THE TRANSFORMERS: COMICS, BOOKS AND MANGA

CLUB AND CONVENTION TRANSFORMERS COMICS

Balancing Act, Part 5
Reviewed by Blackjack

I shall drown the light in darkness.
An action-oriented installment focusing on the two pairs of combatants and how they are direct counterparts of each other, which is rather good. Skyfall and his silly memory mysteries take a backseat, another good thing. The interactions between Ramjet and Vector Prime are well done, with Ramjet having two endgames in plan: Vector Prime saves the universe by balancing it with Unicron’s return, or Nemesis Prime kills Primus and plunges the multiverse into chaos. Ramjet is clearly insane, but the action scenes against Vector Prime are well done. Sentinel and Nemesis, both being brutes with lots of ordnance to lob around, also play off each other well. It’s a nice thing, actually, focusing on the heralds’ individual plans for their comatose gods instead of making a whole apocalyptic thing with multiple universes and shit. And Primus actually screwed things up, which is another fun thing to note, that he is a manipulative bastard. The art wavers a little due to the many colorists, but it still gels pretty well.


Who is Quickslinger? Apparently she is a fan character created by Shawn D. Tessmann (the guy in charge of BotCon’s customization class) inserted as a cameo in the issue, although the art has her black bits coloured green, and her purple-and-red colour scheme is so pale it looks like white-and-orange. There was a contest in BotCon 2006 where fan-created Quickslinger kitbashes could be submitted for judging, but nobody participated.

Once again Sentinel Maximus uses Apelinq’s maces. This time, he also downloads a bunch of miniature Arks (the G1 cartoon circular version) to shoot Nemesis Prime.

Ramjet’s line about ‘order without chaos cannot hold’ actually makes sense in a very roundabout way. In the G1 cartoon, the Armada cartoon and the Armada comic, Unicron never truly dies, while in the G1 comic, both Primus and Unicron dies (this raises the problem of why the multiverse hasn’t croaked yet, but we’ll attribute that, and everything else, to the Unicron Singularity). And at the end of Energon Unicron dies while Primus lives, leading to the imbalance that Ramjet speaks of.

Ramjet at one point mentions Primus’ gambit of burning Unicron in a newborn star, as well as the destruction of six living planets. This is the ending of the Energon cartoon, and establishes that the new sun has mutated into the Unicron Singularity due to Primus’ miscalculation.

I think Primus' spark chamber at the heart of Cybertron is from the Energon cartoon, but I won't bet on it.


Vector Prime’s line “The balance can be restored with Unicron!” is probably either meant to be “without Unicron” or “with Unicron dead”.