Shane McCarthy

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

I wanted to like this book more than I did. "The Decepticons actually do conquer Earth" is a great premise, and unlike the devoted fans who write articles on the Transformers wiki, I don't really care if the depiction of Cybertron here is consistent with past ones in IDW, or whatever. It's just that: 1) the human military characters dominate the first few chapters of the book, and they are as generic as all get out, like show more too-hotshot-for-you-I-don't-obey-orders-but-never-get-in-trouble generic, and 2) the Autobots are back to being an indistinguishable mass of non-characters for me when they do turn up, all hanging out on Cybertron and moping, but what's the difference between Prowl and Jazz anyway. I like the idea of a dark situation that reveals these robots' inner characters, but mostly that just turns out to be snarling at each other.

There a just a lot of scenes, on both Earth and Cybertron, that I think are meant to build tension, but just go nowhere, spinning in circles. That Megatron has got hold of the SPOILER is a pretty good twist, though, and the hints we get of philosophical and moral disagreements among the Decepticons now that they've achieved their goals are pretty good, too. I didn't hate this or anything. But what happened here didn't need to occupy six issues, and it should have been better than it was. Guido Guidi is a surprisingly good artist, though-- like E. J. Su, he can make these robots come to life.

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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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