ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:Another big continuity issue with this series, judging by TFWiki, is that it screws with "Man of Iron" even as it tries to set it up.
Erm, you're thinking of the one-shot "Transformers '84" issue. This spinoff series, "Secrets & Lies", didn't touch upon the stuff from "Man of Iron".
ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:Furman bringing the Wreckers in shouldn't be a surprise - they're his pet unit, and the 2005-2018 IDW comic (which in some ways he seems to have forgot he wasn't writing here) dragged them into the U.S. spotlight.
Right, the Wreckers weren't much of an issue here. If anything, this series shows how they came to be the Wreckers, which is fine since the Wreckers were already a group by the time of "Target: 2006".
With that said, however...
ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:And I'm pretty sure he was trying to better reconcile the US and UK comics, especially since the UK comic - which he was the main writer for and which had 252 more issues - gave several characters a lot more page-time and fleshing-out than the US one did.
Except, that's not what he did in this case. If anything, he
overrode the continuity of the UK comics with this series as, back in the pages of "Target: 2006", he wrote a back-up story called "Cybertron: The Middle Years!" in which he told a summary of events that happened on Cybertron during the 4-million-year time gap between the Ark's crash-landing on Earth and its occuprants awakening in the 80s.
In that story, Furman told of a Decepticon warlord named Trannis who rose to power in Megatron's absence and brought the Autobots to their knees. He was eventually succeeded by Straxus. "Secrets & Lies", however, completely throws all of that out the window, ignoring Trannis entirely to instead put Straxus, Scorponok, and Thunderwing all in power right away.
In his commentary pages, Furman even acts like he's treating the US and UK comics as separate continuities. One such example is when, in two of his commentaries, he says that he included Scourge and Cyclonus in this series because of how they appeared in the old Headmasters mini-series with no backstory for either. But, in his own UK issues, he did give them a backstory that made them the same Scourge and Cyclonus created by Unicron in the future, after they got sent back in time to join up with Scorponok and become Targetmasters on Nebulos.
Yet, in this series, Furman put them on four-million-year-old Cybertron because of the Headmasters mini giving them no backstory, so he chose to actively ignore what he had written before in the UK comics and regard them as separate from the US ones.