by starfish » Wed May 27, 2020 4:30 pm
I grew up with Marvel U.K., too.
I remember when Ultra Magnus was introduced in “Target: 2006”, as a naive young rookie who had just been created. Yet in Transformers ‘84 #0, Optimus Prime greets Magnus as an “old friend”, pre-Ark launch.
I remember the events of “Man of Iron”, when an Autobot ship crashed in England. The eponymous Man of Iron would periodically leave the ship in order to search for the Ark. Later, a castle was built on the site of the wreck, and one of those many periodic awakenings coincided with an 11th century Saxon battle. Yet in Transformers ‘84 #0, we see the Man of Iron’s ship crash INTO a pre-existing castle, during Saxon times (rather than many years prior).
And now we have a pre-Earth Jetfire, contradicting the events of “The Gift”.
It’s like, Guido Guidi was so meticulous in getting the look and the design of the comic right. John-Paul Bove got the exact combination of Ben-Day dots right to make Soundwave look his classic comic lavender colour. The artists really went that extra mile to make issue zero look and feel like a vintage Transformers comic. Which kinda puts Furman to shame, considering that he’d written a prequel that directly tied into old issues, and he couldn’t be bothered to do the research and actually read them.
So in issue 0, we find out that the Ark mission wasn’t about saving Cybertron at all, but was in fact a ‘clever’ ruse to take out Megatron And his best troops. Which basically lowered the stakes of the entire basis of the original comic. Prime wasn’t about saving a planet from destruction, sacrificing himself for truly cosmic events. No, it was a mere assassination attempt (and an failed one, at that).
But the more you examine Prime’s assassination plan, the less it makes sense. He is essentially sacrificing the entire Ark crew, in order to ensure that Megatron’s crew gets killed, too. What an awful plan! Tactically it’s fine to sacrifice a bishop to take a queen, but Prime’s plan involves wiping out the best soldiers of both factions - essentially sacrificing a queen to take out a queen. How does that possibly move the needle in the Autobots’ favour? Prime’s bizarre plan is actually a worse idea than the original planet-saving origin that it retconned.
And of course, as we saw, Megatron and most of his crew survived, and Cybertron eventually fell to Decepticon warlords in the absence of the elite Autobots - first Trannis and then Straxus, while the remaining Cybertronian Autobots were reduced to scattered pockets of resistance fighters (as per “The Smelting Pool”). Furman might think he’s cleverly subverting the events of the original comics, when really he’s just riding roughshod over established continuity, replacing it with Prime’s really dumb and ineffectual plan! Why does everyone just go along with this?
Look, I really liked ‘To The Death’, it showed that Furman can still be a great writer when he wants to be, and I’m hoping that these new issues can course-correct away from some of the scripting problems of issue #0.
But the whole idea of a prequel is to give the audience a better understanding of the original material, to expand upon what had gone before, to shine a new light on familiar events and characters. Retconning established lore and replacing it with something that’s arguably worse - while admittedly surprising and unexpected - only serves to retroactively cheapen the events of those original comics, rather than enhance them.