many people, like me, will have tuned into this comic because of the title and, consequently, the advertised main character.
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| Red, white, and very hard to find - presenting, Optimus Waldo |
That said, if you can get past that, this issue has a very good and quite touching story, presented by art from Kei Zama and Josh Burcham that really recaptures the feel of the later issues of the original Marvel TF run, that continued into the early 90s. The book is set in a period after the Autobot-Decepticon war that dominated most of the Transformers material published at their most popular period, and shows the Cybertronians trying to figure out what to do with themselves now that they have stopped fighting. There has been some pretty decent world-building done around this idea, and it's worth reading the series from the start to appreciate this. This issue focuses on the Autobot brothers Sideswipe and Sunstreaker, and at its core, is a very good story about siblings and how they care for each other even when they hate each others guts. You might shed a tear, and I wouldn't blame you if you did.
So I'm unsure how to score this issue. On one hand, it is a good story with good art, and I liked it. That should be enough to recommend it. But on the other hand, it's supposed to be Prime's book and this issue patently isn't; I picked this up because I was looking forward to seeing a story that got into Prime's head and showed us more of him than the noble figurehead of strength and courage that everyone sees him to be. This series has delivered on that, no question, but the last few issues have focused very heavily on the world around Prime and less on how he relates to it, and this issue pressed that home by veering very far from the path indeed.
3 / 5
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