THE TRANSFORMERS: COMICS, BOOKS AND MANGA

CLUB AND CONVENTION TRANSFORMERS COMICS

The Razor's Edge
Reviewed by Blackjack

The prime example of a bad fan fiction usually written by people who have writing skills, but no idea how to write a Transformers story. I myself am guilty of similar stories during my early days as a fan: lots of uninteresting generic fanmade characters, focusing on a character and how awesome he/she is without giving out any characterization, more on what is going on instead of who the characters are, inconsistent power on terms of characters, just ‘cool’ scenes, a convulted backstory for a preexisting character… in short, it’s one of the most painful forty pages I’ve ever read. Wing Saber, Crossblades and Stiletto are completely interchangeable, and really there aren’t any memorable features about them. The villains are plastic nobodies as well, and really the only interesting thing is the conversation between the Tripredacus council. Wing Saber is supposed to be Airazor? Pfft, if I wasn’t told this beforehand, I wouldn’t have put together two and two. It’s probably the fault of the already generic Airazor, but Wing Saber is even blander than Airazor if it’s possible. The plot is pretty basic and predictable. Terrible pacing… why didn’t the Predacons hunt down the Maximals? There’s also numerous instances of Wing Saber or Crossblades or Stiletto taking out twenty Predacons in one go that you wonder why they even bother with the stealth stuff and shit. And then… barmaids? S&M? What the eff. Using a Megatron exosuit, being unstoppable as the plot demands… Utterly forgettable… and the epilogue makes no sense at all out of context.


This story takes place in Fun Publication’s version of the timeline between G1 and Beast Wars, prior to ‘Descent into Evil’ and ‘Dawn of Future’s Past’, since Flamewar would die in the former and Wing Saber-Airazor would appear in the latter. The Chromia 10, Wing Saber’s spaceship, also will appear in ‘Dawn of Future’s Past’.

The epilogue makes no sense without the prologue, which was published separately in #14 of the Collector’s Club magazine. I have yet to read it, and probably never will.

Steelgrave’s name and description are based on Slaughter Steelgrave, the leader of the evil Destructors in the 1980s Tomy toyline Starriors. Bolar, Sawtooth and Deadeye are likewise members of the Destructors faction. The first two even had descriptions matching the toys.

Steelgrave says ‘cries and screams are music to my ears’, G1 Soundwave’s motto.

Crossblades is a Autobot weapons nut, and she uses reproductions of Starscream’s null ray, Springer’s cyclone cannon, Cliffjumper’s glass gas, an upgraded Hound’s holographic gun, Air Raid’s torque rifle, Wheeljack’s gyro disrupter and fairly generic weapons like a cluster bomb cannon and a plasma gun.

According to several characters, new Transformers are created (given Sparks) in secret Matrix Facilities, or Pit Facilities for Predacons. Protoforms is a new way of building Transformer bodies, the ‘classic’ way is via factories.

The Autobots and Decepticons still exist, but are mostly inactive. Which really doesn’t make sense that they’ll retire.

At one point the Tripredacus Council mention the ‘satellite’, a Predacon outpost that made its appearance in the Beast Wars episode ‘the Agenda’.

Cybertronix, the font used in the Beast Wars cartoon for Cybertronian symbols, is mentioned.

In the art, ‘Megatron’ is based directly after his Masterpiece toy instead of his G1 character model.

The one on one combat, whose loser has to leave the planet, was first seen in the G1 episode ‘Heavy Metal War’.

Flareup’s disguise is described several times as an Exo-Suit, a term used to describe the humans’ exo-suits in the third season of the cartoon.

The drones’ description imply that they are based on Beast Machines Scavenger.


Stiletto is often misspelt as Stileto, twice on page 8 alone.

On page 8 ‘Predacons’ is misspelt as ‘Predcons’.

Page 19 has a ‘>’ which popped out of nowhere.

Really, with Wing Saber and Crossblades being established as able to take out entire squadrons single-handedly, it’s hard to see them afraid against a bunch of drones.

Why didn’t the Predacons hunt down Wing Saber’s group? They outnumber them. Or at least Flamewar-Megatron? No, really, why? And why didn’t they kill or capture Steelgrave and the initial batch of Predacons?