inflatable dalek wrote:The Scoop thing suggests Hasbro might at least be a bit more flexible. Perhaps Hoist will randomly decide to paint himself black (using that stealth paint from RID that's been used as the excuse to make Arcee her new toy colours?)? Though some sort of flashbacks/dream sequences would be fine with me.
Flashbacks or the like would be hard to do if Hasbro is still pushing the combiner aspect super-hard, but who knows? It's also entirely possible that they won't bother because he's a late-run line-filler and they'll have moved on to shilling Titan Wars by the time he hits shelves.
But just the fact that it's a possibility going forward is pretty funny. The one time that Roberts actually
means to kill someone off, and first people don't believe it and then Hasbro might undo it anyway to push a soulless repaint.
inflatable dalek wrote:I wonder if the pack-in version will just edit the text to call him Scrapper and remove any references (if there were any?) to him having been an Autobot? Sort of like how the Trailcutter spotlight mucked about with the text so he was never Trailbreaker.
Sure, he doesn't look much like Scrapper, but lack of resemblance to the toys doesn't seem to have stopped the rest of this giant advert.
That's a fair bet, I think. The silhouette is right even if the details are all wrong, so he'd still have the Protectobots beat.
inflatable dalek wrote:The Elita cliffhanger is litterally "ZOMG!!!! LOOK, IT'S THAT CHARACTER LAST SEEN NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO WITH NO PRIOR PRESSENCE IN IDW! If you're not familiar with the TV show you may need to Google". Considering the amount of new readers the comics seem to have been bringing in lately that must have been a head scratcher for a lot of people.
And even if you do know who she is, that context only makes it make less sense. With Chromia and Firestar being Camiens it's strange that she'd be from a different world (let alone evil), since them being a group is literally the only characterization they had pre-IDW (but then Moonracer is apparently on Velocitron so what do I know?) And teaming her up with Obsidian makes even less sense since he already
has a female co-conspirator in Strika. Not to mention that the two of them don't even look like they're from the same species, since she's super-cartoony while he (if I remember right) was drawn reasonably BM-accurate.
A ship full of Vehicons actually would have been a lot more intriguing, though I suppose the ship sailed on
that when they randomly tossed Tankor into Dark Cybertron. It's a shame that they didn't think through their long-term plans more thoroughly, because he, Rattrap, Rhinox, Sky-Byte and Waspinator could have been used to great effect as a lead-in to exploring the colonies if they'd actually known they were going to
do that when they first had them show up. Instead some of the most popular non-G1 characters are already hanging around, dampening the impact of what really should have been a huge, universe-expanding moment for the IDWverse.
inflatable dalek wrote:I mean, it's the clunkiest moment in that series, but at least the similar arrival of Impactor at the end of the first issue of Wreckers is slightly set up for people who haven't read Marvel UK with the mention of him and that he means something significant to Springer a few pages earlier.
That was foreshadowed well, though, and I didn't even think it was particularly clunky. Everything you needed to know about Impactor was right there on the page, so when he showed up even a newbie reader knew why it was a big deal. Whereas Elita is eye-roll-worthy grimdark nonsense if you don't know who she is, or a complete non-sequitur if for those of us who know that her entire personality is "Optmus's girlfriend".
inflatable dalek wrote:Maybe rather than a physical comic (which seems to need to be ready months in advance of when the "Regular" comic has to be signed off on) a code for a digital download that would only become available as the normal copy did? That'd probably be more down with the kids as well.
That would be a great idea, actually. It would probably cost Hasbro less,
and avoid the embarrassing problems that some of the Dark Cybertron pack-in issues had. Plus it would let them reach a wider audience, at least in theory, by including the download codes with the international figures and not just the US-market ones.