Weekly Comic Review ~ Rud Edition
Slowly working my way through the pile. There’s a different stack near the bed this week, and the common theme here is War in Space
The Transformers – I was a little boy in the 80s. This means that I watched the Transformers, and I did so religiously. When I rediscovered them in my late teens, I was ecstatic to find that DreamWave held the rights to produce comics for the ‘Bots and the ‘Cons. I was even happier to find that the writing had aged along with me. The cartoon was fun, but these new comics had deep and rich characters and interesting plots. Unfortunately, through a series of accidents, DreamWave went bankrupt, and my beloved Transformers were lost to the winds.
Until, that is, Hasbro licensed the franchise to IDW Publishing. Furthermore, they hired on the Transformers brainchild Simon Furman, who had been writing TF comics since Marvel was publishing them. If it weren’t for Primus, this guy would be God.
Hooooo-man, is this run good! The whole franchise has been rebooted, so it resembles the G1 universe, but is set in the modern day. The story starts with Infiltration, where we first slowly unveil the fact that an interstellar cold war is going on. It just gets better after that, weaving a rich story through the main story arcs (Infiltration, Escalation, and now Devastation), through mini series (such as Stormbringer and the Megatron Origin), and through Character Spotlights.
If you like space, giant robots, or building-sized dudes who turn into a normal-sized walkman or Walther P38, then you need to read this series.
Next on the agenda: the Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps in The Sinestro War. This run just ended, but it was quite good. It got a little goofy toward the end, with some bullshit about the Emotional Spectrum corresponding suspiciously well with the Visible Light Spectrum, but if Geoff Johns does something good with it, I can let it slide. This is another “all of space is fighting each other” story, but it works pretty well. My only other complaint is that Kyle Rayner gets hosed. Read it to find out how.
Last up: Annihilation. I picked up this title because I was getting tired of Marvel’s eternally crumbling society on Earth. “Maybe there’s something cool going on in space,” I thought. Well, I was half right. There’s cool stuff in space, but it’s still going to hell in a handbasket.
War, followed by war, followed by war. The Kree and Skrulls can never knock it off, Thanos is doing something odd, and now Annihilus has come to conquer the universe with his swarm of an army. One of Annihilus’ first targets is Xandar, home of the Nova Corps. Only one of them survives: Richard Rider of Earth.
This story doesn’t stop being cool, and it follows up well, with Annihilation: Conquest. We see what happens after the war, when almost all stations of power are void. Even if you don’t pick up Annihilation, Conquest will be worth your while.
