Review: The Transformers: Primacy by Chris Metzen, Flint Dille, and Livio Ramondelli

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2014)
Acquired November 2016
Read August 2018

The Transformers: Primacy

Story by Chris Metzen and Flint Dille
Art by Livio Ramondelli 
Lettering by Tom B. Long

I was surprised at how much I liked Monstrosity. Similarly, I was surprised at how much I did not like Primacy. I didn't dislike it; I just didn't find much particularly likeable about it. While the first two parts of this trilogy, Autocracy and Monstrosity, captured some of that prequel energy, making you excited to see those raw, early moments in Transformers history, Primacy feels too much like the kind of Transformers stories you've seen a million times. Megatron has an evil plan, Optimus Prime angsts about something but wins anyway, rinse, repeat. This is set millions of years before the majority of IDW's work, but would slot into it just fine, which is disappointing. A prequel should capture something different about an ongoing story, but Primacy is too much of the same old thing.

Here it was the interaction of naturally occurring gears, levers and pulleys that miraculously brought forth sentient beings.
from The Transformers: Primacy #1

Next Week: Until I start in on the final stretch of Lost Light, I'm all caught up on IDW's Transformers, so I'm rotating to a different reading project: tea time tales for time tots, the Time Lord Fairy Tales!