Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews

Transformers Movie Prequel Special
IDW Comics
Ryall, Furman, Figueroa, Wildman, Burcham, Robbins & Adams

This comic contains two stories with over the 30 pages of story. Sadly, this comic sure feels like we’ve read most of it before. The Transformers comic movie continuity seems to be a mess. Adding to the confusion is the depiction of some of the bots in this issue differs way too much from those in the other movie comic series. I found much of this issue to be baffling.

The first part of the comic has two pieces to the story. The first piece deals with the Decepticons and them following Megatron who is following the Allspark. If you are reading the Reign of Starscream mini then this is nothing new for you. The main problem here is how different Starscream looks here as opposed to that mini series. He isn’t even the same color!

The second piece of the opening story is actually quite good. It deals with the events just before the movie opens. The Decepticons land on Earth in the desert. They find some American military bases and start fighting. This was a really good sequence that flashed some battles and showed how the strategy evolved that we saw play out in the movie. In the fight they also seemed to leave behind a Decepticon who may play into the Reign of Starscream story. The way this story ended made me more upbeat about the overall issue.

The second story of the comic is all about Bubblebee. Basically he lands on Earth and tries to track down various members of the Witwicky family. It’s a shorter story then the first, but has one main problem. The prequel issues, last year, had Bubblebee land (while being tracked by the military) and then shows him scan the old Camera and take off on the highway. It was my impression that the sequence in that comic happened right before the movie. This comic seems to show him on Earth for a few years prior to the movie. This story left me really thinking they have their timelines messed up.

The artwork was good in both stories, but the inconsistency with regard to Starscream is glaring.

In short, I liked some of the story, most of the art and I liked the page count, but I felt like I was reading stuff left on the cutting room floor or ideas on someone’s concept table. I really don’t understand what this adds to the continuity of the movie universe and I actually felt like it made it more of a mess.

I simply can’t recommend this for anyone unless they are absolute Transformers Movie diehard.

2 out of 5 geek goggles.

Transformers Movie Prequel Special