When You Dig a Trench, Guns Appear, Corpses Appear, Nothing Good HappensA Review of
Transformers #35A Few Spoilers Within
The long road through the Cybertronian War, or at least one of them, continues onwards with today's release of
Transformers #35. Several months of build-up and maneuvering have culminated in a showdown at Termagax's house, House. While a single issue alone will never be enough to get me back "in to" this series, it came as a surprise to find plenty to like in the trenches of this series' latest installment.
StoogesMost of "Lord of Misrule: Sea of Rust II" takes place in the same setting as issue 34, though after a brief but pretty enjoyable skirmish at the beginning the action cools. An opportunity to have one very well focused issue, or at least relatively for this series, is cast aside so we can find out what "Skywarp" is up to this month. Some readers will like that, but I found it distracted from what this issue was doing on the whole. My intense dislike of what Brian Ruckley has done with the character and the series' presumable overarching villain probably doesn't help here.
Someone's been to the dentist latelyThat aside, and without giving too much away, what this issue does is set up and begin to execute a big, exciting, fun to read set-piece battle between a bunch of Autobots and a just-as-large group of Decepticons. It provides at least a small amount of payoff for the series' excessive cast, jumping from group to group while
nearly managing to pull off the impressive feat of building up that cast in a positive way as it does so. While I didn't like every development within the battle and found Optimus Prime to be abhorrently misused during it, it was still very exciting and makes this the most entertaining issue of the series in a long while.
He's used better here than in Earthrise, I promiseThe art steals the show here without question, as Anna Malkova shows off every skill she's developed as a Transformers artist in as big a way as could be imagined. There are dozens and dozens of characters in this issue doing dozens of different things while conveying a wide spectrum of emotion and it's hard to pick a spot where things ever get bad, though Sandstorm's teeth are a little weird. David Garcia Cruz and Evan Gauntt provide the colors, and outside of the orange tinted hues of the Sea of Rust looking marvelous there's great lighting work as well. Jake M. Wood's letter work never distracts and some of the effects serve as a welcome compliment to Malkova's transformation sequences. You can't literally hear Sky Lynx or Sixshot transform, but you will and they sound very different. Tremendous stuff.
This section went a bit long so remember that as always, you can find all the cover images and full credits for the issue through our
Vector Sigma Database page for Transformers #35.
Verdict
You're Outta' Time? Transformers #35 could have been another chapter of this series where I frantically looked to push this review off onto another staff member, but the art and key battle sequence provided enough entertainment that I wanted to let you all know about it. There's certainly still a healthy helping of things I really, genuinely disliked, but at least there's cool stuff here to distract from, say, one of the hands-down worst versions of Optimus Prime that has ever existed, which I'm happy to go into on the boards where spoilers can roam more freely.
If you ignore everything but the battle scenes this is a 4.5/5, but on the whole, the issue has some really excellent stuff that's dragged down by its wider circumstances and context. If you've been enjoying the series, ignore my "average" rating for this one and keep that high score in mind instead.
This issue is out today, September 22nd, and you can pick it up at the
Seibertron.com eBay store or at your local shop,
check here to find the closest shop to you.
