Power and Glory and Feelings
A Review of Revolutionaries #6
Primarily Spoiler Free, but you might find your own if you're in a bad mood
A real panel from the book that you will actually take seriously. Buckle up for a trip.
A Review of Revolutionaries #6
Primarily Spoiler Free, but you might find your own if you're in a bad mood
A real panel from the book that you will actually take seriously. Buckle up for a trip.
With the yearly mega-event First Strike fast approaching, the book intended to bridge the gap between last year's Revolution and said event hits its sixth installment this week. Originally solicited for a May release, it looks like this series won't quite hit its ultimate eighth issue before First Strike, barring a rapid fire release schedule. After reading Revolutionaries 6, this is an acceptable scenario. Sure, it won't be fun to have plot details spoiled, or other things partially unexplained, but if the seventh and eighth issues of Revolutionaries are anywhere close to as good as this one is then no one's going to care about those other factors.
We now return to The Transformers (feat. Action Force as your backup strip)
While this is an ensemble book, and the ensemble does play around in this issue and do their monthly actioning and adventuring, make no mistake that this issue could also easily be titled Spotlight: Atomic Man. This shouldn't make you turn away if you're a fan of Transformers that doesn't like fun peanut butter in your chocolate. On the contrary, if you fit those qualifications (and even if you don't), Officer Reeses yourself down to the comic shop or over to your digital platform of choice and read this now. The Saturday morning cartoon fun is interlaced by a gripping story of a boy that becomes a hero that becomes a man that becomes lost. In one issue, Atomic Man goes from "one of those Adventure Team guys in the flashbacks in that Revolushunries book" to a fully defined character, and it's hard to put this one down halfway.
"How would G.I. Joe fancy a team-up with M.A.S.K.?"
Matt Trakker and Gloria Baker make the Hasbro Universe "Total Brand Awareness" roster for this one, and they serve their purpose well. Author John Barber shows his chops in making sure things fit together through them, at least in a small degree, by nailing the dynamic that's been built between the two characters in the actual M.A.S.K. series. Add in some interactions between them, Mayday, and Stalker, and you have a nice bit of crossover that helps smooth over the wider narrative of the universe while it's at it.
Seriously though Shark has one purpose and that's it.
They really are just there for fun and to move things along, at least on a high level, because outside of Atomic Man another character absolutely shines in this one, and that's Action Man. Ian Noble continues to be treated more like 007 than A Real American Hero (Imported By Palitoy) and here, it really works. Through a clever twist in one of the Agnes Garbowska drawn "Mikey Powers" scenes, Action Man serves as a linchpin to the issue's plot that takes place through the non-flashback sequences featuring the art and colors of series regulars Fico Ossio and Sebastian Cheng, respectively.
I love parallelograms
The art throughout varies wildly, but this is for very, very good reasons. As mentioned, Ossio's work takes up the "Main" story and while there are a few of his panels that left things to be desired, with Agnes Garbowska (who many fans may know from IDW's My Little Pony series) lending back up pages in the first half of the issue, his style is balanced out into smaller chunks that I personally find more digestible. Eventually, Ron Joseph takes over for these back up pages and provides his style to these in two different but still effective ways, and it has the same net positive impact on the storytelling. One page even plays around with a real Adventure Team toy advertisement from Marvel Comics' Man Thing #20, published in August of 1975 (This information was retrieved from a blog post at www.ferretpress.com. This ad is ten years older than me, I wasn't going to recognize it on my own!)
There are four covers available for this one, including the primary cover by Robert Atkins with colors by Simon Gough that's shown in the thumbnail for this review. As always, you can find the full list of covers, credits, and characters that appear in this issue in our Vector Sigma Database Entry for Revolutionaries #6.
Verdict
Reaganomics!
Reaganomics!
I kind of want to check in on John Barber and make sure he's ok, given the dark and almost brutally melancholic nature of this issue and Optimus Prime #9. However, I also kind of don't because he's on an absolute roll and there'd be fear of disrupting his mojo. Mr. Barber continues here with telling gripping, meaningful stories in this Hasbro Universe that take what could be meaningless monthly serial beats and elevate them through genuine emotion. If pressed, one could definitely find parallels between the "Life of Sideswipe" and the life of Atomic Man presented here which is just incredible.
Seibertron's staff of comic book reviewers has been giving out a great deal of very high scores lately, and I promise you we aren't turning into IGN - the output of the past several weeks has just been that darn good. Pick this one up even if you haven't given Revolutionaries a shot, but be prepared to feel feelings.
. 
and ½ out of
and ½ out of
