Marvel's The Transformers Year Two, Part V: Target: 2006 Part Two (US #21-22 / UK #85-92)

Here we wrap up the UK's Target: 2006, and thus can jump back into the story that my reading order wraps around it, the Transformers: The Movie comic adaptation. From there we then go back into the regular US book for the first time in a long while... but then my order sees us take another detour, as I'm reading installments of Transformers Universe by their publication dates relative to the US stories.

Target: 2006, Parts 7–9 & Epilogue / "Judgement Day" (part 2) / "The Final Battle!" / "Aerialbots over America!" / "Heavy Traffic!", from The Transformers US #21-22 (Oct.-Nov. 1986) / The Transformers UK #85-92 (1 Nov.–20 Dec. 1986) and Transformers: The Movie #2-3 (Jan.-Feb. 1987), reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

scripts by Simon Furman, Ralph Macchio, and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Will Simpson, Geoff Senior, Anderson, and Don Perlin; inks by Tim Perkins, Geoff Senior, Anderson, and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey; letters by Starkings, Annie Halfacree, Janice Chiang, and Hans IV; colour by Jozwiak, Gina Hart, and Nel Yomtov

from The Transformers UK #85

Obviously the highlight of the closing portion of Target: 2006 is the Galvatron-versus-Ultra-Magnus battle. This is good stuff, of course, and thank goodness most of it is drawn by Geoff Senior! But overall I found the resolution to Target: 2006 very disappointing.

 

It's cleverly conceived: Galvatron has come back in time of 1986 to build a giant gun to destroy Unicron with; he can't do this in his own time of 2006 because there he's under Unicron's control. (Quite how Galvatron can nonchalantly jump through time is never explained.) But this entire plan is contingent on the idea that Galvatron is not changing history: it needs to be a predestination paradox, otherwise there won't be a big gun waiting for Galvatron in the year 2006. (Why Galvatron needs to build this gun on the future site of Autobot City, or why the Autobots would somehow let this gun sit there undisturbed for twenty years, are also not explained.) This means that Galvatron has to be very careful when in the past: if anyone who is alive in 2006 is killed in 1986, then the future Galvatron comes from will not come to pass.

 

Galvatron is followed to 1986 by three Autobots from 2006, Hot Rod, Kup, and Blurr. (One of the underwhelming aspects of reading Target: 2006 in the middle of the movie comic adaptation, by the way, is that Kup and Blurr barely feature in its first issue, so when they pop up in 1986, it's less "oh it's those guys!" and more "who are those guys?") Their plan to stop Galvatron is to trick him into thinking that he's created a divergent timeline: they manipulate him into thinking he's killed Starscream. Since Starscream killed Megatron in 2006, leading to his rebirth as Galvatron, this means Galvatron must have created a new timeline, and therefore burying a gun in this 1986 won't accomplish anything in his 2006, so he gives up and returns to the future.

 

from The Transformers UK #88

This is clever... but it's basically all communicated after it happens. The entire resolution is dependent on rules for time travel that haven't been clearly communicated to the reader! Thus it all comes across as arbitrary. If even just once, Galvatron had gone, "oh i must be careful not to kill x otherwise i will create a divergent timeline and undermine my whole purpose in the past," then the resolution would have come across as way less of an ass-pull.

 

I also didn't like that it turns out that the three 2006 Autobots had been sent back in time by Unicron and were secretly being manipulated by him. I mean, on the one hand, I get why Furman did this: it's ever weirded to believe the Autobots have this technology than to believe that Galvatron has it, and it kind of beggars belief that these characters could run off to have this adventure in the middle of the movie. But on the other hand, it gives Unicron a knowledge base and a power set that exceeds anything we see him use in the movie, and makes it hard to believe that he could actually be defeated if he can mind control his enemies this way!

 

So, as the first of Furman's "Furmanist" epics, this is enjoyable enough... but it leaves much to be desired. Hopefully future iterations are stronger.

 

from Transformers: The Movie #3

From Target: 2006 I jumped back to p. 5 of issue #2 of the movie adaptation. My main note on reading this is that the way scripter Ralph Macchio cut down the film is very inconsistent and ruins a lot of the gags and arcs of the film. For example, Kup's bit about always saying places remind him of other places he's been is down just to two iterations: one in issue #2 where that characters react to it like he's done it a bunch already, and then once in #3 where the joke is that for once it's something that doesn't remind him of anything... but this pay-off doesn't work at all if we've only seen him do it one other time. Similarly, the joke about the "universal greeting" actually working doesn't make any sense if we didn't see the characters try to use it and fail.

 

This is probably worst, though, with Hot Rod's character arc. Not that it's an incredibly complex one, but "young hothead learns to be responsible and becomes the destined leader" really only works if we saw him be a young hothead... and those scenes were largely cut from issue #1!

 

Still, I thought the art was strong; I think Don Perlin has very much bedded in as a Transformers penciller at this point, and Ian Akin and Brian Garvey match him well on inks every time.

 

It's very weird to go from the Furmanist style of Target: 2006 and the movie to the Budianskian approach of "Aerialbots over America!" Suddenly it's wacky hijinks at Hoover Dam. In particular, Megatron disguises himself in his gun mode... and a dam employee just walks into work holding him, right past a security guard! I guess the pre-9/11 world was a different one entirely. Also, I think we're at the point where the never-ending need to introduce new characters and concepts begins to escape Budiansky's control: so many new characters so quickly. I really do hate anything involving combiners.

 

Early in the compendium, they sometimes included the UK edits to the US stories to make it all stick together, but as of this point, they seem to have stopped bothering. You would never know reading US issues #21 and 22 that, according to the UK issues, Optimus had just spent a bunch of time trapped in a limbo dimension! 

 

Afterburner – Grimlock, from Transformers Universe #1 (Dec. 1986), plus other issues; reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Four (2025)

written by Bob Budiansky, art by Ian Akin & Brian Garvey, colored by Nel Yomtov, lettered by Brenda Mings

I want to read more about debbie downer Dreadwind.
from Transformers US #74

Transformers Universe was a four-issue guidebook to Transformers characters published by Marvel US: each page featured a drawing of a Transformer (usually in both robot and vehicle mode), a paragraph-long description of the robot's personality, and a brief description of its abilities and weaknesses. Annoyingly, these are uncredited in this compendium and on the Transformers wiki, but I think Bob Budiansky wrote the words and Ian Akin and Brian Garvey did the art. After the series's original four-issue run, further profiles were included as backmatter in issues of the US comic; this reprinting intersperses those alphabetically. (This stretches the issue's original 24 pages out to 58!)

 

The character portraits are solid stuff, nicely done. I usually skipped "abilities" and "weaknesses" but enjoyed the bios well enough. These profiles very much show up one of the big weaknesses of the Marvel Transformers comic, which is that there just wasn't enough space for most of these personalities to ever manifest in it. Too many new characters being added all the time for anyone to get an interesting moment.

 

I bet I would have loved this stuff when I was eight, though. Which is really the target audience for Transformers, not sad forty-year-olds. 

 

This is the eighth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issue #23 and UK issues #93-104. Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)
2. US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30 (1984-85) 
3. US #9-12 / UK #31-41 (1985-86) 
4. US #13-14 / UK #42-54 (1985-86) 
5. US #15-16 / UK #54-63 (1985-86)
6. US #17-20 / UK #64-74 (1986)
7. UK #75-84 (1986-87) 
• Budianskian vs. Furmanist 

Marvel's The Transformers Year Two, Part IV: Target: 2006 Part One (UK #75-84)

So here we hit the tie-ins to The Transformers: The Movie. In the US, this was a three-issue adaptation of the movie, which I haven't actually read before, as IDW's Transformers Classics reprints included it in volume 7, not in the volume it would have fit in by publication order, and I only read the first four volumes. In the UK, this was the storyline Target: 2006, where a set of film characters travelled back in time to the present during the events of the film.

I certainly wouldn't recommend this for a new-to-this-material reader, but I decided to read chronologically. Which is to say, for the film characters, Target: 2006 probably takes place after Galvatron says, "Decepticons, to Earth" on p. 5 of issue #2 of the film adaption, so I read the film adaptation up to that panel, then jumped to the beginning of Target: 2006, read all of it, then returned to p. 5 of issue #2 of the film. The Til All Are One compendium, much more sensibly, places the film adaptation in its entirerty after the last part of Target: 2006.

I also read a story from the 1986 annual here, which would have been released around this time, though the compendium places it much earlier. "State Games" is a text story that serves as a prequel to "A There Shall Come... a Leader!" from the 1985 annual, but I like reading it here because it includes Emirate Xaaron, who appears in the present day in Target: 2006, nicely setting up our return to Cybertron in that story arc. (The very short text feature "Cybertron: The Middle Years!", included in UK issue #83, bridges the gap between the long-ago Cybertron of "State Games" and "There Shall Come..." and the present-day Cybertron of Return to Cybertron and Target: 2006.)

That makes this my first batch of Marvel Transformers stories to include no regular issues of the US comic. 

In the National Interest, Parts 2–4 / "State Games: A Tale from Cybertron" / "The Planet-Eater!" / "Judgment Day!" (part 1) / Target: 2006, Prologue & Parts 1–6, from The Transformers UK #75-84 (23 Aug.–25 Oct. 1986), The Transformers Annual [1986], and The Transformers: The Movie #1-2 (Dec. 1986–Jan. 1987); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

stories by Simon Furman, James Hill, and Ralph Macchio; pencils by Will Simpson, Johns Stokes, Don Perlin, Jeff Anderson, Ron Smith, and Geoff Senior; inks by Dave Hine, Tim Perkins (with Andrew Leary), Will Simpson, Ian Akin & Brian Garvey, Jeff Anderson, Ron Smith, and Geoff Senior; letters by Annie Halfacree, Janice Chiang, and Starkings; colours by John Burns, Gina Hart, Tony Jozwiak, Nel Yomtov, and John Burns

from The Transformers UK #74*

In the National Interest is fine. It has to balance out one thing that I enjoy and one thing I don't, in that I do like the Dinobots, especially the ongoing subplot about Sludge's crush on human reporter Joy Meadows, but on the other hand, the convoluted clandestine machinations of the Intelligence and Information Institute (Triple-I!) rapidly get tedious. Whenever secret organizations get involved in Transformers stories, I tune out; they really shift things away from the core appeal of Budianskian storytelling, I think. Still, good showing for the Dinobots.

 

"State Games" is a decent text story, showing how the war between the Autobots and Decepticons came about. It packs in a lot of exposition and thus gets a bit overwhelming, but it has some interesting ideas; the kernel of the idea that was explored in great detail in the IDW continuity, that Megatron and his comrades had legitimate grievances, comes from this story. It's not as nuanced as it would be later on... but it is pretty nuanced for a 1980s kids comic! Note that in this story, "Optimus Prime" is just a guy's name, not some kind of title, even though it came out a month after The Transformers: The Movie, where we learned there was a mythical significance to "Prime." Not a criticism of the story, but it shows you how much the Transformers mythos was being made up as it went along.

 

from The Transformers: The Movie #1

The first half of the comics adaptation of the movie is fine; it's a bit jumpy and narration heavy, and I wonder how much it would make sense to someone who hadn't actually seen the film. The death of Optimus Prime seems kind of crammed in... on the other hand, the capture of Megatron by Unicron and subsequent transformation into Galvatron is very well done. Mostly reading it made me aware of how much work the film's soundtrack and editing did in making the events seem grandiose.

 

As mentioned above, I directly segued from page 5 of issue #2 of the comic into Target: 2006. In this story, Galvatron attempts to escape Unicron's control by travelling back in time to 1986. (The actual movie was set in 2005, as was the comic adaptation; in the UK comic, the movie's events were set in 2006, and the UK printing of the comic adaptation edited it to be consistent with that, but the compendium doesn't include those edits.) However, this isn't very clear at first: Target: 2006 is designed to be someone's introduction to the movie mythos, and so these things are very gradually revealed to the 1986 characters (and thus the reader) across the course of the story's first seven parts. 

 

Thus, reading it with the added context of already having read/seen the movie undermines it a bit... but to be honest, is probably also helpful, because there is a lot going on here. When Galvatron and his minions come back in time, three Autobots including Optimus Prime disappear, so they are disarray; this means that back on Cybetron, the Autobot resistance becomes aware that something has snuffed out the Creation Matrix, and so Ultra Magnus travels to Earth to find out what, even though he's a key part of a planned attack by the Wreckers on the Decepticon elite that can't be adjusted. So we're not just following Galvatron's machinations but also Ultra Magnus's adventures and what's going on back on Cybertron! Plus, Furman jumps around a lot chronologically; each installment almost always begins a bit after the previous one ended and then fills in some, if not all, of its events retrospectively. I admire his structural ambition, but I very often got lost and some key details of the story eluded me (I was very surprised when Starscream woke up in the Ark... totally missed where he was brought back to it).

 

from The Transformers UK #82

Still, the ambition of the story is admirable. This is surely Furman's first go at what we would now recognize as "Furmanist" storytelling: using the mythos of Transformers to its own end, rather than tying it into human characters, extrapolating from the much more "space opera" mode of the movie. I always like Ultra Magnus, and this is a good showing for him. I do think one of the story's big weaknesses is that not every comic book artist is cut out for drawing Transformers; you can probably get away with this in a story with a lot of human characters, but in a Furmanist story with only robots, you have to be good at drawing robots. Unfortunately, Will Simpson is not. It's a breath of fresh air when Geoff Senior turns up to do the last two installments reviewed here.

 

The other weird thing about reading in this sequence is that Kup and Blurr were pretty much completely cut out of the comics adaptation of the film, despite being prominent in the actual film, so when they appear with Hot Rod at the end of part six, you're very much like, "Who are those guys?" It's also jarring to have Target: 2006 heavily revolve around the comics version of the Matrix, where it's the "Creation Matrix," a computer program in Optimus's mind (than can be mentally transferred between people, even into a human being), when the story it ties into has the very different "Matrix of Leadership," a physical object in Optimus's chest.

 

This is the seventh in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #21-22 and UK issues #85-92. (See also a side post analyzing the "Budianskian"/"Furmanist" framing.) Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)
2. US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30 (1984-85) 
3. US #9-12 / UK #31-41 (1985-86) 
4. US #13-14 / UK #42-54 (1985-86) 
5. US #15-16 / UK #54-63 (1985-86)
6. US #17-20 / UK #64-74 (1986) 

* Yes, I know this scan comes from an issue not reviewed in this post... but I like it too much to omit! 

Black Panther: Long Live the King by Nnedi Okorafor, André Lima Araújo, et al.

Long Live the King is another miniseries that ran alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates's main Black Panther ongoing; similar to World of Wakanda, it tells smaller stories, though T'Challa is the protagonist in most of these, unlike the ones in World. I had actually read it before, as it was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story back in 2019.

from Black Panther: Long Live the King #2

There are three stories here; the first, by Nnedi Okorafor and André Lima Araújo, appears in issues #1, 2, and, oddly, 5, and is about T'Challa investigating a monster that's causing earthquakes in Wakanda. It didn't really hang together for me; everyone acts like T'Challa is crazy when he says he can see a monster but no one else can. Like, c'mon, you guys live in the Marvel universe, stuff like this happens all the time! The story tries to explore a subgroups of Wakandans who live without technology, but doesn't really go anywhere interesting with that, and I found making a new character an old childhood friend of T'Challa was not actually an effective way to get me to care. I also don't care for how recent Black Panther comics have watered down Christopher Priest's Hatute Zeraze from feared Wakandan secret police to generic guards. (I feel like the rough edges of his conception of Wakanda are being sanded off.) I often find Okorador's dialogue stilted in her novels, and that's true of her comics as well. Araújo's artwork is technically competent but rarely interesting to look at.

from Black Panther: Long Live the King #3

The second story, by Aaron Covington and Mario Del Pennino, appears in issues #3-4. I just reread my notes on it and I still don't remember what it's about, except it once again depends on a previously unmentioned childhood friend of T'Challa's to generate drama, so... 

The last story, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford, I remember confused me when I read it originally because it takes place in an alternate universe, but the trade paperback it was collected in completely failed to mention that. Thankfully, reading in single issues, you get an explanatory text page that does give some context for why the Black Panther is suddenly a wheelchair-using Nigerian woman bonded to the Venom symbiote... but not why anyone might think this worth telling stories about. 

Back when I read these for the Hugos, I ranked them below No Award. I stand by that. This is generic superhero stuff, not the best of the genre or the character. Presumably churned out to make sure there was lots of Black Panther content on the shelves when the film was released.

from Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury #1

That's probably also true of Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury, a one-shot about T'Challa battling Klaw. It's written by Ralph Macchio, who previously wrote Black Panther way back in 1982... and if you told me this was an inventory script hanging out in his drawer since 1982, I would believe you. Macchio was a prolific comics writer back in the 1980s, and his style doesn't seem to have moved on since then. Overly wordy, very simple characterization. Actually, that's not fair to the actual comics of the 1980s, which were usually better than this. If this was a new story put out to tie into the film, I'm not sure what anyone involved was thinking.

Black Panther: Long Live the King originally appeared in six issues (Feb.-Apr. 2018). The stories were written by Nnedi Okorafor (#1-2, 5-6) and Aaron Covington (#3-4); illustrated by André Lima Araújo (#1-2, 5), Mario Del Pennino (#3-4), and Tana Ford (#6); inked by Terry Pallot & Scott Hanna (#6); colored by Chris O'Halloran (#1-5) and Ian Herring & Irma Kniivila (#6); lettered by Richard Starkings (#4) and Jimmy Betancourt (#1-6); and edited by Devin Lewis.

"The Sound and the Fury!" originally appeared in issue #1 of Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury (Apr. 2018). The story was written by Ralph Macchio, illustrated by Andrea Di Vito, colored by Laura Villari, lettered by Travis Lanham, and edited by Mark Basso.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Review: The Transformers Classics, Vol. 4 by Bob Budiansky, Jose Delbo, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, 296 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1988-89)
Acquired August 2014
Read May 2016

The Transformers Classics, Vol. 4

Written by Bob Budiansky, Ralph Macchio
Pencils by Jose Delbo, Alan Kupperberg, Frank Springer
Inks by Dave Hunt & Don Hudson, Danny Bulanadi, Dave Elliott
Letters by Bill Oakley, Kurt Hathaway, Rick Parker
Colors by Nel Yomtov

At this point, you either love Bob Budiansky's approach to Transformers, or you don't. I don't. Characters with ill-defined gimmicks are just piled on again and again. I know this isn't all his fault, but I still have to read it, and I don't like doing so. The one bright spot for most of this book is Ratbat, Decepticon fuel auditor, the only evil leader awesome enough to gloat about his account books:

If I were a Decepticon, I would clearly be Ratbat. I gotta get me a Ratbat toy.
from The Transformers #41 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Jose Delbo & Danny Bulanadi)

But the Headmasters clog up an already overcrowded book, and there's not too much to inspire here, until the very end. The four-part "The Underbase Saga" starts off kind of dumb when Jesse infiltrates a Decepticon base disguised as a beach to rescue Buster, who has become a total waste of a character by this point. (I think he spends this whole volume as a hostage.) How the Decepticons could get away with this strains belief, even in this comic.

What does she even get out of a relationship with Buster, anyway?
from The Transformers #47 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Jose Delbo & Dave Hunt)

It all becomes worth it, though, for Starscream ascending to ultimate power. Previously, he's been a big nonentity in this series, but I always enjoy a good supervillain-on-the-way-to-godhood rant.

If enjoying this is wrong, I don't want to be right.
from The Transformers #50 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Jose Delbo & Dave Hunt)

It's not Bob Budiansky's best story, but it is his best in a long while, and a fitting subject for the climax of fifty issues of The Transformers.

In Two Weeks: Though there are three more volumes of The Transformers Classics, that was the last in the IDW Humble Bundle, so I'm skipping ahead quite a bit-- to what happens after the war in Regeneration One!

Review: The Transformers Classics, Vol. 1 by Bob Budiansky et al.

Last year, I reviewed the components of IDW's Doctor Who Humble Bundle; IDW also has done a couple Transformers Humble Bundles, and I've downloaded the components of both of them and have been reading an issue a day over breakfast, on days where I don't have other comics to read. There are diverse range of comics on hand, and I'll be reviewing them in some semblance of continuity order, beginning with the first volume of the collected Generation One comics:

Comic PDF eBook, 315 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 1984-86)
Acquired August 2014
Read November 2015

The Transformers Classics, Vol. 1

Plots by Bill Mantlo, Jim Salicrup, Bob Budiansky
Scripts by Ralph Macchio, Jim Salicrup, Bob Budiansky
Pencils by Frank Springer, Alan Kupperberg, William Johnson, Ricardo Villamonte, Herb Trimpe, Don Perlin
Inks by Kim DeMulder, Ian Akin and Brian Garvey, Alan Kupperberg, Kyle Baker, Brad Joyce, Tom Palmer, Al Gordon
Letters by Michael Higgins, Rick Parker, Janice Chiang, John Workman, Diana Albers
Colors by Nelson Yomtov

I have a bit of a mixed relationship with The Transformers. I loved the two spin-offs of the original cartoon, Beast Wars and Beast Machines, both of which I followed devotedly in high school. But my attempts to return to the source material have done little for me: I don't care for any single episode of the original 1980s Transformers cartoon I have seen, aside from the 1986 film, which I like not so much for its quality, but for the sublimely unique experience that is watching it: toy robot advertisements meets mythological saga, featuring both Orson Welles and Weird Al. But I always like the idea of the Transformers-- how could you not?-- and with the cheapness of a Humble Bundle, I'm willing to give it another go.

Unfortunately, I think the opening volume of the 1980s Marvel Transformers comic betrays all the weaknesses of the format. While I think the Beast-era cartoons managed to put storytelling above toy-selling, this comic drowns in its toy-commercial roots, driven home by the giant panels where umpteen characters introduce themselves, their gimmicks, and potted explanations of their own personalities:

And, get this, this is only half of the spread! There are two whole pages of Autobots doing this, plus another whole page for the Decepticons earlier in the issue.
from The Transformers #1 (plot by Bill Mantlo, script by Ralph Macchio, art by Frank Springer & Kim DeMulder)

The worst part of it is that little of these introductions even matter! You never hear from most of these characters in any substantive way, and when you do, they're written completely generically-- the little bits of personality they deploy here never matter. This is probably unavoidable by the design of the comic; when you have eighteen good guy characters and eleven bad guy ones, and are constantly adding new ones as new toys come out, it becomes impossible for more than a handful of them, if that, to receive any kind of focus in a 22-page comic book!

The human characters are few and distinctive enough to pop, though not always for the best. There's a kid who's an obvious reader surrogate, "Buster" Witwicky, son of a mechanic but with no mechanical aptitude himself, but I find myself gravitating more toward his single father, "Sparkplug", a grizzled Vietnam vet who is scared by these strange alien robots but still has a heart of gold.

Surprisingly serious stuff, actually.
from The Transformers #4 (script by Jim Salicrup, art by Frank Springer and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey)

I also found myself liking Ratchet, the ambulance Transformer who is the Autobot's mechanic, but I think that might be because I imagined him voiced by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Jeff Combs, who voiced Ratchet in the 2010-13 cartoon Transformers: Prime.

Initially, the first four issues are written by three writers (Bill Mantlo, Ralph Macchio, and Jim Salicrup), but after that, the long-serving Bob Budiansky takes over. I've of two minds about Budiansky's work. He obviously doesn't want things to be stale. While on television, The Transformers was about Autobots led by Optimus Prime and Decepticons led by Megatron fighting an unchanging war, Budiansky is constantly adjusting the status quo. The logical Shockwave assumes control of the Decepticons, and manages to subdue and capture most of the Autobots. The Shockwave-Megatron throwdown is probably the best sequence in this whole volume, but other than that, the old status quo had so little time to bed in, that seeing the Autobots scattered and leaderless isn't all that effective an upset, and the Autobots don't end up with a whole lot of focus.

That said, this is a pretty great issue-ending image.
from The Transformers #5 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Alan Kupperberg)

Budiansky likes to sprinkle in tales that put some focus on the human element, with mixed results; the trucker whose trailer is stolen by the Decepticons has some potential; the man who finds his life of crime enhanced by his possession of a Megatron locked into handgun mode is much more entertaining. So there's obviously potential here, but thus far I feel like Budiansky and his very varied artistic collaborators aren't really delivering on it.

(One last note of complaint: two issues here feature Marvel-owned characters, Spider-Man and Circuit Breaker, in issues #3 and #9. IDW actually did get the rights to reprint them in hard copy, which was, I believe, a first, but apparently not electronically. I understand that these things happen, but the e-book version of this collection doesn't explain their omission, just cutting from issue #2 to #4, and from page 55 to page 81, without a single comment!)

Next Week: Bob Budiansky does his best-ever work on The Transformers, in Classics, Vol. 2!