“That’s the biggest cheese log I’ve ever seen.”
Transformers Armada #8
Dreamwave (January, 2003)
WRITER: Simon Furman PENCILER: Guido Guidi INKER: Elaine To COLORISTS: Shaun Curtis & Alan Wang LETTERING: Dreamer Design GRAPHIC DESIGN: Kevin Lee ASSISTANT EDITOR: Matt Moylan
Something falls from space and it’s putting the Mini-Cons into a trance and calling them to it. The Decepticons’ captured Mini-Cons manage to escape and cause trouble for Cyclonus. The Autobot-allied Mini-Cons are also drawn to the source, while the Street Action Team also bring the kids along (after “rescuing” them from two other bullies, Fred and Billy). Rad uses Sparkplug’s communicator to call in the Autobots while the Decepticons track the tags installed in their Mini-Cons. As the Autobots and Decepticons battle the Mini-Cons are called into the object and it takes off…with Rad along for the ride!
What they got right: The adventure is starting out well as a new player enters the game for the Mini-Cons. Guidi is one of my favorite Transformer artists and he does a better job here than we saw in the last storylines. The humans can emote and there’s no zoomed-in panel reuse.
What they got wrong: So Optimus learned nothing? Who knows? We don’t get to see Optimus and Sparkplug’s argument…again…so we don’t know who was right about what. Fred and Billy coming from the cartoon was bad enough (they’re terrible characters) but it makes you wonder how many bullies our trio deal with. We had a different set of bullies in the first storyline.
Recommendation: It still surprises me when there’s a Furman-penned Transformer story I can actually point to as something worth getting. This is one of those rare occasions.
BW Media Spotlight 
[…] gave us Seth and Sid instead, but as soon as Simon Furman took over, he went with the show’s Fred and Billy, who show up for one page of one issue and are never seen again, which makes them rather pointless. […]
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