Shane McCarthy

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

This volume doesn't really follow up the previous two parts of All Hail Megatron, instead it moves backward, filling in some of what we know about its characters, though some of the stories here are about Transformers who don't have anything to do with All Hail Megatron at all. Like any collection of standalone comics, it's a mixed bag.

I liked the tale of Blurr, the narcissist racer who doesn't even notice that society is show more unraveling around him (as we saw in Autocracy) until it directly impacts his need for speed and his livelihood.

The rest were so-so. The story of Jazz is framed as a story told by Tracks during All Hail Megatron to cheer up the Autobots trapped on Cybertron. It's unclear to me where this is supposed to take place, mostly because there's no point where the Autobots are ever cheerful, and besides, it's pretty much an action story that reveals little of character anyway. (Plus I can never remember which one is Jazz.) Cliffjumper's story is also dull, being a stereotypical tale of a soldier from an neverending conflict washing up on an "island" (i.e., planet) and tended to by a loving female native, until the war comes back for him. I know a lot of Transformers fans hate Drift, the Decepticon-turned-Autobot-with-"badass"-swords, and I don't, but his story here didn't win me over.

The story of Metroplex is designed to communicate his size with a lot of two-page spreads, which is neat idea. Unfortunately, the e-version of the story I read split them all in half, really ruining the effect.

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All Hail Megatron got a bad rap.

Does it break dramatically from the Furman run? Yup.

Are there continuity errors? Yup.

Is it poor? Not at all.

In fact, it might still be the only IDW series with heavy use of human characters that's actually engrossing. The coda especially is simply lights out, especially the Kup story by Nick Roche.

It's been a long time since I first read All Hail Megatron and it just leaves me wondering: what if only Michael Bay had let the IDW braintrust write him a coherent show more script? show less

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I wasn't a very big fan of Drift when he was introduced in All Hail Megatron, finding him a bit of a stereotypical tortured-man-with-a-dark-past-and-also-he-has-swords. Except he was a robot. I really warmed to him in More than Meets the Eye, though, which used Drift's spiritual awakening in his self-titled miniseries (which I actually haven't read) to reinvent him as an optimist, creating a sort of Kirk-Spock-McCoy-esque show more trinity with Rodimus and Ultra Magnus. But in volume 4, Drift was exiled from the Lost Light (taking the fall for something Rodimus did), and in volume 8, Ratchet set off in search for him. Empire of Stone shows what the two get up to together, as Drift tries to discover where he fits in the universe.

I may have come to like Drift, but basically, it turns out, only when he's being written by James Roberts, because back in the hands of his creator Shane McCarthy, he's the same old dull tortured-man-with-a-dark-past-and-also-he-has-swords; McCarthy just puts in one joke to explain away the difference between his Drift and Roberts's hippy-dippy version; Drift tells Ratchet at one point, "you shouldn't live so much in the past, there is only the true moment in which we're currently living." Ratchet asks if Drift says stuff like that only to annoy him, Drift says "Pretty much," and then Drift's spiritualism is never mentioned again.

Though it has some high points (I liked the somewhat dumb Decepticon that Drift and Ratchet befriend), this is a pretty standard loner action story: Drift comes to the site of an old mistake, Drift angsts a bit, Drift redeems himself, stuff blows up. The best part is Guido Guidi and Stephen Baskerville's very dependable artwork. They do a good job in making clear storytelling and sharp action sequences, even if McCarthy's writing means there's too many action sequences.

The best part of the book is that though by the end Drift is still too cool to be either a Decepticon or an Autobot, he is coming back to the Lost Light, so he'll soon be back in the much more capable writing hands of James Roberts.

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Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

Though there were two more volumes of All Hail Megatron after this, volume 2 concludes the main event, as those were prequels, side stories, and codas. This volume opens by explaining how the Autobots ended up in such dire straits as the series began with, though I didn't find the answers entirely satisfying. Much of the problems that plagued volume 1 still plague this one, but I found a lot of the stuff in the last two show more chapters more interesting than what had come before: Megatron expressing his frustration to Starscream, for example, that Starscream has never become the warrior-leader that Megatron wanted him to be was great, as is the dealing with the idea that everything Megatron does hearkens back to his original revolutionary purpose.

This leads to a pretty good ending, where Starscream actually saves Megatron instead of killing him, and a Decepticon actually break ranks to help humanity-- though not for the reasons that the Autobots would like, not even for the reasons his fellow traitor would like. But this is just the final two issues, and it's taken us a whole twelve issues to get through all this. In the end, All Hail Megatron seems more interesting for the follow-up stories it promises than the story it told itself.

Guido Guidi's work is usually very dependable, but there's also a lot of terrible fill-in artists that look like they came off DeviantArt. It's bad when one artist's humans look less expressive and lively than another artist's robots.

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