Friday, September 20, 2013

Silly pages. More Than Meets The Eye is awesome.

I hope no one minds the frequency of posts. Anyway, have I mentioned how much I like IDW's More Than Meets The Eye? There's a (supposedly) spoiler-free 3 page preview linked here at Seibertron. But anyway, a silly dialogue re-write.


Of course, I have my own suspicions on what will happen to certain members of the Lost Light crew (like, say, Ultra Magnus). Also, solicits for upcoming issues shows certain individual characters on the covers, so, you know, they apparently live out the big event these issues had been leading to; what a wild ride it's been!

"Dark Cybertron" is the big crossover between both MTMTE and Robots In Disguise, and starts in November with a Dark Cybertron one-shot, and you can pre-order these things at your local comic shop. Your local store can also pre-order a $0.99 priced copy of both MTMTE and RiD #1. So if you missed out, these introductory issues will be a whopping George Washington-bot each. Get them and enjoy some of the best TF comics in its publishing history.

Mayhap I will write about the IDW series, where it started, how it dug itself into some weird holes, and how writers like Shane McCarthy and Mike Costa did their best to get the TF saga to climb out of these holes before, let's face it, James Roberts came to the rescue and gave a ton of depth to the barely-explained-yet-somehow-really-confusing Simon Furman backstory the series started out with.

Mayhap I will.

Oh, Robots In Cahoots #s 5 & 6 soon.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Generations...HOIST! And I interviewed Brian Shearer for Robots With Coffee.

So I mentioned the ROBOTS WITH COFFEE page. Well, BRIAN SHEARER, of whom I've referenced here in the past, did an email q&a with me for RwC. So check it out. It'll be reposted here sometime in the future. Enjoy! I'd rather you hit the like button and comment if you've got a FB account, but if not, go ahead and chime in on the comment section.

Hey, I found Hoist! My pals said they'd look for me, as they found him at the same place I'd check the day before. But now they don't have to. I passed on the FOC Thundercracker from this wave (for now) though I DO like the paint job on Thundercracker as opposed to the Flimsybot (tm) FOC Starscream. So maybe I'll see if someone wants to trade up or something.

Anyway, Hoist. He's like Trailbreaker but green, with a Hoist shaped head, and no "shield." The crane turns into a gun, and it's actually a cool weapon. I know there's 3rd party upgrades to replace one of his (and Trailbreaker's) hands buuuuuuut I'm not too concerned about it. Like the Trailbreaker comic, the one included with this toy is written by James Roberts, the writer behind IDW's More Than Meets The Eye series, and it's really good. Not sure what else to say about this, I'm happy with Trailbreaker so I'm equally happy with Hoist. I don't like the weak, hollow feel to this wave of smaller Generations, I'm not amazed by his or Trailbreaker's vehicle modes, but he's still a good stand in/homage for the G1 and I'm glad this character finally got a figure. So kudos! Just one picture, enjoy. (Whew! So many posts in such a short amount of time.)

Sunday, September 15, 2013

silly page - Transformers 4 and no Sideswipe.


Crashing THE ARK...and, uh, a lesson about shipping books, for some reason.

This ended up being a long one, so I put in a page break. Dare to read a boring tale about low cost shipping options when all I started off to do was tell you about a die-hard fan friendly book that I'm STILL on the fence over recommending.

A few months ago I was surfin' around some TF related blogs and in the back and forth on various archival type sites, I ended up looking at this book, THE COMPLETE ARK. It's by Jim Sorenson and Bill Forster, in that they compiled animation models and various background sketches from the G1 cartoon(s) provided by professionals behind the scenes (most notably Bob Budiansky) and hardcore fans.

It was published by IDW, the current licenseholder to the TF comics. This particular collection is made up of two "complete" books published earlier, the first dedicated to the G1 cartoon and its animated movie, the 2nd dedicated to the various Japanese cartoons that carried on the G1 legacy (only recently released in the US on DVD). It came out in 2010 yet everyone seems to be out of it. When I saw it on Amazon, it was $30 from one of their sellers. Well, I figured why not, and bought it. Like the More Than Meets The Eye series by Dreamwave (not to be confused with the current awesome comics series by IDW), it's hard to find at its cover price. The Dreamwave MTMTE books collected bios (and drawings) of the TF G1 characters as written and drawn by the DW staff, and since G1 characters had been pretty much the same in most versions of the G1 story up until IDW, I figured it was a pretty good reference to have (of which I own the first collection and the comics that make up the 2nd collection).

Anyway, I saw this "Complete Ark," it was under $30, the 1st book was over $100, so why not. I've mentioned before I've been having more fun looking up TF art and tech specs, this should be interesting and who knows if I will get a chance to see this at close to cover price provided I don't see it at a major comics convention (that I'll pay $30 to get into, you know?).

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Robots With Coffee update.

Click on the image below to see the 5th installment of ROBOTS! With COFFEE!

Not much else is going on. If you like Robots With Coffee, visit the Facebook page and hit the like button. You can also follow me on twitter. (I post my RwC pics there too!)


Sunday, September 8, 2013

Kreons, bootlegbots, and a few random thoughts.

I don't have anything new as Generations Hoist has made his way into the my geographic area but I haven't been able to find him. Yet. Patience.

However, I checked Target and they had a box full of the Wave 3 of Kreons. There are numbers on the packages that will tell you which figure is which in the blind packs, so I pulled that up online and pulled out the six packages that corresponded to Ramjet, Thrust, Beachcomber, Huffer, Long Haul, and Sharkticon. These are adorable, of course, Lego-figure sized versions of your favorite TF characters. I never posted any pics of the ones from wave 2 that a friend picked up for me a few months ago. So I took a hasty pic of both wave 2 & 3.

left to right: cute, cute, adorable, huggable, awww, cute, lookitthatone, who wants chocolate?, cute...
It's a hasty pic but the new mancave hasn't been organized or cleaned. I moved recently and I spent a lot of time putting together bookshelves and coffee tables and killing all kinds of bugs, so no time to set up the art table and have space I can photograph toys...just as equally incompetently.

One thing I've noticed is that Target, and maybe they're not alone, has abandoned the Kre-O Transformers kits with a few exceptions, which are the Kreons in blind packs and the combiner kits. I'm not sure what the consensus is regarding the kits. Do TF fans just want the little adorably awesome versions of their favorite TF characters as opposed to the unwieldy non-transforming Kre-O kits? I bought a few kits and eventually I kept all the Kreons and sent the building kits to nephews and friends with kids who love regular Legos. Blind packs are slightly annoying to me though I'm grateful for the printed #s identifying which is which inside, as I only want certain figures from these runs.

Random thoughts and some bootleg-bots after the jump.