“I’m telling you we never worked for Michael Bay!”
Transformers: Infiltration #2
IDW Publishing (February, 2006)
WRITER: Simon Furman
ARTIST: E.J. Su
COLORIST: John Rauch
LETTERER: Tom B. Long
EDITORS: Chris Ryall & Dan Taylor
Forced to reveal himself, Ratchet manages to get his new traveling companions away from the Decepticons, but they aren’t as concerned about keeping in disguise, which is not good for our heroes. Evading their pursuers for the time being, Verity has to get out and get her wits. Jimmy tries to calm her down while Hunter tries to learn more about what’s going on, but the Decepticons catch up to them. Luckily so do the Autobots, who chase off Thundercracker and the Battlechargers, but Prowl is not happy about all the protocols Ratchet has broken until he says two words: siege mode. We also see one of the pictures, a Decepticon fortress embedded but easily spotted. And we also get a glimpse of the boss of the PDA’s previous owner when the cops find his corpse.
What they got right: The fan is under attack now. There’s a good moment between Verity and Jimmy, and I like how Hunter is trying to find out the name of Ratchet’s group. You also get an idea of how serious things are when the Decepticons are dropping the stealth campaign because they don’t care anymore. Maybe it’s because we see Starscream has found something very interesting. (Spoiler: it’s the Ore-13, which you may remember from the IDW MASK reviews, is Energon.) I also like that the whole “hammerspace” theory is dropped in favor of a combination of built-in weaponry and built-in holsters for hand weapons (think RoboCop) to explain where the weapons go for G1 characters.
What they got wrong: Do we need a human third column here? A secret organization who knows about the Transformers? Yeah, another spoiler: these guys are the prototypes for Sector 7, if Sector 7 wasn’t a government group, and if memory serves I’m going to be annoyed by them later. They really don’t add anything of interest. Although at least I don’t remember them taking away like Sector 7 did.
Recommendation: Another enjoyable Simon Furman story…thus far anyway. It’s worth looking into since this does the movieverse better than Michael Bay did.
