TRANSFORMERS: ARMADA #1

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Thursday, July 25, 2002

I should know better than to question whether a writer can do no wrong, as I did last week when I reviewed Chris Sarracini's writing on DARKMINDS: MACROPOLIS #3. Despite his stellar work on that series and on the main TRANSFORMERS title, TRANSFORMERS: ARMADA could use a bit of transformation before it's as satisfying as its namesake.

The plot takes place on Cybertron, where a race of evil Transformers called the Decepticons are attacking the Mini-Cons, a smaller race of transforming robots. The Autobots have gotten wind of the attacks and decide to investigate. What they do not know is that the Decepticons are grafting the Mini-Cons onto their own bodies to boost their energy, and soon their leader Megatron plans to declare war on the rest of Cybertron.

I'm assuming this is a prequel to the main series - an easy enough assumption, since Optimus Prime seemingly has no clue as to the existence of the Decepticons, and Megatron looks quite different than his previous television or comic book incarnations - but if it's meant to be a retelling of the story which brings the two warring factions to Earth, then Sarracini's not starting off as logically as the original story did. For one thing, the Transformers on Cybertron appear to transform in vehicles awfully similar to the forms they would later "adopt" on Earth. Anyone who remembers the sleek and altogether alien vehicle Bumblebee transforms into in the series opener before he's saddled with that ghastly Volkswagen Beetle form understands why this difference is so important. Why would alien robots transform into Earth-type vehicles from the start?

For another, the Autobots are described here as "warriors," implying that they're some kind of police force and that there's by extension a "civilian" class of Cybertronians. The objection isn't that this goes against the previous continuity established for Cybertronian society - there really wasn't one, to be honest. It's that this new element doesn't really add anything new, and it even detracts from the original idea. Before, we could believe that Optimus Prime and his followers were ordinary Transformers fighting for their freedom in a hideous civil war. Now they're just a group of policemen out to catch the crooks. Where's the excitement in that? And speaking of concepts that lack excitement: Mini-Cons? Transformers that are about human-sized and thus are easy pickings for "normal-sized" Transformers (if the normal Transformers aren't larger, after all, why would the Mini-Cons be called "mini")?


Visually, this book is much busier than the main TRANSFORMERS title, too. We'd expect Cybertron to be a planet of wonders, and James Raiz, Mark Armstrong, and Erik Sander do their best to make it live up to our expectations. But several pages come close to information overload, and certain key sequences make very little sense visually because we can't quite figure out what we're looking at. All that metal on like-colored metal causes a lack of usual perspective, which isn't aided in the slightest by fancy computer blurring techniques and so forth. In no way should this be a quick read, not if you plan on understanding exactly what you're looking at.

Bottom line: is it worth buying? If you're enjoying the main TRANSFORMERS title, then yeah, sure. This series will no doubt lay the groundwork for any continuity changes that occur in the other title. But is it the smooth reworking of characters and concepts we've known and loved since we were kids that the other title seems to be? Far from it. The Transformers are changed utterly, and a terrible beauty is born. Whether that beauty remains terrible is a question for the future.


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