Cyberstrike wrote:Sabrblade wrote:...Even though I didn't like the G2 comics.
The Transformers: Generation 2 is Simon Furman's best American
Transformers work. IMHO it ties with
Target: 2006 as his best overall work. It's a dark, brooding, and has plenty of memorable dialogue and humor and it makes the Transformers more of a sci-fi war comic (which is what it should be IMHO). In short it's everything that his
G1 IDW run should have been and wasn't.
See, Furman's G1 stories were rich in plot, character, mythos, and a more epic scale than the Budiansky G1 material. But when Furman shifted into G2, a lot of that was gone. Instead, we get some shallow doom and gloom war story that was dark for no other reason than the for sake of being dark, and which decided to see how many characters it could kill off for cheap dramatic effect instead of letting us explore these characters' personalities and come to like them for who they are (or were). There was no real heart or gravitas in Marvel G2. It was just bland grim and grittiness.
And Jhiaxus was... I'm sorry, but I could not take this guy seriously. Well, let me put it this way. Who does this guy think he is that he can just come in and take the role of villain away from the more prominent, more well established villains? Who was he to take away Megatron's importance as "Series Bad Guy Number 1"? The Cybertronian Empire was so overpowered that it felt like Furman was Godmoding them.
And the Swarm seemed to come completely out of the blue, as though we were expected to just accept it as a credible threat right when we first see it, yet all it did was make this story even more convoluted. And don't even get me started on the rushed cliffhanger ending with the Liege Maximo. Without reading the pseudo-canonical Alignment story, that guy makes little-to-no sense in this s\at all.
I tell ya, the best part of the G2 comics was when, in issue #5, Hot Rod and the others were playing a training exercise/game and actually having some genuine fun during all the moments of dread and dispair. Then the games were canned because they reminded us that the Autobots (and the Transformers comics of the time) weren't allowed to have fun anymore.