Before ripping my human claws (I forgot to trim my nails this month.) into Transformers: Monstrosity #6, I feel it necessary to share some important information. I love me some Dinotbots, or as they are apparently referred to pre-Earth, Dynobots.
Like most young boys, my fascination with all things dinosaurs started at an age where anything that shot projectiles was mesmerizing, and anything related to girls was deemed contaminated. Being a young man growing up in the ’80s, the Transformers also became a healthy obsession and a significant aspect of my childhood. With that in mind, you can only imagine my girl-like squeal when Hasbro introduced new robots that changed into dinosaurs. Along with a whole host of new toys, I was also in need of new Pac-Man underoos.
Fast-forward almost three decades and several failed relationships later, and my love for the transforming beasts of the Jurassic era is still going strong, and, if anything, it’s grown to monstrous proportions. I’m going to use that excellent word play to segue into IDW’s latest Transformers graphic novel series, Monstrosity. For those that may have developed some rust on the happenings of Issues #1-5, I will provide a brief overview of the goings on up to this point.
In a storyline pre-Hasbro generation one – G1 for us sophisticated types – Optimus Prime has just claimed the Leader of Matrix as his own and is trying to ask varying factions of his Autobot brethren, “Can’t we all just get along?” In another part of space, the Decepticons have dumped a close-to-dead Megatron on Junkion, not to be confused with A&E’s Hoarders series’ filming locations. To make matters more interesting, the Dinobots . . . sorry, the Dynobots, have decided to start their own band and get the hell off of Cybertron for some fairly suspicious reasons.
Issue #6 of the series starts unveiling those secrets thanks to some NSA-like digging Optimus Prime does into confidential files. In addition, we continue to follow Wheeljack, Perceptor, and Jetfire of the Autobots’ scientific nerd patrol on their quest to find more Energon in hopes of avoiding a mass excavation of Cybertron.
As I just hinted at, most of this issue had a mostly investigate theme, and the action was extremely limited. This is not necessarily a bad thing, seeing as I’m always interested in getting more background on the robots in disguise before crash-landing on earth, especially when it involves the Dinobots. Story wise, there was a sequence I thoroughly enjoyed that seemed to be a direct take from the film Ghostbusters 2. Some might think it a blatant rip-off, but seeing as Ghostbusters is my first true love in life, I appreciated the nod to the flick. At least, I assume it was a nod.
The art of Monstrosity, in general, has been great to this point, and I would have to say this issue has proved to be the best so far. While I had some problems reconciling which characters were which in past issues, I had no such problems with issue six. Another positive that I’m truly relishing with this series is the inclusion of all of the characters I grew up with from the ’80s Hasbro G1 universe. While Autobots like Blaster and Preceptor weren’t the most popular bots of the series, they were amongst some of my personal favorites. In general, this was a relatively lighter issue with regard to overall tone, which, in-turn, allowed for some noteworthy moments of humor, as well.
For this review, I was also able to take in the story via IDW’s interactive comic book format, which was made possible by Madefire (pun intended). While I’m the first one that prefers using the pure power of my imagination when reading any type of media, the added movement of graphics and random sound effects did provide an added element to the reading experience to help bring the reader further into the story. Now, if they could only figure out a way to get Peter Cullen to read Prime’s lines, I would be sold. Well, that and sending life-size replicas of the Dinobots to my address wouldn’t hurt either.