To be fair, the Scorponok/Machination plot wasn't added into Escalation at random, as it had already been seeded in Spotlight Ultra Magnus.*,**
* which came out between #2 and #3, so if that scene was before #3 then I'm massively wrong but I don't think it is so please don't go all Buzzfeed on my arse.
** Really so much of IDW's Furmanverse would have been so much simpler if it had just been structured as an ongoing rather than two concurrent titles that people didn't realise were the same story until it was too late. It's a shame that the most sensible reading order (ie publication) is the one thing it's not been collected in.
You Won't BELIEVE How Often Brend Shows Cliffjumper Up!
Though I think 'seeded' is perhaps a bit generous; IIRC, Scorponok's in it and is last seen jumping through a magic door away from Nebulos, with nothing really to say he was on his way to Earth or indeed desperately needed to be pulled into the plot right that minute. Nightbeat turning up is seeded because Prime specifically phoned him up at the end of Spotlight: Nightbeat Or Hyperdrive.
I take the fact that the Machination's headquarters is an exact duplicate of Scorponok's front company on Nebulos to be a hint.
But yeah, they could have gotten away with not dropping "shadowy mystery head" into the plot quite so early on. I think they underestimated how much attention people would be paying so didn't expect us to all realise immediately that "oh it's Scorponok". I mean there's no way the big reveal in Devastation would have played out like it did if they'd credited us with having figured it out.
Massive sidebar: Can you imagine trying to follow all this shit as a new reader who doesn't already know who these characters are and what their general motivations tend to be? ****ing hell. Here's Scorponok, here's Bludgeon, here's Soundwave, here's Sixshot, here's the Reapers (no we don't know either), here's Starscream again, here's Galvatron, here's Jhiaxus, here's a bullet in the ****ing brain. And that's just the bad guys.
Yeh, "new" plot threads was perhaps the wrong choice... It's more that the last issue or two is just a pile-up of Spotlight tie-ins and it's a bit much. If nothing else it builds up the false impression that Devastation's going to be a big super-villain smack down. Scorponok, Shockwave and the Dinobots certainly would have been done better being held in reserve for much later in the Earth arc... Just pulling in Sixshot and having Soundwave & the tapes as a rogue factor would have been enough.
That said, my read-through has only just got up to the end of Escalation and this was pretty much the point I started treating the whole continuity like the Big Looker books, so I could be surprised by something I've forgotten. I'm sure Devastation will pull this off.
I remember when #1 of Devastation came out, the big ****ing "OMG" cliffhanger, the salivation at the promise of the story to come. ****ing hell did that ever limp meekly across a completely different finish line.
My main memory was that the only thing that got Devastated was one of Jazz' arms.
Nile Rodgers wrote:I come from the disco school of music, yeh? If you're going to call a song 'Let's Dance', you gotta make damn sure people dance to it.
Oh, and didn't Sixshot hilariously kill the Battlechargers? Almost forgot about that, which is ironic as it was pretty clear Furman forgot about them before the end of Infiltration.
I think the Battlechargers maybe died too, but I'm not too sure because I don't remember them actually doing anything after the early set pieces of Infiltration. The fact I re-read all this earlier in the year and have already forgotten isn't a good sign.
Sorry. Erm, I mean, whatchoo talkin' about, idiot?
My current re-read is going worse than I remembered it being... the bad stuff comes in a Hell of a lot quicker than I thought; Stormbringer and a couple of the Spotlights (which now I think about it might be the ones not written by Furman) are the only bits that have been the good sort of enjoyable, rather than the fun that comes from picking absolute shit apart.
Ah poor escalation. Terrible in some ways but still not the worst of Furmans IDW stuff or the IDW in general. I've always felt that I liked some of his concepts and overall ideas, but Furman just executed so much so badly.
I really liked the implication that the Decepticon army is small (in so far as stretched over a galaxy) but lethal so they have to get a planets population to wage war (by deception no less) on themselves before moping up the pieces is a great idea and at the time with genuine world fears of terrorist infiltration it could be used as a fantastic mirror of how a country or government deals with an enemy within. Sadly, pretty much all of that is lost by the end of infiltration. You can mock the 'cons standing around out in the open in escalation but compared to the hidden deceptiocn base being a giant purple symbol etched into a mountain...
Also, if you're going to nitpick the prime/ megs fight (which I think mostly holds up really well) than I think "Megatron breathes fire" is far worse than the super shoryuken Prime hits.
Minor defence - Megatrons powering down is explained as the corruption of the super energon from ore-13. I think its even a plot point to get him to over extend his power levels.
Also the battle chargers get taken out by fan-favourites The Reapers. God, they looked awesome from the moment they showed up in Spotlight Sixshot.
And bad as it all is, it trumps AHM, Costa-verse and even parts of Barbers stuff in my view.
I loved the idea of the Infiltration Protocols - it's a really good hard sci-fi idea, and easily the best thing about Infiltration itself. But the way it's rendered here is silly; the idea that revealing an (apparently unique and traceable via satellite) unique energy signal is the only way to wreck a man made oil pipe and that the Decepticons would just hover around it in robot mode while doing so seems to go against the low-key grain. Dare I say that the first Bay film's early sections, with Decepticons that seemingly spend most of their time operating alone, communicating via coded radio and in alt modes wherever possible made a better fist of the idea?
Blitzwing cloaked and taking potshots from tank mode to stir up the Lithatvian forces? Sure. Blitzwing standing around in robot mode while Megatron chats to his FC? Nah.
Personally felt the "Ore-15 is Red Bull" thing was more implied than actually explained; yeh, Prime's words to Jazz, Wheeljack and Hardhead imply it but IIRC that frame is the only one explicictly dealing with it.
The whole arc is just such a desperate, needy attempt to get literally everyone on-side.
I think the problem with the Inflitration protocols is that it would make for a fantastic TV show - slippery alien robots acting to distablize local governments to provoke a war and then reveal themselves at the end - and a brilliant sci-fi comic book, but its a hard sell to the vast majority of TF fans who just want Sunbow Transformers punching each other. I liked the 'tease' of Infiltration and its a shame its not followed through on because its felt the readership hasn't the paitence.
And the Reapers. I'd happily forgotten about them. They were dreadful and fell prey to the problems I found in the Marvel stuff when other aliens were shown - they just looked like some weird b-movie standby - if they weren't funny cute looking animal creatures. Pfft.
I think I thought it at the time, though I didn't say it because I was a lurker not a poster, and I think the general consensus at the time was Furman desperately needed an editor or someone to tell him to rein his meandering in. Lord knows what would have happened if AHM hadn't come along, we could be seeing Sixshot vs The Reapers Part 29 by now
Yeah, Furman did his best work on the old Marvel UK stuff because he had an editor standing over him saying "yeah this is all good and well mate, but we need all these pieces back where they were in two issues time because we've got one of Bob's stories to print".
And again on the Marvel US stuff because he had the looming threat of cancellation a few times, forcing him to wrap things up three times.
You only need to look at Earthforce to see the knots he tied himself in once given the freedom to lay everything out himself.
I do remember a lot of the discussions being based around two things: The pace of his writing and the fact that it was all set-up and no pay-off. Devastation in particular seemed to get trashed (rightfully so) for setting up a massive massive pay off that never, ever came
I think it'd have worked for a film too, certainly for the first one - which makes it a bit of a shame that a similar method was used for a plain old relic quest. A film'd work because you basically have a captive audience for the run time who have no real choice but to stick it out; the '07 film has that sort of confidence, keeping the robot stuff short and sharp for about the first half or maybe more because it knows that the last couple of acts will cover it and send everyone home happy.
As a monthly comic book from a small publisher who needed the title to make money it was a bad call; I think Brend sort-of hits on an acceptable alternative a few posts up - run two concurrent series, one with big robot fights and one with more cerebral sci-fi concepts (say, an ongoing and a Spotlight-style series) - doing that from a continuity POV would be tricky but my instinct would say start Big Title with the war on Earth advanced and use the secondary book as basically a flashback/prequel title.
pandagork wrote:I do remember a lot of the discussions being based around two things: The pace of his writing and the fact that it was all set-up and no pay-off. Devastation in particular seemed to get trashed (rightfully so) for setting up a massive massive pay off that never, ever came
Bluntly I think Furman's often had trouble with conclusions even going waaay back to stuff like Target 2006, it's just that the factors Brend mentioned stopped him getting too far away.
I'd agree that the whole IDW thing wasn't entirely his fault for that reason - as said, there should have been someone saying "Where are you going with this? Do you really need to throw that in now? Why not resolve this before adding three more things?". Which did make it a bit unfair when IDW suddenly turned around and effectively shitcanned the continuity having made presumably no real attempt to try and focus the titles beforehand. You'd certainly hope that a few other heads rolled when they got Bob Budiansky to type up Furman's P45.
IIRC the justification for IDW putting everything out as mini-series was something to do with retailers not being interested in an ongoing because of the fall-out from DW (which apparently changed after readership fell by 60% or whatever...), but it would have been a great excuse to reign Furman in - six-issue trade-friendly arcs with a contained beginning, middle and end, maybe with the odd loose end dangling. But really for both the regular minis and the Spotlights we ended up with the worst of both worlds, largely through simple poor organisation.
The comics industry has changed a lot in the last decade or so, with ongoings in general starting to become an endangered species. The switch to a more "seasonal" model is starting to carry more steam, as a new #1 always sees a huge sales boost even if it is effectively just issue #22 of the same story. Nothing screams "you don't need to have read five years worth of comics" like a big number one.
So I can sort of see why IDW would have been reluctant to market it as an ongoing, taking the mini approach instead (hell, Locke & Key was done as a sequence of minis and that's one of the best books of this century), but the fact is is just didn't work for the story they were telling, especially in conjunction with the one shots as companions.
There's a reason that All Hail Megatron initially presented itself as a completely fresh start, before folding the previous plot in along the way. Okay so it made a complete hash of it, but the basic strategy was sound. Something that was never really the case with anything other than Stormbringer.
Yeh, I get the idea behind six-issue arcs or series on several levels - IDW at the time had no idea what legs the book would have (DW's sales were spiralling to disaster even without all the other shit going on), trade sales are a big part of modern comics, etc. It's just that if you're going to do it that way you should probably make sure the writer understands. The shame of it all is that it isn't actually beyond Furman to write a decent story to that sort of length or discipline; he and/or IDW really, really bottled it.
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