Way odd to the very end.

I picked up a few Kreons and Generations Roadbuster. Woo! A full report sometime soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this mashup.

Mort Inkingbot and speculating on MTMTE 32

That's Mort Inkingbot, everyone. He used to draw a syndicated comic strip for various Cybertronian newspapers, mostly with pro-establishment, pro-functionist messages, sometimes veiled and sometimes not veiled all that well.

Just kidding. I made him up.

Anyway, expect some more Lost Light Insider and functionist propaganda gags to be repeated here.

In the meantime, the highly anticipated (and dreaded) More Than Meets The Eye #32 came out this week. I have a few thoughts. Just a few, because #33 will answer the 'what the heck?' Hey, it's after the jump because, you know, SPOILERS. Major goshdarn spoilers.

Lost Light Insider includes this football shaped phone!

I made a few more. Then I blinked and @robotswcoffee had a bunch more followers.

Because:

.@robotswcoffee My god, an *IN-UNIVERSE* MTMTE fanzine. As a 90s TF fanzine addict/contributor this is possibly my favourite thing ever.

— James Roberts (@jroberts332) May 17, 2014

These were ending up on other people's tumblrs, by the way. I can't really do anything because I'm taking images from...well, you get the idea. But they're at least listing RwC as a source. Anyway, -paul

BIG McLARGEHUGE! Oh, and Scoop & The Ammonites.

I promised a review of Scoop and the MiniCons, who came in about a week and a half ago. "I've been busy" is what I'm going to say to the deep empty universe awaiting a "review" of toys.

As usual, the toys come with comics, though I'm not sure what parts of the Dark Cybertron story these are part of. The MiniCons are known in the comics as The Ammonites, a faction of another set of transforming robotic life-forms engaged in their own war, and are not called such on the packaging. But whatever.

The first thing I noticed about the combined form of the MiniCons is that, when you look at the robot from the back, the face of the figure making up the legs of the combined figure is...

...THE COMBINED FIGURE'S BUTT. Granted that piece's arms should be blocking the face, but I'm incredibly immature and will be pointing this out to EVERYONE. The figure was easy to take apart and turn its three components into regular bots. There's very little transformation on that end.

I think the helicopter figure on your right is a ladybot, based on the diamond-ish shape of its head and her high-heeled footware. I do NOT have to point this out to anyone. I have more proof and more to gain that the combined bot's butt is a face.

Never got into the TargetMasters part of the TF lore because the Headmasters were much more interesting and, despite being just as blocky, better designed. G1 figures after the movie weren't based on specific vehicles (other than the Throttlebots?) and so they looked LIKE toys, and the Targetmasters especially looked like toys holding other toys. So other than Cyclonus, here's the first actual Targetmaster redone in Generations mold. The construction vehicle looks pretty good and the transformation is pretty easy. There's not much else to say about that other than that he's holding two implausible weapons (living people who turn into guns, at least in the original G1 world; they're robots in the IDW comics, of course). The weapons can stack on top of each other, which for those of you with a dirty mind...

ANYWAY.

I was at a gathering of local TF collectors, and my pals Til All Are Mine and Collecticon were present, and good times were had. The host, Rick, who organizes Atomic Sketch, gave me this:

It's a KO tiny Fortress Maximus! It falls apart easily! The transformation would only risk further damage and lost pieces! And it's called...

Which makes me think of this wonderful MST3K bit:

TINY WHIRL!

Whoa! Look what I found in the $3 bin at Quake!

$3 because he still has no hands, poor guy.

It's a really tiny WHIRL! No more than four, maybe five inches tall. Adorable. I'm sure MTMTE Whirl would find it adorable.

This is a tiny version of the "Dorvack" figure from Takatoku Toys (i'm looking this up on the TF Wiki, yes.). The only readable word for me (in English) is "JAPAN" and the copyright symbol so I can't tell where it officially comes from. There was also a line called Convertors and it looks like this is "Chopper." (We covered Convertors before when I found that tiny camera dude earlier this year.)

Okay, mystery solved. Isn't looking up stuff WHILE typing up a blog entry fun? It is. That's the kind of writing and editing that will get Transformers Aficionado the Pulitzer it deserves.

That rotor's a little sad. EDIT: The rotor was upside down. I fixed it.

EDIT! For scale, here's Tiny Whirl with...coffee.

IDW's More Than Meets The Eye series - seeds and payoffs.

MAJOR EDIT: I duplicated the "Seeds & Payoff" to its own page. And I added issue #22. All future updates will be on that page. Thanks.

Continuing and concluding with my ranting and praise of MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE!

So here's the meat of what I'm getting at: More Than Meets The Eye is either a comic where some jokes were later turned into plot points because, "Oh yeah, I said THIS about THAT back then, maybe I can squeeze it in" OR James Roberts planted some seeds in what must have been some amazingly descriptive scripts, because artists Alex Milne (and Nick Roche, and many others) put these things right on the page and mind-blown fans have gone back and reread the book several times, only to wonder how on Cybertron they missed it the first time. (It's the latter.)

Transformer comics are not known for their subtlety. Transformers, the brand and the characters, are not known for subtlety. But these moments in the book that you giggle at, or just pass over with your eyeballs while wondering when they're going to address a lurking evil in their midst, pay off out of almost nowhere; Suddenly you GASP because their Darkest Hour is at hand, and what Lights it and saves the day was that gag you found so funny a dozen issues ago.

The plot, again: Rodimus, thinking the empty Matrix is a map, grabs a crew of disillusioned Autobots and heads into space to find the Circle Of Light, a city full of pious religious robots who moved away from Cybertron to live in peace from the war, yet still ready to defend themselves in bad-ass ways. They pick up some old (and not previously-seen) friends along the way, and run into some trouble here and there. It's the journey, not the destination for this book.

You already know from the previous posts that I REALLY like this comic book. After issue reading issue #21, where many threads were tied up (but not all resolved, of course) I have to say I'm really impressed. It's not a perfect book; there are inclusions of characters who happen to have toys being released shortly afterward (mostly in the return of the Spotlight books) and so you have to wonder if some focus had to be diverted from the planned plot to include, say, Metroplex and the Titans every so often. There's also a flashback narrative where one wonders if it was mandated by the corporate property owners to include a story about Optimus Prime, considering that he is currently out of the regular narrative in both ongoing titles (Robots In Disguise being the other)...but what is great that this narrative is in fact a story ABOUT a narrative. And the inclusion of the Titans (Metroplex sized characters, now available at Toys R Us) isn't jarring in the least bit. "Hey everyone, it's POOCHIE, the dog! He's a 1/3rd Fonzarrelli!" You know what I mean.

What follows after a jump: a summary, a few problems I have with the book, and a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF SPOILERS, because I went through page by page and tried to pick out every seed planted and where it pays off, and POSSIBLE seeds for...future issues! This last bit will be only good if you've read the comic.

JOIN ME!

More Than Meets The Eye and how it stands out from other TF comics

Here's another rambler, gushing about the MTMTE series.

I promised a "review" of More Than Meets The Eye. But did I review the series in the LAST post? I just wanted to post a quick update that I was going to write something long and tangenty about the series, and instead I wrote something long and tangently basically praising the series as something special to the Transformers comics and storytelling brand. Because it's a BRAND, and as a BRAND stories about it are going to have limitations. They're going to have editors and copyright holders standing over them saying "no, you can't do that, we have toys to make" and whathaveyou. And that goes for REGULAR superhero comics too, because if you know anything about the history of comic book publishing and the REGULAR content that drives the industry, superhero comics done by committee represent BRANDS just as much as constantly re-booted stories about iconic fictional robots do.