The other cover is the other half of his face with his current design.
Transformers #22
IDW Publishing (July, 2011)
WRITER: James Roberts ARTIST: Alex Milne COLORIST: Joana LaFuente COVER COLORIST: Josh Perez LETTERER: Shawn Lee ASSISTANT EDITOR: Carlos Guzman EDITOR: Andy Schmidt Cover “A” shows Megatron’s head from his current body while Cover “B” (shown) has his old Cybertronian head. The Retailer Incentive cover is a black and white shot of the entire head, separated down the middle between old and current, which I’m assuming is just the lineart for the other two covers. I’ll explain why this is lame in a moment.
Bouncing between past and present: In the past, we see another event that created Megatron. After a barfight, a friend of the bots Megatron and Impactor dealt with decides to abuse his authority until he was stopped. In the present Megatron continues to play mind games with Optimus and it may be altering how the other Autobots judge him.
What they got right: I do like the idea of exploring the Optimus/Megatron “relationship”. All we see is that they are arch enemies, and this exploration is actually something I’ve found interesting in Milne’s novel (who is the artist here, but wrote a novel loosely based off of the War For Cybertron video game). It’s also nice to get some more hints about pre-war Cybertronian society.
What they got wrong: The other half of the story, which not only continues off of Megatron: Origin, a book I have issues with (although at least here the entirety of Autobot society isn’t made to look bad) but continues off of themes that bothered me in both that and the aforementioned novel. While I’m willing to admit it has something to do my own ideas about pre-war Cybertronian society, it still bugs me. Also, the text is very small to fit into the smaller panels, which does give us more story for our money but is hard to read even if you have good vision. I can only imagine what someone with poor eyesight is going through trying to read these panels.
My biggest complaint, worthy of a second paragraph, is the cover art. It’s good artwork, that’s not the problem. It’s a complaint I’ve made before, where two variant covers of THE SAME ISSUE are joined to form a complete issue. I hate when comic do this! (See also various issues of Boom’s run on The Incredibles.) Doing this with consecutive issues I can understand, but how many people are going to buy two copies of the same issue just to put the picture together? Why do this?
Recommendation: There are things I like, but I’m holding judgement to see how the Chaos event works out, or at least further into it. Might at least be worth a look.
Up Next: Depending on how my schedule works out this weekend, we will hopefully have Best Scene of the Week in tomorrow’s Weekly Wrap-Up.
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