James Roberts swerved us all by not giving us the bloodbath we feared. Instead, Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #21 actually saves a life we feared we were losing,
Roberts has established that he’s not afraid to kill off characters we love – we still shed a tear for Rewind – and every indication was that we were looking at a significant loss of life at the culmination of the first “season” of this series. The nefarious Chief Justice Tyrest had already killed his stalwart enforcer Ultra Magnus, and he’d just flipped the killswitch that was going to kill every Cybertronian that was “constructed cold,” which he believed would be his penance for constructing them cold in the first place by bleeding out Matrix energy to play god. This killswitch effect was spreading throughout the galaxy instantaneously, with far reaching effects that promised to kill many, many characters – maybe even Starscream and Prowl back on Cybertron itself. This was all in addition to poor Tailgate, whose little body was succumbing to incurable cybercrosis, and whose spark was due to die out in a matter of days.
This issue picks up with Tyrest about to achieve his genocidal enlightenment, only to be stopped by our Li’l Tailgate with the spark of a champion, jumping on Tyrest’s head to try and kill the killswitch and free his friends. No dice. However, Ultra Magnus isn’t as dead as we thought – although his secret inner form of Minimus Ambus revealed itself to have an even secreter, innerer form, and he manages to put an end to Tyrest. That still leaves the killswitch effect, which head medical guru Ratchet manages to concoct a counter for, but it involves risking Rodimus’ life in the process. That impending doom spurs Rodimus to come clean about just how bad his leadership has been – even in the face of Magnus telling him everything he did wrong. The darker secret is that he allowed the unstoppable Phase Six Decepticon Overlord to be brought onto his ship – ostensibly for study, but of course he came to life and murdered Rewind, Pipes and several others – simply because Prowl baited him by saying he’d be a scaredy-cat if he didn’t.
Rodimus is often a tool, but Roberts has made us actually like him – in part by showing us that he’s not good at being any kind of “chosen one,” and he screws up as much if not more than we expect him to. Then, he says things like “self-sacrifice is a cheap way out,” and he has to live if he’s going to make amends, and that makes us like him again.
Tailgate manages to save the day a second time, the pacifist First Aid is driven by indignant rage to take the life of the mad doctor Pharma – which shatters him, the reckless maniac Whirl manages to make himself useful, and we close with a strong moment between the emotionally open Tailgate and his reluctant best friend, the emotionally-closed Cyclonus… where those tightly-guarded emotions come to the surface, front and center, as he’s forced to watch Tailgate waste away… then makes a massive gamble to try to save Tailgate at the price of his own spark.
Roberts once again proves why he’s the best Transformers fiction writer ever, because he shows us how deeply these characters can care about each other despite being a genderless species – a nut he cracked back in issue #12 of this series. It’s also impressive that, in a world of comic books where death of heroes is rarely real and is almost a joke at this point, we actually expected that he was going to kill off craploads of beloved characters, and we’re sort of surprised that he didn’t. Pleasantly so. Yeah, nobody thought Starscream was going to die, but a lot of these folks could have.
Alex Milne’s artwork is very kinetic. Sometimes it takes a little bit to parse what you’re looking at, because there’s no human shorthand going on here – they are mostly humanoid characters, but they’re full of wheels and gears and wings and metal and tires that turn into feet, so you’re forced to linger on his panels for a while here and there to figure out what’s actually happening. Milne, however, is remarkably consistent and impressive with making these characters emote and move – there’s an explosive panel of Skids coming to Rung’s rescue, and a simple panel where the normally stoic Cyclonus is actually running to find a cure for Tailgate, and just that revelation alone shows us a level of emotion in him we haven’t seen. There are lots of moody moments that Milne manages to make magnificent.
I say it every month. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye is the best fiction in the history of the franchise. It’s everything I wanted when I was a kid – it takes these awesome concepts and characters, knows what is awesome about them, and makes them into something, well… more, much more than meets the eye.
