Dan Reed (3)Reseñas

Salvage! / Wrecking Havoc!
Already reviewed as part of a different collection here.

The Big Broadcast of 2006 / Space Pirates!
You can read a version of the below that includes illustrations here.

"The Big Broadcast of 2006" was actually a US story (reprinted in Classics, Vol. 4), set in the future era of The Transformers: The Movie. But while the US comic never did anything with the future era other than this story and the movie adaptation, the UK comic had by this point depicted a robust and detailed future history—which was completely contradicted by this tale. UK writer Simon Furman solved this problem by writing a two-page frame to "Big Broadcast" that established it was a story being told by Wreck-Gar, full of lies to mislead his Quintesson interrogators: "Wreck-Gar's whole account is full of absurdities and contradictions." As the Quintessons point out, by this point in the UK continuity, Galvatron, Cyclonus, and Scourge were all in the 1980s, not the future. And besides, the UK continuity was up to 2008, not 2006. It's a clever conceit, though I imagine it will have more impact if I ever read it where it "goes"; this just reprints the two UK pages.

It leads into the next UK future epic, Space Pirates!, one of those future stories that actually doesn't intersect with the present-day timeline. I wasn't really convinced this one held together, to be honest; the maguffin that everyone is chasing after didn't make a ton of sense to me, and the story requires seasoned warriors to make dumb decisions for everything to hang together. I do like a bit of Rodimus angst, but I feel like such angst was done much better in IDW's original continuity two decades later. Now, arguably a lot of Simon Furman epics probably wouldn't make sense if you delved into them, but this one didn't grab me the way some of those others did, so I'm less apt to forgive it its mistakes.

"Ark Duty"
Already reviewed as part of a different collection here.

The Transformers and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

Wait, so you can something and then rebuild it again?

Whut?½

Scourge grows a backbone! The Wreckers get their bums handed to them. What an episode!

Megatron and Galvatron lay the smackdown on all your favourite minor characters. Twintwist! Flywheels! Sandstorm! Barrage!

I really love this one, seeing Autobot City under attack is exciting and dramatic. Poor Beachcomber! But its nice to see that Trailbreaker etc had survived that far!

This is a good 'un! The Quintessons are wonderfully weird characters, and Dan Reed really emphasizes this in his art.

Ultra Magnus fights his way into not fighting and sends a stern message to the universe.

Another great episode, I really like this story. Violent, amoral, and gory, just like real failed states!

Lovely bit of horror pastiche! Great fun.

A bit of an all-time classic, this one. Great art, fun use of horror movie tropes, duocons.

Oh man, Inferno! What a way to go out. But how did he know that there were no Autobots fighting there? It looks like he just plows the shuttle into the battlefield. Pretty awesome though.

Let's have a giant fight with all the Transformers you can think of beating seven barrels out of each other. Ace! But I like that there's a moral here too - that they're too evenly matched and will just wipe each other out. There's a time not to fight! Plus, will Smokescreen and Inferno make it back? How badly hurt is Inferno? He's the man, after all, and after Shockwave last week we can't be so sure that anyone will make it out alive now...½

Yeah, this is pretty good stuff. I like that the Decepticons know a head-the-ball when they see one and are going to destroy the whole mountain to get rid of Galvatron. We all know it wouldn't have worked though.

Great stuff. But man, the Autobots are rubbish. Their bodyguards are crap, their secret ciphers easy to break. No wonder they're always on the back foot.

Pretty classic story, this one. Pity poor Blurr though, he's just the perenniel whipping boy.

I like this one, plenty of drama, plenty of peril, a super villain on the edge of sanity. Great stuff.

Ultra Magnus has a holiday in a bushfire, saves some women, then gets his arse handed to him by Galvatron. Does Galvatron kill those two women though? That's pretty bleak stuff.