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#transformers #mtmteI’ve been thinking about this all day, and it’s kind of distracting me from my Work-work, so I’m going to go ahead and write this down so I’ll get it out of my system.
Spoilers for MTMTE #38…
I’ve said this before: Transformers has historically been a pretty regressive franchise, even for...
Ratchet and conflict de-escalation. I was surprised to notice how often he does this even just in the first two volumes - it’s almost always his first solution to potential violence.
Ratchet continues to be excellent at de-escalating potentially violent situations.
So here are some of the characters I’ve been working on lately which have shown up on the cover to MTMTE 41 :) Yes, They are all female transformers and out of these designs 3 of them I also choose the names for.
It was fun to help create these characters. I know I’ve wanted more female characters in transformers for a while now. I’ve always placed one or more in the background of various TF projects I’ve worked on. Now we have the opportunity to have more of them and I’m very happy about that.
When the story came up for having new female characters I knew that I would like to have some of the characters that haven’t been used yet. I know I really wanted Firestar and James was able to get her for MTMTE. Then we were talking and he asked me to come up with a crew of new characters, both male and female and I was pretty excited about that. He didn’t have any names in mind at the time, so I wrote down a bunch of names and looked up on the wiki and tfu.info if they had been used. A lot of them hadn’t to my surprise so I showed them to James and he liked them. I then came up with a head sketch of them, and mentioned which ones were female and which ones were male, and he liked them. then I set out to design them.
These are the design I came up with. I wanted there to be a lot of different looking bots. First I started with Firestar. She is the more traditional look for a female TF, but where her main difference is her height. She is a very tall bot. She towers over most of the others. Not as tall as Megatron or Ultra Magnus, but she’s taller then Rodimus and most of the other Lost Light crew. I also had the idea to give her fire hair since in alt mode her head is the where the exhaust of the car. It also help add a little more emotion to the character since I can have the fire doing different things when she’s feeling different emotions. I thought it was different and something interesting to play with. With her torso design I decided to give her the same style of split canopy that Nautica has since it solved a design issue I was having at the time. Also I like the idea of some of the characters sharing similar design features :)
Next is Javelin. She was fin to draw since I wanted something very different looking. I enjoy the look of the head where is a single eye. i thought can we have a character with a single eye and not be a victim of empurata? why not?.
Next we have Proxima. When I described her to James I said she would be the equal of better of Perceptor. She would be a extreme multitasker. With her e4 head design she has main visor style eye, but 3 other eyes where 2 can move around her head.
Roadmaster was fun to design. I wanted a big characters that looked like she would bend and break you if you looked at her the wrong way. She is the biggest of the characters I’ve designed so far, matching Ultra Magnus in height (well to his head, not shoulders) When I was working on this character I thought an interesting variant would be to make a strika out of her, but then I would want strika to be a bit bigger then her. But the idea is in the back of my mind so maybe I’ll work something out of it?|
Last character who isn’t on the cover, but I saw that she was partially shown on a post on the credit’s page is Velocity. Another fun design where I got to play around with features that I don’t normally see with many TF’s :)
Thats it for now
Enjoy :)
Ratchet would’ve solved every conflict in two minutes.
Please don’t take this too seriously, I’m just fucking around. I personally really liked the issue.
I will be so mad if this arc doesn’t go exactly like this.
LOTS of Transformers from IDW today, including a reference-heavy issue of MTMTE! Not a sitcom watcher? Don’t pay a heck of a lot of attention to Swerve’s shoulder over the course of four frickin’ years? TFWiki’s here to help! Where everybody knows your name - ‘cos we turned off anonymous editing a while back.
ALSO THIS WEEK!
COMBINER HUNTERS #1 - “An Uneventful Night”
WINDBLADE #5 - “Race Against the Light”
and TRANSFORMERS VS. G.I. JOE #8 - “Pax Megatronus”
(If you enjoy my regular detailed write-ups of IDW titles for TFWiki, please consider showing your support on Patreon - you wouldn’t believe how much time this takes when they release four issues on one day!)
THE OLD MAN’S BACK AGAIN! A desperate last gamble that might mean the sacrifice of one of their own gives the Autobots a chance to fight back - but what will it take for Megatron to join them? Find out in MTMTE #54, the penultimate chapter of THE DYING OF THE LIGHT, now on TFWiki!
If you enjoy my regular detailed write-ups of IDW titles and other Transformers media for TFWiki, please consider showing your support on Patreon, or just send a donation my way via PayPal sometime!
Come back next week for the final issues of SINS OF THE WRECKERS and G.I. JOE VS TRANSFORMERS!
Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye #50, @idwcomics
Story by James Roberts
Art by Alex Milne and Brendan Cahill
Colors by Joana Lafuente, Priscilla Tramontano, and John-Paul Bove
It’s not often these days that we get the opportunity to see a comic reach its fiftieth issue, and that MTMTE has done so is a testament to its quality. We’ve followed Rodimus and friends (and not-friends) on their quest to find the Knights of Cybertron (please pretend that text has been Blingee’d) and the many, many…many distractions they’ve faced along the way. Between spark-eaters, mad doctors, monsters in the basement, Megatron Himself joining the crew, a chase sequence through time(complete with Back to the Future references), and all of the other abundant deterrents the crew of the Lost Light have confronted, surely they’ve come so far in their adventure?
…Nah.
However, #50 marks a huge change in the status quo of MTMTE as we know it. “How Bright Their Frail Deeds”, the first story in this issue, takes a sharp turn as things get dire for Team Rodimus. The storytelling is paced exquisitely and, paired with Milne’s beautiful artwork, creates an almost cinematic experience while reading. Each page will have the reader on the edge of their seat wondering what more could possibly go wrong for our heroes.
The second installation, “No Guns, No Swords, No Briefcases”, is a short character piece focusing on the memories the crew (and we, the readers) have made on their journey. Cahill’s art in this story really strengthens the blow the reader feel with his grasp on subtle body language and emotion. The story is poignant and sweet and funny, and you will need tissues.
MTMTE #50 is a hallmark in the series, and only Roberts knows where it will go from here. Will it break our hearts? Probably. But I’ve always enjoyed suffering the slow burn of a good story. I mean, as Swerve so eloquently puts it, “Who wants closure? Let’s really stretch this sucker out.”
ComiXologist Prime is a Digital Editor at ComiXology and really, who is that pseudonym kidding?
THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN! Pinned down by the DJD, the Autobots must weigh their options, but just as a window of escape appears, a moral dilemma forces them to choose between fight and flight. Perhaps some surprising back-up will save the day…? Find out in MTMTE #51, now annotated on TFWiki!
(If you enjoy my regular detailed write-ups of IDW titles and other Transformers media for TFWiki, please consider showing your support on Patreon, or maybe just buy me a coffee sometime!)
rosalarian
So you’re young and queer and everything you know about sex has come from porn because nobody’s teaching it to you at school and frankly some of what you’ve witnessed is terrifying. You’re intrigued by sex and your hormones are raging and you want to have sex but you don’t want to get fisted while someone beats you with a cheese grater. You’re young and your baseline state of being is *uncomfortable* and *powerless* and you just want some semblance of control and something resembling comfort and you want to find people who don’t make you feel so weird all the time. You see queer people reveling in being weird, and you’re panicking that people think you’re like that because the last thing you want is to be seen as weird. You’re gay but you’re not gay-gay, you’re normal if you can just ignore this one small difference.
And then here comes a group of people who commiserate with you, but only on the surface. They, too, hate how weird Pride is, how weird queer culture is, how terrifying queer sexuality is, how awful kink is. They tell you that your discomfort is actually a form of harm, that nobody should ever make you think about the things you don’t want to think about, that you should be protected from it. They use the language of social justice and it feels like social justice to you. People are doing things to you! Without your consent! It’s psychic rape! How dare they?
But then you get older and you scratch beneath the surface and remove the masks and find that underneath, those people who told you that you were being harmed were intense homophobes, who found queer sexuality terrifying because they found queer people terrifying. They don’t “consent” to queers being sexy or kinky because they don’t “consent” to queers existing. They consider all sex bad, and queer people as inherently sexual, so queer people are inherently bad unless they go out of their way to desexualize themselves as much as possible. And you find that they’re transphobes and terfs and they consider trans identities to be fetishes and this is why they want to hide fetish. As soon as they’re done driving all the sexy, kinky, trans queers into hiding with your help, they can move onto the less outrageous queers. They’re moving onto you, even though you’d never call yourself queer because you’re young and uncomfortable and afraid of being weird. They’re uncomfortable and they learned that their discomfort was harm and they never sat down to examine those feelings. They’re the Karens of the world calling the cops on black folks for just existing in their vicinity. They think children should be completely sheltered from all that liberal nonsense.
And the queer elders try to speak up, try to tell the young ones about our history, but it’s so hard when we keep getting entire generations wiped out in the holocaust and the AIDS crisis. Our books burned and our people left for dead. Half of those left only survived through assimilation and internalizing that they needed to shed all of their queerness and become plastic Barbies and Kens, perfect and sexless, and this worked for them, in a way, in that they survived, so they think that this is a reasonable solution. Just cover up and get married and live quietly. Disown the loud queers, the ones still demanding more, the ones still pushing boundaries, the ones who don’t want to hide, who question the rules. They rewrite history to say gay rights were won when marriage was won and now the fight is over and anyone who is still complaining should shut up, lest our overlords hear and take away what little we were allowed to have.
The truth of the matter is that people are more naked at the beach than at Pride. Kink harnesses are normalized in fashion everywhere. Overt displays of heterosexual sexuality are everywhere. Children are not harmed by this. They will not be harmed by all of this in a queer context. No one will be harmed by this because discomfort is not harm and it was never about that. It was about hijacking discomfort for an anti-queer agenda. It’s being driven largely by sheltered teens and homophobes taking advantage of them. But the internet is a big stew where those people have the same platform and reach as queer historians and activists and hot takes spread faster than research and knowledge. We don’t have to engage. It’s settled. It’s done. Wear your gimp mask to Pride. The kids are alright.
