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TRANSFORMERS: GENERATION 1 #1
Highly Recommended (9/10)
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Dreamwave Productions
Writer: Chris Sarracini
Pencils: Pat Lee
Inks: Rob Armstrong
Backgrounds: Edwin Garcia
Colors: TheRealIt!
Letters: Dreamer Design
Editor: Roger Lee
Price: $2.95 US ($5.95 US foil cover) |
I'll be damned.
Sure, I watched the Transformers cartoon when I was a kid. Even had a few of the toys, but I had no great affectation for the characters, no nostalgic thoughts about them. So I'm not representative of this book's target audience... at least, not what I thought was the target audience. Basically, I figured the Dreamwave folks would do the same thing the Devil's Due crew did with G.I.Joe at Image Comics: dust off a concept high in nostalgia and basically tell the same kinds of stories that adult fans remembered from their youth.
Such is not the case with Transformers: Generation 1, though. Sure, this book will appeal to the grown-up reader who cherished the Autobots and Decepticons during his childhood, but it's not just the reader that's grown up. There's a darker edge to this incarnation of Optimus Prime and company. This is Transformers as conspiracy-theory book, and it's far more interesting than I ever would have expected.
It's been three years since the Transformers and a human contingent were slain when the Ark II -- a spacecraft header for Cybertron -- blew up in the skies over the Earth, and Spike Witwicky has gone on with his life. He's approached by a general heading up a special new war division for the United States, and he reveals that one of the Transformers, long believed decimated, has been sighted, and he's not the only one.
Lee's art on this book is tremendous. His richly textured manga style adds greater depth to characters I remember as being simply rendered. Here, the Transformers leap off the page; the book almost looks as though it was rendered in 3-D. The colors reinforce that stunning sense of realism.
I'm no expert on Transformers continuity, but it certainly seems as though the creators have built on what came before. Mind you, that doesn't mean the book is inaccessible to the uninitiated. Sarracini instills a sense of history and context into the script, but he doesn't rely on past stories as a crutch. This is a fresh start.
Sure, the parallels in this book are pretty basic, but it's the tense tone established by both the dialogue and the art that make the plot seem more grave and intriguing in tone. There's a mature tone to the book; this is not something that's aimed at kids.
Email Don MacPherson comments about this review, or discuss it on the Fourth Rail message board.
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