The best Transformers fiction writer of all-time, James Roberts, earned that title by not being afraid to put wild new twists onto well-established old characters, and he’s done it again in Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #19, which remains my favorite book on the market each month.
A while back, he radically altered the way we looked at our favorite purple Decepticon, the one-eyed Shockwave. This time out, it’s a stunning redefinition of Ultra Magnus. Up until now, he’s just been the uptight, over-officious stick-in-the-mud that we loved anyway because he was so easily tweaked. But Roberts’ method of dense, intricate storytelling makes sure we have consequences for everything, no matter how small. Becoming the lovable grump may have pleased readers, but it’s severely disappointed his boss, one Chief Justice Tyrest, the supreme legislator of Cybertronian criminal law. Seeing as how Tyrest has taken to drilling holes in himself to make amends for what he believes are his wrongs, Magnus’ boss may not be secured in all of his hinges. He even drilled a hole in his head, and that made him see the light. So you don’t want to disappoint a guy like that.
It turns out that the bot we knew as Ultra Magnus is actually a smaller, pseudo-mustachioed gent named Minimus Ambus who was simply inhabiting the role of Ultra Magnus, Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord. The real Ultra Magnus died years ago, and ever since then, Tyrest secretly handed out ‘Ultra Magnus’ armor to his dutiful servants to apprehend criminals and enforce his laws. ‘Ultra Magnus’ isn’t a person, it’s an appointed office – one that Tyrest has decided to discontinue now, as he’s bringing in a new, slick looking, fanatical official named Star Saber, the “Dark Evangelist.”
What’s worse is that we get a look into the mind of Tyrest and why he’s doing what he’s doing. Ambus learns new details about the creation story of Cybertron’s people. There are the “forged,” the original sparks (i.e. souls) created from the Primus pulsewaves through Vector Sigma, and then the “constructed cold,” a next generation who were said to have been formed through a “spark-splicing” process, using healthy sparks to ignite new ones. Tyrest claims the latter was just the cover story, and that he led the team that was charged with bleeding the Matrix nearly dry in the creation of constructed-cold sparks, and now he believes that process also corrupted the Matrix, and that he’s responsible for every crime committed by every constructed-cold Transformer out there – and his plan is to kill them all, believing genocide will actually atone for his sin in creating them in the first place. How can a crime like that be committed by a Chief Justice committed to the law? It seems Tyrest has also developed The Resository, which essentially gives him a constantly updatable line-item veto over every law on the books, meaning he’s functioning as Congress and the Supreme Court all in one. Power corrupts.
The loss of Ultra Magnus is stunning, but it makes perfect sense and feels right – playing on small details like the original toy having a little white truck dude that basically put on the armor to become Ultra Magnus in the first place. Roberts knows the TF mythos backwards and forwards, and he utilizes it to great effect when he wants to, and turns it on its ear when it suits him, and it’s always fantastic. He’s even got an out, claiming “the original Magnus was real,” and he could show up at any time – or anyone else could put on the discarded Magnus armor, too. That may be what’s in store for our seemingly doomed friend Tailgate… although given what happens to Ambus in this issue, he may just be out and out doomed. Roberts isn’t afraid of sacrificing characters, either.
Case in point is Ambulon, a victim of the Mad Doctor Pharma’s crazily supervillainous torture of Chief Surgeon Ratchet. He’s proposed a surgical race to prove who’s the better doctor by seeing how can stitch up a mech sliced in half first. Except he slices Ambulon in half lengthways, not at the waist as expected. It’s just gruesome, even with robots.
We also have to talk about Alex Milne, the artist who manages to inject an immense amount of detail into the designs of these mechanoids, and colorist Josh Burcham, who is somehow able to decipher abnormal robot body parts in all these intricate black and white panels to know what bits should be which colors. This art is busy, it’s kinetic and it’s just as dense as the writing, and in that vein, it sometimes takes a few reads to figure out exactly what’s happening. IDW takes some heat for the artwork on a lot of their licensed titles, but they do not skimp on Transformers: MTMTE, and that’s what helps make this book the best TF fiction ever made.
