Looks like the A cover was Jhiaxus smooshing Boltax's (virtual) head. I didn't even recognize the poor sod.
In any case, Foolery, I need some discussion/input on #'s 94 and 0.
The Galvatron/Magnus fight. Shitballs, this is awesome. When you read (and you will read, trust me) the UK fights between these two, they're always inconclusive. This shows both as being even more badass than expected, and the winner is not exactly who I would've thought. I love the way this Magnus is irritated with this Galvatron referring to fighting him "again"--and, at the same time, there's a throwback to Magnus' UK origin (still the same?) that he was dubbed the "Greatest Warrior" by Xaaron.
But, fuck, they
both survived getting the shit knocked out of each other
and blasted by a fucking WarWorld that disintegrated poor Cosmos last issue and took out what looks like a few (at least) square miles here. Fucking hardcore!
Is Grimlock alive? Or just animated by Primus? He looks pretty intact to have fallen that far, so there's a possibility he will live now that Primus' spirit has left him. I wasn't quite sure how to "pronounce" his weird speech with the random-seeming slashes. Is he saying multiple things at once?
A few of the corpses in the Primus chamber look like they were drawn to be recognized, but I don't. The closest one to the foreground could be either Apeface or Snapdragon, but not sure. I recall Apeface being melted by Unicron, but not sure what happened to Snapdragon.
"Great God Ginrai" as an epithet. Fuckin-A!
Really dig the way Omega Supreme is a last line of defense again, and back to his original huge-ass size. The inconsistencies through the G1 run bugged me, because he became weaker in later stories so it wasn't just an art error (repeated an awful lot).
Also, I guess Starscream is keeping a low profile about now to see who might come out on top.
#0. Holy shit. I have to say again that Bove's matching the coloring style to what was current on the comic during a particular artist's run (including the cool-ass painted look for Anderson's pseudo-UK story), while maintaining a modern style on Hot Rod is
fucking incredible. It's like the homage pages from the IDW-verse annuals, only squared. No, cubed. And this really is the first time I can ever say, "Holy shit, that Jose Delbo Transformers artwork is awesome!" I really think it's the realization that people remember these stories twenty years later that made him work to his full potential.
Now, obviously each of these four vignettes will be important in the final six issues and aren't just here for our amusement. I think that goes without saying.
The Deathbringer story (and, goddamn, I love Geoff Senior) does an excellent job of telling the story that confused the fuck out of us all as kids. It actually sticks pretty closely to the UK story (which was pretty underwhelming when I read it years after the fact, since it seemed like it would be a much bigger deal--still, you should read it when the current paperbacks get to that point). Didn't realize Denver got as fucked up as it did in the battle, though. Jesus. We need to check on JJL.
The main point of that story is that there is
still a Dark Matrix out there, because the energy stored in the Deathbringer could not be destroyed. (Which raises the question of what happened to the Matrix itself when Prime destroyed Unicron? It wasn't referenced again in G1, but did show up in the G2 splinter timeline.)
Part 2: Love the UK coloring style. Jhiaxus' backstory is a bit different from the G2 comic, but, hey, who cares? G2 kinda sucked in comparison to this.
The Underbase was a product of the melding of the minds of Boltax, Jhiaxus, some dude named Decanus, and two unnamed generics. (I asked on the FB page if one was meant to be Alpha Trion, since there's a definite resemblance, and was surprised to get a very quick answer that the script called for "elders like Alpha Trion" but not him.) We learn that Jhiaxus stole the knowledge of life itself and then erased himself from Cybertronian history. So, in this universe, he truly is a non-Decepticon Cybertronian, since the Underbase was ejected from Cybertron around the beginning of the war. Presumably he's learned to "bud" new Transformers, since he clearly had Rook and the rest of his army in the early RG1 issue, but either this knowledge was kept secret from others by Boltax, or was erased by Jhiaxus as well.
So, is this merely the origin of Jhiaxus? Or is there something to do with the Underbase? If he deleted the secrets of life, then is all that remains the knowledge of destruction, explaining why a database was so fucking dangerous? And, in keeping with Hot Rod's ruminations on energy not being destroyed, the Underbase is still presumably out there somewhere. Might it somehow play into the Dark Matrix? Could we be looking at an RG1 version of The Swarm? And is there some weird connection with Earth being destroyed by zombies primarily slain by the Underbase?
Part 3. Sniff, sniff. (Although there is a pretty devious irony that Buster and Jesse are killed by Ratbat in a car wash.) Minor thing first: What the fuck is Bugly doing here? He survived Starscream's Underbase rampage because he was a Pretender. Even if a lot of casualties were retconned in after the fact, issue #50 is pretty explicit there. Whoever wrote this up on TFWiki said it's likely not an error, and he was killed off panel later, since he last appeared in #55. Only one problem with that: his body was in Autobot custody, on the Ark. There's no point where any Decepticon could be killed and placed in cold storage on the Ark. I'm going to chalk it up as an error. But Bugly's never looked better, so fuck it, I don't care.
Now the bigger deal: What is the purpose here? It's not simply a "whatever happened to...?" story. As major as Buster was in the original book, there were tons of others from both the US and UK books who are presumed dead. Hot Rod seems to lean toward the real purpose being Spike's decision to act (since it looks like he wasn't being quite as vigilant about the Ark as he told Optimus Prime, and, regardless of his whole "I hate being Fort Max's head" shtick, refusing to act when a rampaging Deceptizombie horde has made it, mostly on foot, for crying out loud, from near the Arctic Circle to Oregon is a bit extreme. (Spike also looks like he's in a hotel, not at home, if that's important.)
But I don't think that's it. Bizarrely running into the Transformers a lot by coincidence afterward was the only ramification of his time with the Autobots in the US books, but the UK books basically said he could never get rid of all the Matrix energy he'd stored. I'm thinking it's more to do with that, and the whole "energy cannot be destroyed" thing. So, if Buster still possessed Matrix energy when he died, where did it go?
Part 4: Nick Roche and "true" G1 is a marriage made in heaven. I'd assume this is the Rhythms of Darkness parallel world that Galvatron II hails from. The events here certainly explain how that world's Hot Rod could become Rodimus Prime and, yet, Galvatron and Unicron are victorious because somehow Rodimus dies despite holding the Matrix (he loses it when HR distracts him, since this Rodimus is stupid and still carries it on Galvatron's chain). He's clearly more bent on justice for Cybertron than destroying Unicron. Hot Rod interrupting the battle and leading to Rodimus' death is a neat TFTM homage--and this is the
only world Hot Rod can interact with. The whole bit about one Primus/Matrix throughout all realities, though possessing forms that can be destroyed in each, makes sense when Hot Rod takes this world's Matrix back to his own. Only odd thing about that would be one of Unicron's three heralds telling Galvatron II that they served a "different Unicron" back in #67. (I wonder if the G1 Unicron tampering with this timeline at a later point is what made Primus attuned to it, bringing Hot Rod to it to accidentally cause Rodimus' death so that Unicron would want to kidnap Galvatron to his own world, and, holy fuck, this is going to go in circles.)
Finale: Holy. Mother. Fucking. Shit. Just. Got.
REAL. I assume at least a quarter of #95 is going to deal with Omega vs Monstructor, and at least another quarter with how exactly Kup wound up on the floor of the WarWorld, about to be skewered. (I hope to fuck he's alive at this moment. I really want to hear some variation on "I knew you had potential, lad!") But, dammit, one of my all-time favorites seems in every universe to go out like a punk bitch in an insanely mismatched fight. (Hey, I suppose that at least it's what he wants!)
