Va'al wrote:I agree almost entirely with this. The ending is sad, a new beginning is An Actual Jumping On Point.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this probably
is my jumping
off point.
I finally got a date more or less set for my dissertation defense, and I will probably be formally finished with my PhD at the same time
Unicron #6 hits the shelves. By that time we'll hopefully be moving into our first house, and preparing for our first child (fingers crossed). Basically, the 'life' I've known for the last 13 years is likely/hopefully going to come to an end over the next five months, and that those changes happen to coincide with the demise of a fictional world which has supported me emotionally and morally over the course of that time, seems appropriate somehow.
It may be unfair of me to assume that whatever IDW produces next will be less good than what we've had so far, but I do. Action alone doesn't satisfy me outside of a movie. The romance, politics, and wacky humor that so many people say they hate, and the moral and social issues that have gone with those aspects of the story, have been what's kept me reading this long. I wholly expect that the creative teams will cave to the demands of former readers who promise to come back if they would just make it 'less progressive', but even if they don't sell out, and they do try to stick to the more mature and challenging themes of the current comics, it will take a very long time to rebuild the world and redevelop the characters to the point that they can tackle anything as interesting as what we've seen over the past several years.
And I doubt very much that they would reach that point again, as I imagine that the remarkable longevity of this series won't be reproducible. From here on out, I would expect a reboot every 3 to 5 years, in order to better tie-in with Hasbro's other media and products, and to desperately try to fix whatever they think has most recently caused them to lose readers.
If I were to guess, the Transformers comics post
Unicron will all take place on Cybertron beginning at the outbreak of the war, in order to tie-in with Hasbro's new direction in the toyline. Hasbro's other properties will be published sporadically, with ongoing series launching, dying, and relaunching. They'll all nominally take place in the same continuity, but they will take place millions of years after and light years away from the ongoing
War for Cybertron comics.
When either the
War for Cybertron toy series has burned itself out or Hasbro approaches the 40th anniversary of transformers (whichever comes first), there will be a soft reboot or revamp of the Transformers titles. The publisher will drop the ongoing story-lines, or rush to conclude them. They'll revert all characters' alignment, personality, and motivations to match up with the beginning of the G1 cartoon, and jump forward in time to bring the war to Earth with all of the pieces in the starting positions familiar to nostalgic 40-50 year old readers.
At that point they'll start having more crossovers with properties like
G.I.Joe, but since people complain that the multiple titles are too hard to follow, they'll minimize the interactions between the properties, saving the crossovers for discrete, specially titled story-lines that will have amazingly minimal impact on the plot-lines of the ongoing series. The focus of Transformers will go back to Autobots and Decepticons being "Robots in Disguise" whose conflict on Earth plays out so secretly that even organizations like G.I.Joe and Cobra think they're nothing more than urban legends, which they occasionally make jokes about in their own titles.
And that will get slow, and tedious, and be less-and-less believable as the issues grind past, until they eventually do a major crossover built around a plot like
All Hail Megatron. Unfortunately, because the intercontinuity of the story-lines will have been deliberately downplayed up to that point, people will complain that it felt rushed and contrived, so after a brief trailing off period where the authors struggle to handle the implications of that 'world changing' crossover, either IDW will lose the license, or they'll reboot the whole franchise again.
After that reboots will occur more and more frequently, or there may be no attempt to sustain a multi-title continuity at all, with comics simply being printed to mirror whatever cartoons and movies are on screens at the time.
In the IDW universe, who could be a herald for him, anyway? Maybe the Phase-6ers finally find a good role? I could see Sixshot and Overlord be heralds, with Sixshot being the loyal one and Overlord being the one who tried to doublecross Unicron and steal his power, like Dr. Doom did to Galactus in Secret Wars in order to fight the Beyonder.
.
I think Unicron will have his heralds, but aside from galvy, I think we'll see thunderwing and monstructor back and maybe the big bad from -tion series, nemesis prime under uni's power
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