The previous creative team’s run came to an end with issue #24. So here we are at the start of a new era: all hail Robert Kirkman and Dan Mora!

In truth, this issue feels far less like a new era and more like a direct continuation of the previous issue, with Jorge Corona on art for the opening sequence, so there’s not even a switch in the aesthetic until we shift focus back to the Autobots and their clean up operations.

I had my reservations about Robert Kirkman taking over, and I have to say that, unfortunately, they were well founded. There’s so many instances of poor dialogue and weird logic here; for example, Optimus Prime being told that it was a surprise to have giant robot vehicles from space invading rather than little green men, then the same character revealing that they have known about the Cybertronians for well over a century just a few scenes later.

I also had to groan at yet another Energon Universe property being shoehorned into the storyline here, in an especially awkward way; and it really stood out due to the silly, 80s-toon name of the character. It’s not cute, it’s not clever and at this point, given how poorly integrated all of the box-ticking crossover stuff has been with Kirkman’s own Void Rivals, I’m just disappointed that we couldn’t have had the Transformers standing on their own for a bit longer.

GI Joe makes sense in this world, and has fit in well so far, but this new character, heralding the arrival of another nostalgia bait IP, just caused me to roll my eyes in all honesty.

When it’s time for Dan Mora to take over on art, however, things do at least look the part. I loved Jorge Corona’s art style, but it’s refreshing to have a different take on the material; Mora has a much cleaner, sleeker look to his pencils which I really enjoyed too.

Overall though, this wasn’t a disappointment as such, because I wasn’t holding out much hope for Kirkman’s arrival in the first place. There’s so many odd elements here that don’t quite gel, and even the climactic events just seems so massively out of character that it feels like it’s just there for shock value. Which an awful lot of Kirkman’s stuff can feel like, at times, and it always seems to me that he struggles to pay things off meaningfully. I suppose time will tell, but I may not be sticking around to find out.

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