WinkWonk and the Cling Clongs - A TF Thread

I'll probably end up throwing another sketch layer on top of this one just to work out all the stupid, silly details, because these are two of the designs I find most complicated (Fortress Maximus because he's so big and has so many bits, and Overlord because he has a very distinctive Look), but I'm definitely going to make an effort to just say FUCK IT and blast ahead with a looser, less particular style. I did one picture where I was really good about getting all the detailing juuuuuuust right (and then immediately overlaid that with lots and lots of damage, goodbye to my beautiful original work :') ), but it just takes... so long.... I know I'm still in the middle of the idw-style learning curve, but I'm so used to being able to sketch out humans fast and fudge the curves, and my normal shortcuts don't work in this fandom XD I'm working on it though! Soon! And in the meantime, I've figured out how to do this comic for minimal pain. My day got eaten by cross-stitch, but tomorrow I'm either doing art or fic for SURE.

Yes!! That's him! I wanted to try to dig up one of the pictures I've seen of him in silly t-shirts, like with his guns busting through the fabric, or shirts that say 'sex machine,' but I am striking out :C But I do have this beautiful thing!

Ahahaha, don't worry, I've done the exact same thing! There's a character called Sixshot, because he has six modes, and I was so confused, because I kept trying to count them and coming up short (wiki alt mode cheat: jet, tank, armored car, beast, gun), and I was like... I'm not going crazy, right? That's FIVE. That's FIVE modes. What's going on here? I know how to count, don't I? I think? It took an embarrassingly long time for me to sort that out.

OH MAN OKAY so something that you see played up way more in fandom than in the original source material is the idea of 'trines,' or flight-mode cybertronians who basically come in sets of three. This popped up for the first time in the original cartoon, where the seekers ('energon seekers', who would sally forth into the galaxy, seeking energon deposits) were in matched sets of three, because it's nice and easy to bulk out your cast when you recolor the same character a couple times. So Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker were referred to as a trine.

Now the original material didn't actually DO much with that idea, but fandom has played with it in a LOT of different ways, and it's soooooooo good. Sometimes it's just plain platonic, but there are also LOADS of exciting directions to take it. In TGWP, I don't know if it's romantic exactly, but the seekers share everything, including sex and the slaves they're forcing to have sex with them. In that forced breeding fic I linked a few pages back, the world is set up as being different from canon, and the fliers all live off on their own moon together, and trine is the default romantic configuration that everyone is expected to seek out. Or, my favorite for the twins, in TBSHTC, we don't get any information on whether a trine is romantic or platonic, but these fliers are programmed to need that trine structure, and Jetfire and Jetstorm were put in a position where they should have trined up with Sentinel... but he kept them at arms length and hinted that it might happen, but he never actually gave them what they needed. The trine is apparently such an important thing for fliers that by the time they're taken away from Sentinel, their rescuers are worried that it might have affected their development.

Basically, there are ten million and a half things to do with trines, and as far as TFA goes, the jettwins are prime candidates for all kinds of happy/sad/anything trinefeels. Coldstars and I yell at each other on the regular about an ot3 trine for IDW Starscream that I'm totally going to produce content for whenever my brain slows down enough to actually create the goshdarn content.

....OH. This is a good idea. I am definitely going to absolutely do the thing. With fun expressions. Thank you!!

I never even noticed that the face on his chest was blacked out until I read that page!! I just love that touch, I wish we'd gotten to know more! And I think I didn't catch that it was Lockdown in the Drift miniseries my first time through, because he's got such a distinctive face shape in the cartoon and they definitely went for a more humanoid face in the comic, but..... I am a sucker for excessive spikes and he gives me the happy giggles. As far as I know, he shows up innnnnn the Drift miniseries and Spotlight: Trailcutter in early phase two, so he's not a major-major player, but he's out there, doing his thing!

I'm not going to lie, sometimes it gets... really unfortunate. There's a couple of artists who are the problem children, though these days, there's only one Bad Artist who pops up every so often. Lemme see. The first one, I think he actually does some of the artwork in All Hail Megatron, which is... augh. Because that's an important part of the storyline, but the is so aggressively ugly that I have trouble parsing the dialogue.

Okay, so here's Ironhide, a handsome old man



And here is he is by Don Figueroa. Can't tell who he is because none of these guys look remotely like how the character is supposed to look, and all of them have weird homer simpson robot five o'clock shadows? He's the one talking in the top right panel



Honestly, I just skimmed this guy's issues and spent most of the time not having a clue about who was saying what, and just pushed on :P

Then there's the Bumblebee miniseries. This is just four issues of ugly, depressing shit. The art is very like... mushy. I don't know how the heck they picked this art for giant, crisp mechanical beings, but it is not my favorite at all. Plus after the events of All Hail Megatron, a running theme is humans being complete assholes to the cybertronians left on earth. And in some ways, it's good to see humanity kicking back against the giant, warlike aliens who invaded our planet and caused a shit-ton of death and destruction. But it also gets really, really depressing seeing the Autobots being like 'we're your friends and we want to help!' and getting exploited and exploited and never learning their lesson.



Thennnnnn, lessee. The next person, unfortunately, does most of the substantial stuff about Galvatron and Cyclonus and Jhiaxus and Arcee. Also there is some SKETCHY writing stuff here, having to do with gender. I've never had any issues with my own gender and my brain tends to just glaze over when I hit nonsensical plot points, so I just parsed it as bad writing, but some people definitely find the phase one treatment of Arcee very upsetting.

Spoiler: arcee and gender

So, in transformers history, the dudes outnumber the ladies by a significant margin, but most continuities have had at least one or two high-profile ladies. IDW's phase one did not play it that way. All of the cybertronians were dudes. With one exception. Arcee was supposedly the result of medical experiments by this one evil mad scientist asshole, Jhiaxus, where he was seeing if he could artificially introduce gender into the Cybertronian race. Or something. It's never explained how or why he did this, and it's pretty clear the whole experience was pretty traumatic for Arcee. I don't have a full picture of her backstory, because a lot of it gets explained in the issues with the awful art I'm about to showcase, and it's not something I really wanted to look into any further.

Like, here, let me just insert the closet thing we get to an explanation, since it conveniently showed up in my google image search



(CNA is cybo-nucleic acid, instead of DNA, because puns)

It's not critical to the plot, and I think IDW definitely, definitely realizes it was a mistake. The phase two plot has old cybertronian colonies reestablishing contact with cybertron, and there are plenty of ladies on these planets (we even get a lady combiner, where all the captions on her wiki pages are steven universe fusion quotes), and at least one flashback to ye olde cybertron has a lady character. But Arcee's trauma isn't written out entirely, she still has some struggles with feeling othered, and she gets upset when people expect her to bond with some of the new colonists just on the basis of 'hey, look at us being ladies together, yyyyyyup'. She's a REALLY gr8 character these days, her intro was just really... not-good.

Just some warning before you hit it in actual canon!

But okay. The Heart Of Darkness miniseries is like the one phase one thing I haven't read period because I just C A N N O T with the art. It's not as ugly as the AHM artist up above, I guess, but there I had a plot that i cared about and characters I was invested in. Here? Nope. And it's really, really ugly. With inexplicable robot boogers. Why does Jhiaxus have built-in metal roboboogers? Why does he have such an ugly philtrum? WHO KNOWS.



Also, that's Arcee, who is supposed to be a supreme robobabe of the highest caliber. And she looks SO. BAD. Everyone in this series has flat ugly faces, there's nothing dynamic about how anybody moves, and Arcee is just... what? What happened to her thigh? What happened to her foot??? When I get around to finishing off the reading order

This is what Arcee should properly look like, for the record.



The only other bad artist I can think of who pops up sometimes is Ramondelli. I hate his art and I feel bad for hating it, because he's all young and enthusiastic and no stop that I don't want to like you I just want you to stop drawing like this why do you have to be likeable as a human aughhhhhhh. Just as an example, here's two images from exRiD 22, both of Soundwave and Shockwave, where Ramondelli is doing the flashbacks and the normal artist is doing the present day parts. See if you can guess which is which :P





The good thing is that he's improving. The bad thing is that they keep giving him work -_- I can't remember if he does anything in phase one (I feel like he does, but for the life of me I can't remember), but for the first season of exRiD, he pops up every five chapters or so. Now, they do use him sparingly (usually), and for most of exRiD, his issues are usually ones that focus on a background plotline, or that are flashbacks. And a lot of his work is in miniseries that aren't directly connected to the main plotline. Now, the IRRITATING part of that is that they keep giving him work on issues with really excellent writing, so you have to soldier through the bad art and really pay attention to what's happening. You get glorious details like, okay, so originally because of brain/psychic issues, Soundwave was originally living on the streets and barely even functioning. Even after he gets help and starts getting himself stabilized, and starts making a name for himself in the information-collecting business, he's apparently still living on the streets and you get a panel of him with a tarp draped over his shoulders, warming his hands over a barrel of burning trash. .....in Ramondelli's art. Very frustrating. He is improving though, and his art is getting less murky and ugly, but it's still frustrating when his art gets paired with really interesting writing.

 

................................................my god, I never even realized. I have failed in my duty as a pornographer

I guess as penance, tomorrow I'll have to write something with somebody having a gloriously excessive spike ;P

But also as of my last post, I've now got a super rough sketch for some art I can actually turn around fast because TFA is SO MUCH EASIER, because my irl friend reblogged a picture of a dude in bondage with flowers tucked into the ropes, and omg, bondage plus language of flowers, yes/hell yes/hell fucking yes? So now instead of sleeping, I'm going off on a quest to find the perfect combination of flowers to quietly imply some delicious TFA MegOp lovin'. And tomorrow I get to learn how to actually draw flowers!

 

AWRIGHT, I am procrastinating, so it seems like the perfect time to finish detangling the transformers idw continuity. The good thing is that once you hit phase two, things get MUCH easier to follow, and you're almost there.

One thing. The next issues are an ongoing series, just titled 'The Transformers.' Now, not only is this the most generically unhelpful name they could have possibly chosen, but ALSO. One of the phase two ongoing series was called "Robots in Disguise"... until 30-something issues in, when they changed the series to be named "The Transformers." THANKS, GUYS, YOU'RE BEING HELPFUL. This is also why people refer to one of the phase two current ongoing series as exRiD, because it's the comic series formerly known as RiD, and "The Transformers" is just about as unhelpful and generic as it's possible to get.

But this means I am totally striking out on trying to find these issues online, which is frustrating the bejeezus out of me. I mean... they aren't particularly good. This is the thing where the humans are being dicks to all the cybertronians left on earth and hunting down some and exploiting others, and everything is a depressing mess. There is.... a little bit of interesting stuff to do with Hot Rod, and Ultra Magnus shows up to play in the plot (even though he doesn't do anything interesting until phase two), plus Spike Witwicky acts like a fucking asshole (this is a running theme). Aaand I can't find anything. Plus there's the 'Chaos' sub-series in the ongoing run that is actually good, but also impossible to track down. I'm mostly sure it isn't on viewcomic. The concluding 'Chaos Theory' sub-sub-series is on google drive, thanks to the wonderful applechime, but there's some plot-heavy buildup to that I can't find :T I guess wikipedia can fill in the holes, but it isn't quite the same as reading some of these moments yourself, especially since the series is starting to get exciting again, after wading in depressing mediocrity :T Maybe I'll see about getting some shitty pirates together, if I have the time

First off, I went through amazon and just yoinked their reading order for the whole continuity. This stuff is sometimes online, but there are frequently bits and pieces missing. I know Spotlight: Blurr isn't online, which is annoying, because I like it a lot :P Plus the ongoing series and chaos miniseries, which KILLS me, there is so much plot missing there. So I've filled in the hyperlinks for everything I can find.

Spoiler: sorry, this will be a complete mess

First, the hardcover trade reading order, which was originally all I meant to do until I got distracted, and then oops I accidentally the entire reading order :V

Phase One:

• Volume 1: Megatron Origin #1–4 (hard to follow if you're not familiar with a lot of the cast), Spotlights: Blurr, Cliffjumper, Shockwave, Nightbeat, Hotrod, and Infiltration #0–6
  
• Volume 2: Transformer series Stormbringer and Escalation, as well as Spotlights: Sixshot, Ultra Magnus, Kup, and Soundwave
• Volume 3: Transformer series Devastation, as well as Spotlights: Galvatron, Ramjet, Wheelie, Blaster, Arcee (Unfortunate, for gender reasons mentioned before), Grimlock, and Mirage (weird story, may not even be properly canon, idk. I recommend reading the wiki page for clarification)
  
• Volume 4: Transformer series Maximum Dinobots and the four-part Drift story, as well as Spotlights: Cyclonus, Hardhead, Doubledealer, Sideswipe, Drift, Metroplex, and Jazz
• Volume 5: All Hail Megatron issues #1–12 and Coda #1–4
  
• Volume 6: Ongoing series issues #1-6 (drawn by Don Figueroa, so it's ugly and I'm not sure I actually read it), the four-issue Bumblebee series, Last Stand of the Wreckers (plus amazing text supplements), and Spotlight: Prowl (severely out of character and also boring)
  
• Volume 7: Ironhide four-issue series, Infestation Volume 1: Transformers #1–2 (I'm pretty sure this is the weird, bad zombie story), and ongoing issues #7–18
• Volume 8: Heart of Darkness (painfully ugly) and ongoing issues #19-31 (starts off with the "Chaos" storyline and leads into the final "Chaos Theory" arc of the ongoing series)

Here is the tfwiki link for this particular ongoing series that is being a problem child. Augh, I wish I knew where to find decent scans of this, because it's got the actual character development on earth and sets the stage for the big final conflict, and is some of the most interesting writing of phase one. I'm super frustrated I am striking out here :T

Phase Two:

• Volume 1: The one-shot Death of Optimus Prime (pretty boring prequel to the ongoing stuff), More Than Meets The Eye issues #1–5, and Robots in Disguise issues #1–6
  
• Volume 2: Autocracy mini-series (ramondelli art, but EXCELLENT backstory for hot rod/rodimus), Spotlights: Trailcutter and Hoist (won't make sense until you've read mtmte #1-5, but VERY good), Robots In Disguise issues #7–9, More Than Meets the Eye issues #6–8, and Spotlight: Orion Pax
• Volume 3: More Than Meets The Eye #9–13 and the 2012 Annual, Robots in Disguise #9–11 and the 2012 Annual, plus Spotlights: Thundercracker, Bumblebee, and Megatron (THIS ONE IS SO GOOD!!!! And it is RIGHT up your alley. It's placed right after exRiD #11 for maximum emotional impact, but you can read this anytime after you've finished the phase one ongoing issue #19)
  
• Volume 4: Monstrosity mini-series (have I... actually read this? I'm not sure I have. It's ramondelli art and I'm too tired to fight through that right now), Robots in Disguise #12–18, and More Than Meets the Eye #14–16
• That's where the hardcover trades are right now, but there's also another miniseries called Primacy (set in the past, ramondelli art, and kind of a confusing plot. but it has omega supreme!)

Okay, so! That reading order is not terribly important for phase two. Spotlight: Trailcutter and Spotlight: Hoist are the only ones where placement in relation to the main series really matters, but I'd read all of mtmte several times through before I actually read those at all. In terms of reading MTMTE, there is one crossover event with exRiD in the middle that makes things a little messy, but honestly, my first time through, I just skipped it entirely and didn't read it anything besides mtmte until months later. But if you're in need of a robot fix and can't start MTMTE yet, you can totally read exRiD up through #22 first! In general, here's what I recommend.

• MTMTE #1-5
• Spotlight: Trailcutter
• Spotlight: Hoist
• MTMTE #6-9
• MTMTE 2012 Annual (the only annual they've done, and also for some reason it isn't in the right order on viewcomic? very annoying. doesn't make too much sense unless you've read drift's miniseries)
• MTMTE #10-22 (this finishes with the MTMTE introduction to the Dark Cybertron crossover)

NOW. Backtrack alllll the way back to the beginning of exRiD. If MTMTE is the wacky space roadtrip, exRiD is corrupt politics, trying to rebuild society and their planet after a war, and everything is a mess. It's not as good as MTMTE, and it definitely starts off rough, but there is some Good Shit in there (especially Wheeljack, Arcee, Starscream, and Prowl)

• exRiD #1-10
• exRiD 2012 Annual (also not exactly in the right spot on viewcomic, but the default chapter order has it in a WRONG spot)
• exRiD #11
• Spotlight: Megatron
• exRid #12-22 (finishes with the exRiD introduction to Dark Cybertron)

Reading Dark Cybertron originally meant bouncing back and forth between issues of MTMTE and exRiD for a while, but fortunately, viewcomic has a compiled version of DC, in two chapters

• DC #1-2 (the writing and pacing and art can be erratic, but also there are some GEMS in there) (mostly about Shockwave's weird science shenanigans and also the dead universe)

Then, things get easier for MTMTE, more complicated for exRiD

• MTMTE #28-40
• Empire of Stone miniseries (on viewcomic, but I think they're doing their donation drive, so I can't get a link right now)
• Mtmte #41-present (currently 54) (just shotgun the entire thing. Do it. It'll be GLORIOUS. You won't regret it)

exRiD kind of... well. The main series partly/mostly splits off to political/military shenanigans... on earth. On the one hand, ugh, boring, I have enough squishy humans in my life already, I want giant alien robot culture. But there is still some interesting stuff happening on Cybertron too, and also on earth you get to know THUNDERCRACKER! He played a minor role in phase one, but now he's a major player and he's the best, BEST thing, and he has a dog and her name is Buster and he loves her so much. Also Soundwave is a total babe, and Prowl is my shitty, precious son. But before you dig into that, you know what? You deserve something nice. You deserve some of the most gorgeous art in the entire IDW run. You deserve the Windblade miniseries

• Windblade miniseries #1-4 (viewcomic lists issues after that, but for now, just stop at #4)
• exRiD #28-35
• Punishment (dark post-war societal stuff, with tragically ugly art) (fairly optional)
  
• exRiD #36-38

And then, unfortunately for ease of reading, we have... another crossover. This is the Combiner Wars event, which crosses over between the Windblade ongoing series (not the miniseries) and exRiD, because why would we want to make reading order easy :P And sadly, this time, there is no compiled version uploaded, so the only way to read it is to bounce between the series.

• exRiD #39 (opening salvo)
• Windblade #1 (part 1)
• exRiD #40 (part 2)
• Windblade #2 (part 3)
• exRiD #41 (part 4)
• Windblade #3 (part 5)
• exRiD #42 (epilogue)
• Windblade #4 (epilogue 2: electric boogaloo)

After that, you can go ahead and wrap up Windblade's series! It only goes up through issue #7, and then they stopped, paused, and just last month started another ongoing series (Till All Are One) that I will link below. The exRiD books focus more heavily on what's happening on earth, while Windblade and TAAO are more about Cybertronian diplomacy and politics, but the two series are like... aware of each other, they aren't operating in total isolation. There's also a miniseries, Sins Of The Wreckers, that's a sequel to Last Stand of the Wreckers, and is placed between exRiD #44 and 45 (i think). Despite that placement, its last issue was only published, like... last month. But that's where it falls. It's dark and weird and I like it a lot.

• Combiner Hunters (one-shot with sooo many ladies, lovely art and interesting ideas)
  
• Windblade #5-7
• exRiD #43-44
  
• SOTW #1-5 (sequel to LSOTW, won't make much sense without that context, or without the previous exRiD issues)
• exRiD #45-49
• Redemption (optional reading but VERY SAD AND COOL and even with the Ramondelli art it gives me Emotions)
  
• exRiD HOLIDAY SPECIAL (oh my godddddddddd there are three parts to this (cybertron/the lost light/earth), and they're all AMAZING. This is THE BEST)
• exRiD #50-present (currently 54)
• TAAO #1-present (currently #2) (this is brand new and is all politics and intrigue with lovely writing and some of my FAVES, and it's really, really good so far)

There are also a few one-shots and miniseries scattered here and there where I either can't find them or don't know a good place to put them :P

• Autocracy (beginning of the war, ugly art, but gr8 emotional backstory for Rodimus and his Issues)
• Spotlight: Thundecracker (also a flashback to during the war, something something hunting for metroplex)
• Spotlight: Bumblebee (I don't even remember, but maybe it relates to Thundercracker's spotlight? They make a nice ship together)

Wow. Fwoo. OKAY. I didn't think I'd be typing that all up, but it is good to get it done and not have it hanging over my head. I am so sorry for the giant wall of text on how to read about giant robots. If you'd rather not deal with all that mess, easy mode (what I did) was read all of MTMTE (minus the spotlights and skipping Dark Cybertron entirely), and then I went allllllllll the way back to the beginning of phase one and read from there. It was a pretty quality reading experience, though you do get interesting character backstory if you read the other parts of the canon first. MTMTE and exRiD were both intended to be a jumping-on point for new readers, so if the mess of links and missing links and all that jazz looks like a pain, you're totally allowed to skip it! However works best for you, that's a totally legit way to do it.

 

The price varies a little book to book, but buying them new works out to about $35 each, for eight books, so around $280 (about 250 euros, I guess, if pricing is consistent between regions), minus shipping. I got them through Amazon prime, so shipping wasn't a factor, but they are fairly heavy. It was a pretty irresponsible spending decision on my part :P That being said, I like these things a lot. It's really nice having someone take care of reading order for you, especially when there are SO many frigging pieces in phase one. And it's really nice just being able to casually leaf through SO MUCH material. Also the whole set is really, really, really satisfyingly heavy. If you want irl versions of phase one, I do definitely recommend getting them this way, but the cost does add up.

 

I'll answer the rest in a little bit, but I finished the Optimus, and he does have glorious lips!! I had to fiddle around a little a lot to get a placement I liked, because tfa face proportions are hard, but I made it work!

Spoiler

Real quick and dirty, but lots of fun! What we have here are shamelessly larger-than-life red carnations (my heart aches for you, admiration), christmas roses (relieve my anxiety), cowslips (winning grace, healing, youth, pensiveness), and narcissi (formality, stay sweet as you are). I accidentally stumbled onto the flower hack you suggested, and it helped SO much for getting these things turned out fast and easy.

I had the most fun with the carnations and christmas roses (I could draw carnations forever), though looking back on it now, I wish I'd planned ahead for better flower grouping and a more cohesive bouquet feel (even though the carnations are my favorite, nothing ties them back to the other flowers. and that doesn't even touch on grouping. I took a class on flower arranging, even, so I have no excuse :P). And now that I've got proof of concept, I want to do lots more like this. There are so many flowers with interesting and cool meanings (things like: shame, mature charm, i am your captive, beware, beauty unknown to possessor, all kinds of good stuff), and one of my irl friends just started a bondage inspiration blog (ropeylittlefeministbitch, if anyone is curious), so I'm going to have loads of cool references to draw from. I want to see if I can take some of my sad asshole faves and tie them up and say angsty things with flower arrangements. THE BEST, MOST SELF-INDULGENT THING. I just have to figure out how Whirl actually moves so I can tie him up properly, and figure out the best way to get Starscream in high-strain positions working around his stupid, silly wings.

 

And on the note of glorious, kissable lips and me being in a share-y mood, I'm starting to almost nearly get a panel's worth of lines for that comic idea from @coldstars with the friendship bracelet made from fort max's own internal wiring. I'm trying to figure out if I can just get away with redrawing overlord's arms and the two faces from panel to panel. I think I can do it, and I'm feeling lazy enough to go for it. This thing is going to clock in at abouuuuuuuuuut six panels, and I'm down for redrawing Overlord's ridiculous face, but I'd really rather not do his torso and helmet from scratch every time and pray I get the proportions even semi-consistent.

(his hands are beautiful, I don't think there's any polishing required there. and I definitely didn't cut off fort max's arm just because I didn't feel like figuring out how to draw it, what?)

(also I think you're going to really love overlord once you run into him. I thiiiiink the first time he does much of anything is in last stand of the wreckers, where he is glorious and awful (you can jump into that series pretty much any time after you meet verity, or even without meeting her, if you want) and he plays a decent-size role in mtmte, and he's the worst and I love him)