Transformers: Generation One Volume 3 (Paperback)

But then something happened. It started to suck. A lot. All of the sudden, the world is threatened by a "virus" that the transformers have to fight. This "virus" spreads like a glacier and is apparently metal that grows. Yep, I'm not making this up. So in classic Ghostbusters-2 fashion, the transformers get guns that shoot jelly and fight the "virus". It's as corny and stupid as it sounds. And all the continuity is quickly thrown away (then totally abandoned in the follow-up series.)

Oddly, while all this is happening in the arctic, everything else is great. Optimus and gang are duking it out with the decpticons back in San Francisco old-school style. It's awesome. The dialogue is great, the structure, pacing, and design makes it feel like a really good movie. So what's holding it back? Well, it seems like Sarrachini is incapable of throwing away all the tired old camp and kiddy-ness of the original. Megatron is still as one-dimensional as ever, spouting his usual maniacal tirade and playing the role of generic and cliched mad scientist/world domination obsessed bad guy (not that he shouldn't be that character, but we've seen that from day one from Megatron. How 'bout adding something new?).

The book was most heavily criticized for it's human characters, which many claim bogged down the book. I couldn't disagree more. The humans don't hog much of the story, and add some reality and grounding to the plot. In response, the second book, "War and Peace", has no humans at all, and it really hurts the story. Without any humans, the bots are forced into the role of politics and intrigue, and it's as awkward as a cykill figure at BotCon. And the author lays it on thick, war and peace has so much politics and dialogue, I've had to read it 3 times, and it's still confusing.

So overall, the two Generation 1 graphic novels that have been published so far are well worth the price for the beautiful art and wonderful nostalgia, despite their minor scripting flaws. I think even non-fans can enjoy these books. Perhaps best of all is the high re-reading factor - because of the level of detail, these books will never get old.

For one: the story isn't much to look at. It is a quite obvious attempt at making a more grimm and "mature" Transformers story, dealing with issues such as the human view on the Autobot-Decepticon conflict an so on. In theory, that could've worked really well, but in practice, it falls somewhat short of expectations. I won't bore you with details, but the human characters are still as blant as they were in the cartoon, the dialogue tends to get tacky and the reasons for the Decepticons to run amok on our planet Earth are even more vague than they were on the old series. As said: it is an obvious attempt at ginving Transformers some maturity, but unfortunatly, its failure to deliver that promise is almost even more obvious.

The artwork is quite good, as long as you don't examine it too closely. The way people are depicted, for one, is just downright poor. They are basically all generic, caucasian or semi-caucasian screen filling without much of a facial expression or obvious emotion. Since this series in essence revolves around giant, transforming robots beating each other senseless, this wouldn've been such a problem if humans hadn't played such an important role int his book.
The Transformers themselves look, in general, a lot betterthan the human cast. They still have the same basic look and design from the old cartoon series (hello again, nostalgia) but somewhat updated in the sense that the robots look more detailed and "bulky" and are therefore more believable as being massive, living machines. An actual improvement over the classic series, if you ask me.
Unfortunatly, on the whole the artwork on the robots usually either works great or doesn't work at all. Especially 1980's #1 role-model Optimus Prime looks either great or downright silly with sometimes enormously oversized lower legs. Sometimes, the whole "detailed and more bulky" thing backfires dramatically and makes the robots look like walking assortments of discarded car-parts. Finally, as some other reviewers have mentioned as well, there is a distinct lack of continuity in the artwork with the same characters having completely different faces depending on the panel they're on and so on.

Finally: some of the classic Transformers seemed strangely out of character. Optimus Prime seemed far more agressive than I remember him, Megatron seemed REASONABLE rather than megalomanic and Starscream dind't make a single attempt at overtrhowing Megatron as leader of the Decepticons. This last thing could be a major concern for the nostalgic twenty-somethings like me that seem to be the main target audience for this book.

So in short: it's a neat book for all you who like Transformers and mecha in general, but it could have been far better than it ended up being. A shame, but it's till nice to see the old crew back in action.