Kavinay

I wanted to love this book. Daniel José Older's short story and narration was the standout for me in “A Certain Point of View” and I really hoped he could do a lot with Lando especially in this novel.

Unfortunately, Last Shot is okay to good, not great. While he Older had me at “Ewok Slicer” it just feels like the book dragged on throughout. You could almost ditch part I completely for example and give us even more Lando & L3. It takes a while but the plot does get going eventually and it's a nice smuggler anthology in a way.

One thing is clear though: Lando > Han in almost every respect. I think part of this is that canon really hems Han in now with both Solo and the OT+Force Awakens movies. Stuff happens to Han whereas Lando is still an intriguing mover and shaker who's allowed to develop outside movie canon. This may be what contributes to the sense of a lost opportunity to do even more with the two scoundrels than Older was allowed to.

As an aside, the audiobook itself is great. Three narrators, including Older himself and they all do a very good good job. I just love how you can practically feel Older grinning through the spoken word and it went a long way towards enjoying the overall story.

I just don't have anything nice to say about the story or art. It's honestly a book you could and probably should avoid.

Nick Roche's alternative covers are nice.

Points for weaving together many strands of the plotline.Unfortunately I wonder how much better then book and trilogy could have been idnit was less fractured.
I have to admit, the fawning over Stackpole's leading men bordered on disturbing, not just heavy-handed. A late forties Hanse Davion contemplating impregnaying his eighteen year old child bride is especially creepy.

This is the first Hasbro-verse crossover that was not just okay, but fantastic! I'd have no problem with Transformers interacting with organics if the comics were as engaging and TF focused as this.

A decent shift into a post-war continuity. I admit, I really dislike Figueroa's shift to Bayverse-style character designs, but he still does a better job with such translations than the movies ever did.

The series is a bit slow but issue 6 is a solid payoff that establishes a lot in terms of developing Bumblebee, Rodimus and Optimus. These “peace-time” changes in their thinking goes a long way towards developing the runs of Barber and Roberts to come down the road.

It's okay, but this story suffers from the same problems of many 80s comics: protagonists need to turn incredibly stupid (allowing themselves to be controlled) to create a plot to solve. It's just a bit cringe-inducing when you consider some of the other stuff IDW pumped out around the same time (i.e. Last Stand of the Wreckers).

I really like this book, yet I don't know why. The resurrection of Ironhide is poorly hand-waved away, but this is simply a beautifully illustrated book. Coller's pencils are really clean and cinemati, yet I really think the star of the book is Lafuente's colours. Seriously, this is just an amazingly coloured series. The next time someone laments about the nostalgic days of four colours, give them this book and tell them to shut up.

You get the sense that Mike Costa really didn't have a lot for his Cybertronians to say. That's not a metaphor. Panels are large, dialogue relatively terse and the stories are fairly decompressed compared to where IDW would eventually end up with in Barber and Roberts' writing.

There are a few interesting ideas here: +1 star entirely due to Thundercracker's budding fascination with Earth culture. Ultimately though, this book is probably one of the weakest parts of IDW's run. Anytime humans have drastically more pages of dialogue than Cybertronians, you're more unlikely to get a compelling Transformers story.

James Roberts + Alex Milne! Outstanding. Cybertron before the war, the Chaos two-parter, is how you get hooked on the IDW Transformers universe.

Even Mike Costa's Rodimus story is quite good. I think it bears pointing out that little to no human involvement forces the story to be about Cybertronians and that's so much better than anything else in his run.

Costa has a few good ideas, but it's just more running around/filling up panels. Stuff happens... it just doesn't really make sense or at least captivate.

The art improves with Milne coming on. Best part of these issues really might have been Nick Roche's alternative covers. :(

Better than much of Costa's run on Earth, but still mired by the fact that humans are profoundly boring. The twist in regards to Spike's actions all along is better than nothing, but doesn't feel worth an 30 issue run to pay off.

“Altrusim and morality have a consumption cost like any other...“

There are two ways to look at Kaplan's work:
1. That this is a cynical work on political game theory that predicts the rise of Trump like figures.
2. That politcal economy, however unseemly, is a fascinating result of the electorate, politicians, media and so on attempting to navigate the fundamental irrational forces at work in democracy.

Ultimately, Kaplan's point is often that markets, both economic and behavioural, trump idealogy in terms of what motivates policies.

It's a profound disturbance to realize the conditions of your birth and family history were entirely defined by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.

Honestly, this is a bit of a ham-fisted wrap-up to the post-Furman era of IDW's Transformers. D-void is a bit dumb and underwhelming as a climax to this series.

That being said, the execution of this storyline is better than could be expected. Ramondelli's art has its drawbacks in terms of character expression (i.e. the complete oppositie of Milne or Roche), but for an epic scale battle for Cybertron, it works quite well.

The intro and focus on characters that would go on to populate MTMTE as well does quite a bit to reinvigorate Costa's script even if the majority of battle itself is plodding.

The Raven Guard/Iron Hands marriages of convenience are becoming as tropey and boring as anything to do with Calth.

The Seventh Serpent might be the best story in the lot, but even then, you struggle to keep the cast of characters straight. Is it because it's too complex or really just that it's so hard to care about any of these interchangeable marines?

Move along.

It's surprising how far back Neiwert starts this book, but it makes sense. Movements built on eliminationism, misogyny and racism have been around for a long time. In this context, Neiwert is able to illustrate that extreme right-wing movements have always helped skew American political discourse and theory towards extremism even as the fringe championing it was publicly denounced.

What you have as a result is more of a historical look at the ingredients that constructed and fueled the rise of the Alt-Right and it makes Neiwert's analysis far more useful and interesting than shallower reads such as Angela Nagle's Kill all Normies. The “this” of the proverbial rant against pro-Trump/Fascist political forces is not just a sudden radicalization or disaffection of the right. Neiwert gives you two big tools: history and analysis of authoritarian psychology to explain the appeal that extermination, hatred of women and fear of minorities will always hold in a country where the right-wing traditionally absorbs such sentiment as almost normative.

Better than the novel. Unlike Zahn's book, the adapted graphic novel doesn't get bogged down in places such as Imperial Hogwarts.

Argh. Soule's story telling is fine, the art is just a major obstacle for me.

There is some thing about the combination of Unzueta's pencils and Prianto's colours that is just really jarring. It's an uncanny valley effect of reproducing the likenesses of on-screen characters on the page. I'm not saying the art is poor. Far from it. In fact, it might be that the two artists do such a good job at the photo-realistic portrayals of characters like Poe and Leia that I'm stuck on the art rather than experiencing it with Soule's writing.

This book is terrifying. You can't worry about what you don't count and it's a tradition that Tirman connects through copious research and stats throughout America's wars.

To be glib, it makes you realize how the action movies and news coverage of your youth all tied into a relatively blatant attempt by US political and military policy to dehumanize civilians of other countries and thereby reduce how seriously their deaths were treated by a country that styles itself as a city upon a hill.

Not great. The Jake Pentecost backup story is dramatically better than the main story. Even then, it's an underwhelming addition to the canon compared to Tales from the drift. A criminal waste of Hannibal Chau too.

Cohen really is a true believer. At least on a small scale, he really does make good case for socialism. Where it breaks down is really anything applied to a larger scale without a dispute mechanism (i.e. markets). I found his objection to market socialism in particular more telling than objectionable as he seems to really want all participants in a socialist system to be true believers too. At that point, I think he's completely lost the plot as we're now dealing with ideologues as the reason why the system works rather than a self-correcting feature of the system itself (i.e. even capitalism would work if it was “true” capitalism and not corrupted by cronyism and regulatory capture, etc.).

There's actually nothing unpredictable in this book. It's basically an evangelical scholar outing his own community as political opportunists.
One of the more useful history lessons in Fea's primer on religious power in America is his focus on the phenomena of court evangelicals. A brilliant term for faith leaders attracted to wealth entrenching politicians.

I don't really have any great fondness.for TOS, but I think I'll always make exceptions for the mirror universe. Such a great device to turn conventions on their head and really embrace the pulpy side of Trek.

The puns and Bond homages are very good. The movie continuity is utter crap, but that's not Barber's fault. If anything, he goes out of his way to try and make the story as compelling as possible given the cinematic universe's straitjacket.

It's almost cheating to include the Annual, The Starscream Move, here. It might be the single best story told in the run of IDW's universe. Thundercracker under John Barber is an utter joy.

The mainline issues though are another matter. A lot of Prime's critics are basically rehashing the same points over and over again. I get it Slide/Pyra Magna...

Still what's clever about Barber's run in the end is his approach to Optimus (and Cybertron in general) not at as a hagiography but rather as a the more fallible character that Arcee memorializes. We all know how Primes end... but Barber and company did try hard to achieve something something noteworthy compared to conventional “such heroic nonsense.” :D