Nick Roche

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

Having enjoyed IDW's first two Wreckers comics, somehow I still missed the existence of a third, Requiem of the Wreckers until it was too late: the one-shot wasn't at my local comics shop, and wasn't even available at my usual aftermarket web site. It was collected in this trade paperback, but this trade paperback also collected the first two Wreckers miniseries, which I already owned, and I wasn't about to pay $20 for a show more collection of eleven issues that I already owned ten of. But then the collection appeared in my LCS's $5 discount pile on Free Comic Book Day, so of course I went for it.

I'm actually really glad I did. I liked Last Stand of the Wreckers and Sins of the Wreckers the first time around, and I'm not going to re-review them here, but I liked them even more a second time around, with a firmer grounding in Transformers lore, and knowledge of where the stories were ultimately going. Small details became significant with foreknowledge in mind, and reading Last Stand and Sins (and Requiem) back to back made how it's all one big story much more apparent. (Poor Guzzle.)

Requiem is a fitting end for the whole saga, bringing together the villains of the first two stories, and tying off a lot of emotional and character threads, especially for Impactor and Springer, whose relationship is one of the backbones of the series. Kup is dead, so he can't feature like he did in the first two, but Roche turns that into a virtue.

I also appreciated the presence of Verity Carlo throughout. Verity was there when IDW's continuity began, so I'm glad Nick Roche kept her character going once Simon Furman left, and gave her an ending as IDW's entire universe drew to an end.

Roche is oft-praised by Transformers fans, I think, but probably still not praised enough. Of course he knows his continuity and stuff, and we like him for it, but even better, he understands character and theme. This is a saga about the damage war does, and how we need friendship to overcome it, and what the appropriate bounds of friendship allow for and what they do not. How do you forge an identity that meets the expectations your friends place upon you when the entire universe seems to be conspiring against you? This informs every character arc, every story beat. He also has a way with big crazy ideas, and his art is incredible stuff. James Roberts (co-writer on some of Last Stand) justly gets a lot of praise, but Roche is surely the talent of the IDW era. I hope IDW keep him involved in their new era, or that he goes on to do his own incredible stuff. Or you know, both.

Wreck and rule!

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This series had been hyped beyond all belief by the Transformers fanbase, so I was excited to finally lay my hands on a cheap copy of the trade paperback. It did not disappoint. This is the kind of book that shows just how great this franchise can be when put in the hands of people who really care about and understand it. It takes place in IDW’s current series continuity, but besides a couple of scenes, it’s entirely self-contained, and it draws heavily on obscure characters from all show more throughout franchise history, meaning you don’t have to be familiar with them to enjoy this book. If you’re a hardcore fan, or just interested in seeing how good TF storytelling can get, you need to pick up this book. Besides the original 5-issue series, the trade paperback also collects a related prose story by Roberts titled “Bullets” that’s just icing on the cake. show less

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

I suspect of Sins of the Wreckers what I also suspect of the story to which it is a sequel, Last Stand of the Wreckers: it will improve on a reread. There's a lot going on, and though I've gotten a lot better at reading Transformers comics than I was a couple years ago, I still struggle when a book throws a ton of new characters at me. Sins of the Wreckers picks up from the events of The Transformers, Volume 8, where Prowl show more went missing: Arcee has found him, and he's on Earth for some reason. Plus, Verity Carlo is back!

The Wreckers are reassembled to track down Prowl. Like Last Stand, this is a messy story in a good way: a lot of secrets, a lot of screwed-up people in a screwed-up world. I've been getting pretty sick of Prowl over in the series formerly known as Robots in Disguise, but put him in the murky world of the Wreckers, and he works much better. (Nick Roche's more sophisticated writing probably doesn't hurt either.) Prowl is as messed up as Kup and the Wrekcers. Arcee is messed up too-- she's a good fit for the Wreckers, and I'm surprised it took IDW this long to put her in combination with them. And Verity's messed up too. Not that she was ever terribly well-adjusted, but this war has screwed her up as much as it has all the Cybetronians in this story, and she can't escape it any more than they can... even though it's over.

If there's a complaint that I have, it's that it's mistitled. Though everyone in this story has sinned, the focus is not on the sins of the Wreckers, but Prowl and Verity and a couple others whose appearances are spoilers. The Wreckers themselves are kind of background players in this drama. If Roche does another Wreckers story in another five years, I hope Impactor et al. can step into the foreground more.

Everyone in this story has some kind of desperate plan to try to free themselves from the sins of the past... none of them work. Every character from the key players to the bit-part antagonists has a goal and a meaning within the larger picture, that lines up thematically to create a greater whole. More than Meets the Eye might be the best-written Transformers ongoing story, but Sins of the Wreckers is probably the best self-contained Transformers comic. Last Stand tugs at your heartstrings more, but Sins is better crafted, showing the effects of five years' artistic development for Roche.

Roche is a good writer, but he's a great artist, and Sins of the Wreckers has got to be the peak of his work, especially when you combine it with Josh Burcham's colors. Horrific, dynamic, touching, he creates Arctic vistas and nightmarish hellscapes with equal ease. I wish it was getting the same deluxe hardcover treatment as its predecessor, because it deserves it.

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

This is one of those books that you keep laughing aloud at, and your wife is like, 'what's so funny,' and you're like, 'um... it's a Transformers comic?' The new status quo for IDW's Transformers is that the Autobot/Decepticon war is over, and both sides have returned to Cybertron, along with the "NAILs," the nonaligned Cybertronians who fled the chaos of the war. So there's a lot of conflict between these three sides. The show more Autobots don't know how to exist in a world without war, the Decepticons are all in prison right now but that can't possibly be sustainable, and the NAILs don't see the Autobots as having any more legitimacy than the Decepticons. The first issue here sets up the basic conflict, which seems very ripe with storytelling potential, and it ends with Optimus Prime abandoning Cybertron, his argument being that he's a living symbol of the war, and peace can never truly come to Cybertron as long as he hangs around.

This leaves the remaining Autobots conflicted about what to do. Rodimus wants to hunt down the mythical Knights of Cybertron and implore them for guidance; Bumblebee wants to make a go of it on Cybertron, mending the conflict between the three sides. So once Rodimus's Lost Light takes off, the book essentially splits, with More than Meets the Eye following the Lost Light and Robots in Disguise staying on Cybertron.

More than Meets the Eye is the whole reason I started this project to read IDW's Transformers comics in the first place, and one year in, I've finally got to it. It's quite possibly everything I could want out of a Transformers comic book: a group of scrappy underdogs united on an improbable quest. There's Rodimus, the eternally optimistic leader who always plunges into lost causes; Drift, the ex-Decepticon who has the passion of the convert; the rulebound and distrustful Ultra Magnus; the moody and morose Cyclonus (who comes on board by accident); Ratchet, the doctor who's lost his optimism and his confidence; Rung, the genius psychiatrist who seems put-upon; Tailgate, who accidentally slept through all six million years of the war; and Swerve, who talks a lot and never stops making jokes.

I recently read that G. K. Chesteron once observed that the opposite of "funny" wasn't "serious," it was "not funny." (Who knows if he actually did; I can only find paraphrases and attributions, not an original, in a cursory search.) More than Meets the Eye is a book that lives by Chesterton's dictum: it is both serious and funny. I could past dozens of different panels into this review that made me laugh, but there's very much a serious idea beneath all of this. Even though they're robots, these are a group of people who have been affected by war in a myriad different ways. These are real people, and I am finally really clicking with all the different personalities of IDW's Generation One Transformers. It turns that when you write them differently, I actually can tell a bunch of robots apart!

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