TF Views

Dominic wrote:But, when is the last time Lee did anything TF related? When has he worked for IDW? If IDW did try to contact Figueroa, I am would be suprised that Figueroa did not take the opportunity to get his name out there again, especially given that he is trying to launch his own franchise.

Fair point. If they went to the trouble of having Lee give some commentary, they certainly could and should have gone to more effort getting commentary from people who work or have worked for them.

IDW's output for "Beast Wars" was mixed at best, with the reception generally running negative. (This is ignored by IDW. It is not quite as glaring as how they avoid talking about "Dreamwave's bankruptcy", but they do a pretty good job of downplaying how badly their BW comics turned out.) The 3H BW comics were better, but why would IDW want to reprint those in a comprehensive volume of TF comics? Why would they want to reprint something like "Critical Mass", which is self-contained and something that even long term fans may not have read?

I wouldn't say IDW ignores it, not completely at least, having mentioned BW has struggled in comic book form even if they failed to mention their own series. And even with the poor reception, the first issue of The Gathering would have been better than something like the Armada pack-in comic that they choose because of a stupid internet meme. And I really wouldn't say the 3H BW comics were better. And I can't see convention comics going into a collection like this in the first place. Clearly this is supposed to be a more mainstream collection.

The main problem I see with that book, at least for me personally, is that I already have most of the reprinted issues. Meaning I'd be buying something like that for the commentary, and it sounds like they were unable to get a wide range of Transformers creators from across the years to contribute. That's a pretty steep price for a few extra tidbits of information, so it sounds like a pass for me.

On the other hand, the casual Transformers fan or kid who knows very little of the brand's history might find it an excellent book, with a nice sampling of Transformers fiction from the past 30 years. They'd be missing out too, they just don't know it!