Don't You
(Spoiler free-ish)
SynopsisAll they wanted was an adventure. Now, as worlds turn to dust and every sacred truth is undone, as everything they’ve run from catches up with them and every gruesome future comes to pass.
Only two issues left! Closing a story six years in the making! Don’t miss the B cover by beloved Transformers artist Geoff Senior!
feat. Shinji IkariThis is it. This is the end. Almost, I know. But this is the end. This is the flash before the finale, and everything we've seen in a long series, with stories starting all the way back in the first Chaos seeds reaching some kind of conclusion, before they actually conclude next issue, and attempting some form of closure. Starting with gods and life.
fight! super robot lifeformsA first warning: if you're expecting a big action scene, or even a series of action scenes, how are you still living in denial with Lost Light? There is plenty of action, of course - they're fighting a planet from a planet, one which is also a giant robotic being powered by bigoted spite - but James Roberts' strength is still in the smaller moments between characters. Those, in this issue, abound.
MVPsAnd in that action frame with people stories, then, we have the one, bigger story that no one expected until a couple of issue ago, the one that people were most likely to forget, most likely to get wrung, but that somehow still rang a bell, that somehow still brings a conclusion after a conclusion, even when plans only work in panicked extremis.
...Where previous attempts at balancing heartfelt, passionate dialogue/monologue during action have been admittedly questionable (at least in terms of pacing), this issue seems to have found the better solution - tonally, pacing-wise, structurally - to weigh out the different aspects to telling this type of ending, using strengths and weaknesses alike.
ArtBrendan Cahill returns for the issue, after we last saw him in #22, and whatever he's been doing in the meantime has only made him more powerful. The issue contains some of the most tender and heart-rending moments for pretty much the entirety of the cast present in its pages, and Cahill's art has been able to work all of the right emotions into the motions, the gestures, the silent panels, all while keeping giant Functionist Primus in the peripheral vision of it all.
Take a load of this, tooAnd Joana Lafuente has made sure that the peripheral vision is something no one can ignore, be it explosions, sudden changes in light sources and direction, mood flickering, tone shifting, crucial moments and smaller, tender interactions - the light and colour fit all, snugly, and just right.
it's really hard to spotlight this without spoilersIt's almost impossible to distinguish Curtis and Tom by now, and if you're not in on the joke, please bear with me - but what Long is managing to do with fonts is truly impressive, given the already emotional charge of pretty much everything else in the visual aspect of the book.
All the covers, as usual, can be found in our Vector Sigma Database entry
here, though the one spotlighted in the thumbnail is once more the Geoff Senior / Josh Burcham variant featuring Rung himself, for once taking charge of the situation - almost like Rodimus.
ThoughtsSpoilerish aheadAnd so, where do we stand now? This is the finale, no matter what the next issue decides to conjure up in its denouement, and as an ending it fits everything that the creators have set up from the start - sometimes literally, sometimes thematically - and it will definitely leave an impact on readers and TF lore (here's hoping, at least), for the principles and themes if not the execution.
also, gayest issue everDoes it cancel out my troubles with the series up to now? No, but I don't think anything will. What it does do is sidestep to tell a wider story that no longer focuses on the alleged main characters, while also focusing on those very same characters - from Team Rodimus to Megatron's AntiVocationist League, to the Scavengers and more - in a way that we may have expected after all, and reminding us very much so of the influences, the setting, and the lineage of this type of story, and of Transformers as an icon.
Bonus Tracks:
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