TRANSFORMERS #0 - #6

"PRIME DIRECTIVE"*
Written by Chris Sarracini | Pencils by Pat Lee
Inks by Rob Armstrong w/Erik Sander & Ferdinand Poblete
Backgrounds by Edwin Garcia | Letters by Dreamer Design | Flats by Kenny Li
Colors by TheRealT!, Ramil Sunga, Gary Yeung, Alan Wang, Shaun Curtis,
Rob Ruffalo, Stuart Ng, Angelo Tsang, Juan Malera, Matt Cossin, Pat Lee, Talent Pun
Graphic Design: Paul Villafuerte & Kevin Lee | Edits by Matt Moylan

The Plot: Several years after the Transformers' arrival on Earth, the Autobots defeated the Decepticons and attempted to return to Cybertron aboard the Ark II, along with a human expeditionary force. But The Ark II exploded after takeoff and all aboard were presumed destroyed or killed.

Three years after the Ark II's destruction, a mercenary named Lazarus has located a number of Transformers and reprogrammed them, intending to auction them off to the world's mercenaries as weapons. But the U.S. military has a Transformer of their own, Optimus Prime. Enlisting Spike Witwicky's help, the U.S.'s General Hallo awakens Optimus Prime. Prime gathers a small number of Autobots from the Ark II's undersea crash site to fight Lazarus at his arctic base. But instead, Megatron breaks free of the mercenary's control, restores his Decepticon followers, and renews his plans to conquer the Earth, this time by using a virus to transform it into a replica of Cybertron. The Decepticons escape the arctic, leaving the Autobots to face Megatron's virus.

Optimus and a handful of Autobots pursue the Decepticons (whose ranks are bolstered by the traitorous Dinobot Commander Grimlock) to San Francisco while the remaining Autobots stay behind to fight the virus. Spike, meanwhile, is taken away by General Hallo, who it turns out was actually in league with Lazarus at one time. As the Autobots and Decepticons fight it out in the City by the Bay, Hallo orders a nuclear strike against them. Superion sacrifices himself to save the city and Hallo is gunned down by the president's men. In the arctic, Wheeljack also sacrifices himself to stop Megatron's virus. The Decepticons escape San Francisco in the chaos and Grimlock departs as well, choosing to walk his own path away from the Autobots.

G1 References: The entire series is set in some semblance of the original Generation One continuity from the eighties. Little is made explicit about the past, but we know that at some point the Autobots and Decepticons crashed on Earth just as they did back in 1984, and that their war continued here for some time until the Ark II incident.

Possibly the main difference between this story and the original continuity (besides the human casualties and collateral damage, which I'll discuss below) is that, for the most part, the only Autobots and Decepticons on Earth are the class of 1984 -- the original Transformers. In the original G1 stories -- both cartoons and comics -- that group was eventually joined by other Transformers. On TV, they usually popped up with no explanation while in the comics they were either activated on Earth or sent there from Cyberton. Here, the only Transformers present besides the original 1984 group (and here I use "1984" to mean the characters from the TV show's first season, not the actual first product year) are the Aerialbots. Their presence among this group is unexplained, but it's likely simply a behind-the-scenes reason: the story needed an Autobot gestalt to fight Devastator.

Other references to Generation One include Spike having a son named Daniel (as seen on TV) and a brother named Buster (from the comics; Buster is mentioned but not seen in this series). Beyond that it's minor things like Optimus Prime being equipped with the Autobot Matrix of Leadership and Spike's father being nicknamed "Sparkplug". But, as these comics proceed, the Generation One references and homages will become deeper and more explicit.

It's also worth mentioning a handful of continuity errors to be found here. As noted, all the Autobots present are the group from 1984, but there are a couple scenes where Red Alert, a 1985 character, can be spotted. Apparently this was a mistake on the part of Pat Lee, who drew Sideswipe into two different locations (the arctic and San Francisco), which forced a post-production change. The simplest fix was to redraw the second Sideswipe as Red Alert, a character who shared Sideswipe's mold in the original toyline. However subsequent issues will make clear that this is continuity glitch and nothing more, and Red Alert was not actually present on Earth at any point during or prior to this story. Additionally, in a flashback among the defeated Decepticons, we see Blitzwing and the Insecticon, Kickback. Later stories will reveal that these, too, are mistakes.

(I actually don't mind these errors, egregious as they are. They remind me of the original cartoon's occasional accidental use of incorrect character models and/or color schemes.)

My Thoughts: These aren't your daddy's Tranformers, kids. Or, if you're a child of the eighties, these ain't the Transformers you grew up with. These Transformers cause destruction and carnage wherever they go. Yeah! They step on humans and demolish cities and it's so kewl because that's what we all wished they did when we were little, playing with our toys, right?

Ugh.

This sort of thing could almost be excusable if it was done by someone who came to the TRANSFORMERS franchise later in life, who had no fond memories of the cartoons and comics (I'm looking at you, Michael Bay). But the Dreamwave gang, back in the early 00s, had presumably grown up with the Transformers. So naturally they decided the Transformers had to grow up with them, and we needed to see the "consequences" of their war. So the series includes angry soliloquies from Spike about how he can't deal with this anymore, how the Transformers caused mass death and destruction all over the Earth but the Autobots were too busy with their war effort to notice. And of course we get to see some of that destruction during the climactic fight in San Francisco, as buildings topple left and right when Devastator enters the fray.

Look -- I don't mind if the Transformers grow up a bit. The original cartoon, while I still like it, was very simplistic. There would be nothing wrong with writing new comics in a "layered" fashion -- give them more mature storylines and characterizations for the adults who grew up with the characters. Heck, the original TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE was more mature than the episodes which came before it, showing several beloved characters dying in battle (and scarring a generation of small children including myself). But that's not what Sarracini and Lee have done here. They've simply thrown a bunch of glorified violence into the series because, in their minds, giant robot fights should involve some hardcore carnage.

And, yeah -- in the real world that's true. One would be naive to believe some human death didn't occur off-camera when the Deceptions raided power plants and such in the original TV show. But this is a fantasy world. Good versus Evil, Right versus Wrong. It's not mean to reflect what would actually happen if gigantic robots came to Earth fighting each other. I guarantee that if we were really visited by Transformers in 1984, our civilization would not have still existed by 2002.

But what really bothers me here is Spike's implication that the Autobots caused some of this damage themselves. Indirectly, I'm sure -- they were always sworn to protect Earth and humanity from the Decepticons. But the problem is, once the Autobots are shown to accidentally kill even one human, they become just as bad as the Deceptions. In Marvel comics, there's a school of thought that Hulk has somehow never taken a single human life in any of his rampages. This is completely ridiculous on its surface, but it can't be any other way. If the Hulk were shown to kill so much a single innocent, then the character is tainted and there's no justifiable reason for Bruce Banner not to feed himself a bullet at the earliest possible opportunity. The same holds true for the Autobots.

The nice thing about this inaugural Dreamwave mini-series, though, is that it's pretty much completely ignored going forward. The continuity remains, but the bleak tone and excessive collateral damage will be discarded. Dreamwave made some questionable, terrible decisions during their brief time on this Earth, but disavowing "Prime Directive" was not one of those mistakes.

So besides my issues with the story's tone, what else is there to say about it? Well, it's not all bad. Lee's artwork is actually decent throughout most of the issues. At some point his Transformers would come to have weirdly bulbous balloonlike features, but that hasn't happened quite yet. He nails certain characters, such as Megatron and Starscream, almost perfectly, and his humans, while not always perfect, are mostly decently drawn.

If I have one complaint about Lee's artwork here, it's simply that he draws the characters as a weird hybrid of their toy selves and their Sunbow animation models. His Bumblebee has the chubby, cheerful face that the character had on TV, but his Mirage is drawn to resemble the toy's horribly designed and colored head. Ironhide, thankfully, is drawn to resemble his cartoon counterpart, but Jazz unfortunately is too, with his doors visible in robot mode like Prowl and Bluestreak. Look, I've said it before but it always bears repeating: the best way to draw Generation One Transformers is in the style of the Sunbow model sheets. This is not an opinion. It is fact. Anyone who believes otherwise is just flat-out wrong.

But regardless of the quality of Lee's art and the story's lovely colors, I just can't get past the tone of this thing. Is it that hard to understand that some of us, as adults, simply want to read updated, but otherwise unchanged versions, of the same stuff we enjoyed as kids? Or am I just a weird exception in that regard? I like entertainment targeted at me as a thirty-six year old, but I don't want the stuff I remember from my childhood to fall into that category. Let the Transformers retain their innocence and just give me a modern take on the cartoons I loved as a youngster. And, fortunately, that's just what will happen moving forward.

---

* Note: This story is not titled in the individual issues, which I read for the above post, but was called "Prime Directive" for trade paperback reprint purposes.