I also set aside like ten random pages that I noticed flying by with panels I wanted to comment on, but I have to go back to all of them and remember what I even wanted to talk about and crop and save and upload them annnnnnnnd I am lazy. And spock also already hurt itself in its confusion :( I spent plenty of time lingering over young Prowl, Red Alert blew by making me sad, Cyclonus did me a sad too, Swerve surprised me into doing a cry, Whirl hurts me all day every day, issue 40 caused me pain in like five different ways, the scene after DC where Chromedome is sitting alone in his room looping Rewind's message DESTROYS me every time, annnd I lingered way too long over the panel where Starscream says, "I've dispatched my tormenter and the people are cheering me on." Which is pretty much as good as outright calling Megatron his abuser. I just. Want him to be happy and succeed. So. So. Much ;-;
@spockandawe Have a teaser. I'll make more tomorrow. Spoiler: Last Stand of the Wreckers, robogore (You were always laughing)
SNIPPETS! Because it's impossible to read these comics without noticing new things to comment on. Spoiler: large, etc. So it's just really, really warming my heart thinking about Cyclonus being all awkward and detached and fairly not-friend-having, but being missed and remembered in some fashion after he disappeared. I mean, Jhiaxus and Galvatron didn't do much to earn those good feelings :P But Cyclonus. And as much as he misses Cybertron, this means that there was something of him still there on the planet, long after he disappeared, right up until the war destroyed things. Also look at Prowl being young and soft and gentle (for Prowl). He's willing to apologize and admit he cares and say things that leave him vulnerable. These panels do me hurt :( Also look at Red Alert being a wonderful, clever boy. The characters (and the narrative) rag on him for being paranoid and way out of control and looking for secrets beyond any reasonable level. Sometimes he finds things, like Overlord. And sometimes he goes through Ironfist's fanfic datalogs assembling typos into something kinda-sorta-maybe resembling a coded message. Cyclonus says he was appalling at his job as chief of security, and I mean... that's fair. But sometimes that obsessive attention to detail gets him really impressive results. If he found that symbol only by accident, and only eventually, it was probably pretty darn well hidden. And that was such an important key to unlocking the framing of the assassination. Red Alert doesn't get enough credit. Good job, Red Alert. And also just look at that confirmation that some of his paranoia was justified to, because people really were messing around with his head, even way back then. No insightful analysis here. Just boner.png I'll ship it And finally, this cracks me up. Just look at that confirmation that Rodimus knows about sex, knows enough about sex to casually toss off a term like heat, and is familiar enough with sex to just use this as an everyday, common-company metaphor in mixed company with some of the most uptight officers his faction has. And nobody questions what he means. So Rodimus definitely knows about sex. But I'll posit that everybody here, all of them, even Prowl, know plenty about what sex is. Plus, turbofoxes are native Cybertronian fauna and presuuuumably evolved in parallel with Cybertronians and are made of jointed metal and it would be reasonable to assume they share some biological/mechanical constructs. What I'm taking too many words to say is, Cybertronian sex drives: #CONFIRMED
Pyra Magna with a tiny anime nose and cheek squiggles doesn't bother me quite as much as bondage sexploitation boobsock Windblade. But it's still a close race. On a completely unrelated note, I finally have some references for Hawkeye Initiative Chaos Theory Megatron.
That said that doesn't actually bug me that much since the same artist tends to give EVERYONE more anime faces. It's not like Optimus is there all grizzled and jjba looking while Pyra Magna is all soft faced or whatever. Also I've pretty much accepted that dermal plating has to be pretty relatively soft and flexible compared to everywhere else, which is actually p interesting. Human faces are so stretchy and bouncing for ease of communication via facial expressions. So the meta reason for transformers having such 'soft' and stretchy faces is to better mimic human facial expressions, obviously. But in-universe, they've got a ton of other ways to signal, and it seems like a pretty striking potential vulnerability to have a softer part right in front of your brain, which is one of the vital body parts you absolutely HAVE to protect even as a transformer. At first I thought maybe the advantage is everyone naturally has a face while not everyone has wings or whatever, but that's not even true. I mean, look at Tailgate. But even with that mnemosurgeons access the brain through the neck, not the face. So there's probably some pretty dense internal plating and protection just under the face for exactly the reason that faces can be so vulnerable?
I want you to know that I mean winner in the opposite sense of winner. I am in pain, and I blame you. Next thing you know, Pyra Magna is going to be late to robot school which is for robots, and she'll run RIGHT into Optimus's back and go uwaaa~ and I'm just going to cut myself off now because I am only hurting myself worse. BUT I noticed a thing that I totally missed before, because boobsock windblade bondage pissed me off so bad. On the one most gratuitous page, where there are robo boobs flopping in EVERY direction, there were all these tiny little illustrations around the edges. And from the caption text.... I think these are supposed to be AU Windblades that never happened? I think maybe? This whole issue was confusing and it bothered me. This looks... kind of like holo-Scoop? Like Starscream was taking to for a while. But, dear god why are those boobs that pointy from this angle and what is perspective and proportions and what are that hand and neck and boobs and waist and hips THIS BOTHERS ME Ooooooh, warrior aesthetic for what I assume is Windblade and Chromia. I would be all in favor of this, except the anime proportioned mouth and noses bug me. But also for someone who SURE LIKES DRAWING BOOBS, this artist is really distressingly bad at them??? I'm just trying to imagine two dangling sacs of flesh tethered directly to my neck, and... god, why. I'm going to go right ahead and assume this artist has seen at least some occasional naked women and plenty of clothed women. They're a paid professional. They should know better. This bothers me slightly less, but only because the boobs are less... like that. But? Starscream? What are you doing with tiny fairy windblade????? And why is there tiny fairy windblade??????? also please go back to your sarah stone face or at least something more pointy, at first I thought this was lug. I am unironically into this Windblade. But. Whoooo is this? Because that one corner of those finials looks AWFULLY familiar, and given how bad this artist is at perspective in other places (boobs) I'm pretty sure that is supposed to be a shattered cockpit and this guy shows up in two of the other pictures and basically OHMIGOD, STARSCREAM, WHAT And ohmigod, Starscream, WHAT????? I'm not sure whether I have this the right way up, or if he's supposed to be on his back (the balance doesn't look quite right either way), but... this hits me right in the still-unironically-enjoying-it anime romance trope place. What happened?? WHAT HAPPENED???? You can't give me a picture like this and then not give me any more to go on!!!! I need to know more!!! I need to know everything!!! Windblade saved Starscream's life at extreme risk to herself, is he going to do the same??? Is this an AU where he did that, because we're never going to get it for real? Were they going to do a romance in this AU? If there was a merciful god, they wouldn't leave me hanging this way
Yeah it's a scene where the ideas and concept are so cool but the art doesn't do a great job of living up to that. I mean, it's still a thousand times better than 'metal cubes covered in 15 instagram filters', but windblade does not need tits. I mind less about general proportion stuff, because they're robots and don't need to have the same proportions, Chromedome. Like that first image with the really chunky chest and shoulders and tiny little waist could look really cool, actually, but it'd need to flow with the rest of the body.
I think anime faces tend to bother me more when I'm used to getting some variety and the artist flattens it out much closer to sameface. I've run into it here and there in american comics, and it usually isn't an issue in manga because they start from the same place, but I tend to pitch a hissy fit when I'm given Good Things and then the creators take the Good Things away. I think it's especially bugging me for Pyra Magna because she has such a serious face and carries herself very seriously. Except for the boobsocks and gratuitous bondage, I like this artist's Windblade, because she's drawn in a more classically feminine and soft-face-shapes way to begin with, and this style fits. But this is like the one picture in my last post of Starscream who I thought was Lug, where when you round and soften out some characters, my brain just revolts :P And I'm so attached to my hard-edged ladies, because they can be so hard to come by :( Man, I just wish this part of the revolution thing had been better. (eta: and yeah, usually I'm pretty chill with the proportion stuff, I'm just dying over it being so incredibly different in a small set of illustrations on the same page, especially when they're consistently... badly drawn, just at all different sizes)
Yeah. The artist is a really good artist in my opinion as an awed non-artist, but they definitely have a problem with sameface and should work on more distinct and varied faceshapes. give the jet a big pointy roman nose!!! Also the boobs n stuff.
On the up side, I'm now imagining Lacuna as a tiny robot fairy with a big, big knife, and it's a very amusing and funnily accurate mental image.
I like to think that the artist literally just took a bunch of generic anime poses off Google Image search and then plugged Starscream and Windblade into them for fun and profit Like Spoiler
I mean..... I am pretty sure that is exactly what happened XD And I honestly would have probably done a similar thing, but. Not anime people, those are such a risky reference for anything approaching reality. You might get some successes, but there will be a LOT of misses. The things like boob sizes? Those are a pretty easy thing to eyeball on your own, I'm guessing those are absorbed right from the (anime) source material.. The generic what-are-ribs waist curve is very anime, complete with the one in a million outlier 'those boobs would be suffering' chests proportions compared to the waists. Picture one fails to define shoulders around where they should be for robots. They're more like human shoulders, which is never right for transformers. When I use human references, I have to cut out their arms and move them sideways to get anywhere close to accuracy. And this is a super-basic head-on view that any Windblade refernce should have fixed. The fairy pose is painfully, painfully generic anime fairy, complete down to the extreme knock-knees. Except for the first picture, the hands all have the same basic three-fingers-plus-one-finger pose. So you'd think they'd be at least consistent on that one boring repeated element. But Windblade in the fourth picture has two joints in her pointer finger.... and one joint in the other three. The face shapes are all pretty standard anime. But the basic shape of them, like picture two does the rumiko takahashi thing of straight-line-down-to-cheek-point, and picture three has the cheekbone hitting below the eye socket, closer to how actual anatomy goes. And picture two also has the noses sitting waaaaay low on the face compared to the eyes, very different from the other pictures, even though most of them are a head-on view. I'm honestly not a good enough artist to be justified criticizing them this much, but. This is their job, which they are paid to do. I usually read fast enough that I don't even notice yaoi hands happening (I also question some of the foreshortening on the size of those hands, especially picture one). I'm not a very focused or art-critical reader. But I sent a giant essay to IDW about the visual storytelling alone in this issue and flat-out said I didn't plan to buy anything else from this artist in the future, and I kind of wish I'd caught enough at the time to send them some sharp words about the art too.
I don't know anymore. Probably this is a sign of chronic sleep deprivation, but I made myself laugh really, really hard Spoiler: nsfwish
I love how Cyclonus literally just nyooms out of his chair. So fucking fast that Drift is completely shocked Can't believe that nyoom bird and Cyclonus are wearing the exact same expression
The Last Knight looks great so far Spoiler: large image Source: http://mintmovi3.deviantart.com/art/Transformers-Fifty-Shades-of-Prime-674767470
