Review for IDW Transformers Beast Wars #6

You forgot to count Megatron's ego. That's a clear 5th member of the team.

This is about the cartoon and not the comic, but this is where my fellow BW fans are at so I'm sharing it here.

I just rewatched the finale today, probably the first time in about a decade. And I caught something I never noticed before. In the first episode, during the space fight, Dinobot shouts "Destroy them!" and Megatron refuses to do so right away. And in Nemesis pt 2, the Nemesis has its fusion canon fully charged, target locked on the Ark, and Megatron shouts "Destroy them!" only for Dinobot II to refuse to do so. I can't help wondering if that was a coincidence or an intentional callback.

muddyjoe wrote:I just can't get into this series because the artwork is just so bad... looks worse that coloring book art.

The artist is changing next month if i recall. I never found a problem with the art work to be honest but, each go their own.

So I just got issue 6 and it is probably one of the worst issues to date. Not even for the usual offender being the poorly composed and child-like artwork. This time the writing was just as bad. From IDW 2.0 levels of pointless exposition (comics are a visual medium - SHOW DON'T TELL) to the most monumentally asinine exchange I've read in quite some time. Wherein Optimus Primal explains to Dinobot the origin of HIS OWN NAME

I know now, if this had been out during the Beast Era, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it. This coming from someone who utterly adores Beast Wars. Especially back then, as a kid. I'll give it til the end of the second arc, with the introduction of new characters and obviously better art. If it is still this bad, I'll cancel the subscription and probably give the books to charity.

Prepare to maximize your Wednesday with Transformers: Beast Wars #7, set to arrive from IDW Publishing for your weekly new comic book day. Winston Chan takes up the art duties for a short run beginning in this issue, and you can check out the five-page preview provided by IDW further below in this post to get a taste of that for yourself. The publisher's listing for this issue says:

(W) Erik Burnham (A) Winston Chan (CA) Fico Ossio
"Pod", part one! After their first explosive battle, both the Maximals and Predacons have allowed a lull to refresh and regroup. But when the first protoform pod comes down and a new entrant to the Beast Wars enters the fray, things are going to change in a major way! But whose side is Blackarachnia on?!

Check out the preview below and be sure to pick this issue up tomorrow at your local comic shop, through a licensed digital comics retailer, or via the Seibertron.com eBay store.

IDW's trip to prehistoric Earth or some near-to-that equivalent continues with today's release of Beast Wars #7. The issue begins a new arc called "Pod" and features the first appearance in this comic of Blackarachnia, and that's not a spoiler when she's on the darn cover. Her fictional debut is accompanied by another that's probably the hot topic when it comes to this particular issue, as a new artist takes over for a little while.


I'm personally a big fan of Josh Burcham's art style, but I'm also not blind - it's definitely a style and reading our boards here at Seibertron and elsewhere on the internet will tell you that style is not enjoyed by some fans. For those fans (who are wrong, but that's ok, I'm wrong on the internet a lot too) it may come as good news that issue 7 features Winston Chan as the interior artist, bringing along a change in that aforementioned style concept. Chan's beast modes are stellar, managing to find that careful point between realistic-ish animals and animals that are so large and out-of-scale with one another that they're completely unreal. SidVenBlu (yes, written like that) takes up the color work and brings major consistency with the opening arc of the series that helps make the transition from one artist to another much less jarring than I'd feared.


If there's an area where Chan's art has room for improvement, it's in the characters' robot modes. Something I'm not art-literate enough to describe just looks off about many of the facial expressions, but aside from that, some of the poses the characters are depicted in feel very stiff and artificial. It's worth noting that the action scenes were better than the talking scenes in this regard. Those action scenes are also bolstered by some of Jake M. Wood's best letter work to date - check the image before the one just above (with Dinobot and Optimus Primal from page 2) for an example. Multiple fonts, fun usage of onomatopoeias and nothing in the way of other things makes for a good time.

Art's usually not the first part of my reviews, but it's good to change things up, so this is also where I'll remind Seibertron.com readers that you can find all the cover images and full credits for the issue through our Vector Sigma Database page for Beast Wars #7.


As much as the art's changed and is rightfully the main point of interest in this issue, the plotting has changed very little, and by that I mean the decompressed pace of events. Eric Burnham's writing leaves little to be desired and gets out of the way when it needs to. The characters are further defined and more of each faction's situation is elaborated on. All of that's good to have, but just like with the "Savage Landing" arc, "Pod" is off to a start that makes it feel much like an episode of Beast Wars' first TV season, which is not as much of a compliment as it may sound like to some. If you see the switch in the book's credits where David Mariotte has moved to supervising editor while Jazmine Joyner takes up the mantle as editor and hope for a change to the pacing from that, let me go ahead and give you the bad news - there isn't any. This issue feels like it was plotted out for the trade paperback, just like nearly every issue of this series so far.


Beast Wars #7 continues a story where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The series itself is quite enjoyable, but it's tough to find a single issue that jumps out as better or worse than others. It's strange that comics publishers will judge a book's success based on how many monthly orders it gets from comic shops while simultaneously creating a product that is best enjoyed by those shops' customers when they abstain from the practice of subscribing to boost those monthly numbers as they wait until the collected version is released. You have to wonder when this anachronistic business model will crack, but that's another tangent for another time.

In short, this was another enjoyable issue that works well as part of the series, it's still not something that shines extremely brightly on its own, and fans turned off by the initial art style may find more to like here than in previous issues.



Look out for this issue today, August 25th, where 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.

The art is already leaps and bounds better than the crud in the previous releases. Let's hope this artist can replace whatever hack was employed for the others.

ZeroWolf wrote:

primalxconvoy wrote:The art is already leaps and bounds better than the crud in the previous releases. Let's hope this artist can replace whatever hack was employed for the others.

He's already set to return in November. I liked his art as well, just remember that art is subjective. Plenty of people hated animated for it's art style after all

Oh, and Cyberverse plenty of folk knock on Cyberverse but they missed out on some great stories and characters.

That's a shame that the "artist" it's returning. As for Animated, I liked the show, but the toys were awful. The aesthetic didn't translate into a great toy line. I remember someone telling me that Animated was linked to a female Hasbro employee, or something? She was demoted/let go due to poor Animated toy sales? Can't really validate that though. Cyberverse had a great little (and surprisingly mature) story too. In both cases, they were leaps and bounds better than the main art in this BW series.

And yes, art is subjective and subjectively, I think the regular art for these BW comics was of an extremely poor quality and out of touch with the majority of TF/BW fans.

Depending on where you looked, you got different view points of the art, as D Max pointed out a few pages ago.

The animated toyline was superb and I felt it captured the style brilliantly, look at Deluxe Prowl/ Samurai Prowl for instance, the engineers worked miracles. There was a few duds of course (Voyager Megs) but they were outshone. It was a shame the last few toys never got a wider release.

Not heard of the female employee story

Edit:

Thanks for the clarification Sabrblade!

william-james88 wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

primalxconvoy wrote:I remember someone telling me that Animated was linked to a female Hasbro employee, or something? She was demoted/let go due to poor Animated toy sales? Can't really validate that though.

Complete and utter bull. The people who spearheaded Animated in both toys and fiction were all men, the art design aesthetic stemming from the style of Derrick J. Wyatt.

I think it's a reference to Samanttha Lomow but a bunch of facts are getting twisted.

Could you elaborate? Also, for reference, I'm not suggesting that sex/gender is an issue here.