With Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #18, James Roberts continues to give us the best Transformers fiction of all time, juggling a massive cast of characters, balancing humor with drama, mystery with action and worldbuilding with character development. Alex Milne continues his dynamic artwork as well, finding a great balance between detailed robotic design and stylized kinetic vibrancy.
Captain Rodimus Prime of the Starship Lost Light is the embodiment of Captain James T. Kirk’s “cowboy diplomacy” if ever there was one (sorry, I’ve just recently watched the Spock episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation). Recently, his right-hand stick-in-the-mud Ultra Magnus was attacked and thought to be dying. Instead, he sat bolt upright like The Undertaker, then walked off and commandeered a shuttle without saying a word. Naturally, Rodimus followed him, and it let the ship through a portal, whereupon they discovered a treasure trove of Cybertronian lore – namely, one of their planet’s missing moons, Luna-1, and about a billion disembodied sparks – aka, souls. Oh, and they’re also now under attack by a horde of random-number spouting robots.
Issue #18 opens with Swerve, a guy we as readers (and no one else within the pages of the book) have loved since the first issue, when he wouldn’t shut up about quests. He runs the bar aboard the ship, but he ain’t no Guinan. Instead, he’s a little dude who fends off an attacking ‘bot with – well, you can see it in the image above. That’s the kind of silly Roberts and Milne can bring.
There’s also Skids, whose introductory issue was where we first saw these Number-Bots, and he’s fighting off a horde of them on his own, and we learn while he’s monologuing to these drones who don’t care how deeply he cares for the Lost Light crew, who took him in when he was a mysterious amnesiac – which he still kinda is. Rodimus himself is trying to outrun a Decepticon pursuer named Lockdown by escaping into the corpse of a gigantic Metrotitan (of which there are an astonishing amount here on Luna-1) while a panicked Tailgate clings to him for dear life, and he does pull off some badass maneuvers to outfox him, but it ain’t enogh. Rodimus and his landing party all get thrown into the pokey, where they meet Chief Justice Tyrest, the primary lawmaker of old Cybertron who hasn’t been seen in ages… and who is about to charge the Autobots with “crimes against creation.” This also happens to be the boss of Ultra Magnus, Duly Appointed Enforcer of The Tyrest Accord, about whom some secrets are revealed by the end of #18.
Then there’s the matter of the Mad Doctor Pharma, who seems to have gone narly Bat-villain cuckoo, and is playing guessing games with his former colleague and friend Ratchet, before revealing that Pharma has beheaded and besparked Ratchet, separating him from his body and making him look at it. Yeah, this is gonna be some freaky torture stuff. Roberts can go as dark as he does light.
If you’d told me that I would find Rodimus Prime to be an extremely fun and engaging character a couple of years ago, I’d have wished you good day, sir, and scoffed about your delusion. After all, this was the guy whose bumbling got Optimus Prime killed and then was “the chosen suckapunk” to replace him back in the ol’ G1 movie. However, Roberts has distilled his hot-rod nature into something highly amusing in its obnoxiousness, and it’s made more palatable because everyone else is aware of how overbearingly cocksure Rodimus is, whether it’s Ultra Magnus lecturing him on recklessness or the rabble taking bets on how soon into any given speech he’ll blurt out his hackneyed catchphrase. Everyone on this ship is as valuable a character as Rodimus, and nothing is about his magic destiny or anything like that, which has been a pitfall of a lot of previous TF fiction. There’s no character in this book I don’t like.
Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye is just good comics. Not good Transformers comics, but good comics. Long may it rule.
