Thoughts on IDW Transformers: The Furman Era

After nearly a decade of pestering, I've finally done it: I've gotten Anthony to start reading IDW's Transformers comics. I'm also rereading them along with him, since it's been years since I last read any of them. I write all of these blog posts in a room flanked by two signed Nick Roche art prints and several shelves full of Transformers, with one shelf dedicated entirely to the crew of the Lost Light, so you can imagine I'm excited to be revisiting these comics.

Rather than skipping to my favorites, though, we're in it for the long haul. We started all the way back at the beginning with the run written almost exclusively by one man: Simon Furman. So let's talk about the highs and lows of his 44-issue run!

Who's Simon Furman?

For fans, he needs no introduction. For those not in the know, I'll give you a quick summary.

Furman originally made a name for himself at Marvel UK in the '80s. See, the UK printing of Marvel's Transformers comic was mostly released weekly, not monthly like the original US version, so Marvel UK would produce their own supplementary stories to slot in between the original American stories to avoid outpacing them. Y'know, like how an anime that's adapting an ongoing manga might stall for time by inserting filler. Except in this analogy, many fans end up thinking the filler arcs are better than the original manga, and eventually the writer of the manga steps down and they just hand the whole series over to the guy who wrote most of the filler. That's essentially what happened with Simon Furman.

After writing both the bulk of UK stories and the last few years of the original US run, Furman would go on to become the most prolific Transformers writer of all time, writing a bunch more comics at various publishers, some video games, and even the final episode of Beast Wars. He still pops up here and there to this day, and his work is still held in extremely high regard by the old guard of the Transformers fandom. As for what fans of my generation think of him... well, we'll get to that.

Broadly speaking, Furman is known for writing "all robots in space" stories focusing squarely on the Transformers themselves, as opposed to stories about the Transformers interacting with humans on Earth as robots in disguise. This made Furman popular among fans who found the typical kid sidekicks and other human characters uninteresting and just wanted to get invested in the bots as characters and learn more about their world. (In the 2010s into the early 2020s we got a ton more all-robot Transformers comics and cartoons in the Furman style, so more fans are starting to yearn for stories with well-written humans. But look at forum threads from 20 years ago, and "the humans are irrelevant" was the prevailing opinion in the fandom. Obviously both styles have merit in the hands of competent writers, it's just a matter of balancing them out.)

Over the years Furman also introduced many recurring elements of the series. Smaller things like the existence of the Autobot commando team the Wreckers, but also foundational lore like the creation myth of the Transformer species, the idea that their home planet Cybertron is the body of their god Primus, or the original idea of the "thirteen original Transformers" that was developed into the legend of the Thirteen Primes. Hell, three of the Thirteen Primes are just characters Furman created for various comics. In other words, if you've seen 2024's Transformers One, that movie wouldn't exist without Furman. His influence is inescapable.

So it was a bit of a shock to fans when IDW Publishing gave Furman his very own Transformers continuity where he was the lead writer from issue 1, and he decided to start by throwing out all of his previous ideas and doing something totally different.

Infiltration

The Transformers: Infiltration, the seven-issue miniseries that kicked off the IDW continuity in 2005, is unlike damn near any other Transformers comic released before or since.

Uncharacteristically for Furman, Infiltration is told from a human perspective. We learn about the Transformers through the eyes of our human protagonists, Verity (a teenage drifter), Hunter (a Fox Mulder-style alien conspiracy theorist), and Jimmy (Verity's mechanic friend) as they slowly unravel the truth about the giant alien robots who are secretly invading Earth. The Decepticons aren't openly trying to drain the planet of its resources, but are rather operating in the shadows as part of a careful multi-phase infiltration protocol they've used to conquer who knows how many other planets. They're sneaking around in their vehicle modes and creating artificial doppelgangers of important humans, trying to agitate existing conflicts. When the dust settles and society is sufficiently weakened, they'll swoop in and colonize what's left. So, basically, they're the CIA.

The Autobots, too, are using their power of disguise to their advantage as they try to stop the Decepticons without alerting too many of the locals. Our main Autobot character for the series is Ratchet, who spends most of the series in ambulance form to blend in. He tends to speak through a "holomatter avatar," a solid hologram he projects to make it look like he's got a human in the driver's seat. He doesn't even transform into robot mode until the third issue! This might sound like a Surf Dracula situation where you're just waiting for the damn Transformers to show up in this Transformers comic, but it really works for me. Again, we got a LOT of all-robot stories in the comics and cartoons released since Infiltration dropped in 2005, and I love a lot of them. (Recall my MTMTE shelf I mentioned in the intro.) But the prevalence of that style makes Infiltration's deft use of the human lens stand out a lot in hindsight. It's aged like a fine wine.

This isn't a grand science fantasy epic in space, it's an espionage conspiracy thriller leaning as hard as it can into the phrase "robots in disguise." It builds a ton of intrigue and suspense, grounding you in the perspective of the human cast and making the bots feel strange and alien in a way they rarely have past 1984. Sure, we know who the Transformers are in the 21st century, but we don't know how this specific take on them works yet. What are the Decepticons doing on Earth, specifically? How deeply have they inserted themselves into human affairs by the time the series starts? How many of the big name bots are already on Earth? How will our heroes save the planet? Is it already too late? Who knows! Keep reading to find out.

Having a small cast that adds new characters very gradually, seeing things from a human POV, and using the bot modes more sparingly here means it feels like a bigger deal when we see them, whether it's an all-out brawl or a scene back at the base where they don't have to hide. When Verity turns a corner in a Decepticon base that she thought was abandoned and finds herself staring down Megatron, who towers over her in robot mode, it's a huge "oh shit" moment.

Perhaps my favorite creative decision here is the use of holomatter avatars. It allows Ratchet to feel like a main character on par with the human cast even when he's stuck hiding in vehicle mode for long periods. But, crucially, he still manages to feel alien throughout due to one simple choice: his avatar is always smiling. The mouth never moves because they haven't figured out human interactions yet. He thinks it makes him look friendly, but it just comes off as creepy and reminds you that Verity and co. aren't talking to a real guy. It's great! Plus, it's just fun to see what all the avatars look like. Some are the type of person you'd expect to see in a given car (Bumblebee's looks like Lindsay Lohan in a then-topical riff on Herbie: Fully Loaded), while others like Ratchet's medic are clearly just humansonas for the Autobots. I'm glad the concept stuck around in later IDW comics.

When I first read it in 2005, back when the first Michael Bay movie had been announced but we didn't really know anything about it yet, Infiltration felt very much like Furman's pitch for that movie. It introduces the Transformers to a new audience through a human lens, updating the premise for the 21st century. The fact that the robot modes are used more sparingly is the exact kind of concession you'd make for the special effects budget of a live action movie, but unlike in the Bay movies the bots don't feel like an afterthought as characters. I still kind of wish we'd gotten this as a movie, rather than the one where Bumblebee pisses on John Turturro for a full six seconds. It's just a really solid reboot all around, with consistently great art from E.J. Su that gives all of the bots detailed modern redesigns that's only slightly brought down by those typical early 2000s smudgy digital colors.

Unfortunately, Furman would pivot away from this direction almost immediately. The rest of his run at IDW isn't bad overall, but it does feel like it has a lot of wasted potential.

Stormbringer

To appease returning fans who hated the slow burn of Infiltration and wanted more bots pronto, IDW expedited the release of Furman's next miniseries, Stormbringer, which checks in on how things are doing back on Cybertron. It's not bad, but it's an odd one.

Stormbringer establishes a new status quo where Cybertron isn't just in an energy crisis, it's been rendered an uninhabitable, irradiated wasteland following an incident with the Decepticon Thunderwing. In this continuity, Thunderwing was originally a scientist who warned both sides that the ongoing war was doing so much damage and draining so much energy that the planet was simply dying. The natural Energon is gone, as is the ozone layer that would protect it from being bombarded by cosmic radiation. After his warnings were ignored by Autobot and Decepticon alike, his next step, for some reason, was... to start grafting organic tissue onto his robotic body? This is supposed to help them survive Cybertron's ecological collapse, somehow? And somehow this flesh grafting makes him the most powerful Transformer alive? But the process makes him go crazy, and he becomes the avatar of the very apocalypse he was trying to prevent. It's like if Al Gore decided to turn himself into Super Mega Satan to survive global warming, and instead went crazy and personally accelerated the climate crisis. Anyway, after being defeated hundreds of years ago, now Thunderwing's back, and they have to stop him again.

Thunderwing certainly looks cool the way Don Figueroa draws him, and he has cool villain monologues, and all this does lead to a good moment in the climax where Optimus gives a speech about how they were all so focused on killing each other that they didn't stop and see how dire things had gotten around them, and they have to take responsibility. In general, I like Furman's ideas for Cybertron here. But the plot that gets us to that point doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and the character writing leaves something to be desired.

While it was written to pander to the super-fans, I feel like Stormbringer lands best if you have only a moderate amount of Transformers knowledge and an open mind. There's a sweet spot here.

If you have no other frame of reference beyond Infiltration, I have to assume it will be overwhelming. There are so many returning characters and sub-factions, some of them incredibly obscure, and it presumes you're already familiar with all of them. It doesn't really explain why you should care about the Wreckers, you're just already supposed to know them and pog when they show up. Why is Thunderwing a big deal? Because he was a big deal in Furman's Marvel comics in the '80s. Why does he graft flesh to his body? Because his toy was a Pretender with an organic-looking outer shell. At no point does anyone ever stop and explain basic concepts like, y'know... why are the Transformers fighting this war in the first place? If these comics are your introduction to Optimus Prime and Megatron, their first scene together is a flashback of them cooperating to stop Thunderwing like they're old buddies. If they can work together, why'd they go right back to fighting afterwards? You can easily fill in these gaps if you're already familiar with the characters from elsewhere, but newcomers are kind of left in the dark.

On the other hand, if you're already intimately familiar with other Transformers comics, particularly prior Furman comics, it's not really anything special. It's another one of those stories about a big battle on Cybertron, of which there are many. A bunch of characters show up to say Furmanisms, including the Wreckers and some late era G1 combiner teams whose toys you might've had as a kid, but few of them have much in the way of interesting characterization. It's fine, but it's nobody's favorite. Compared to the bold reinvention of Infiltration, this is Furman playing the hits for the sake of nostalgia—even though when Stormbringer released in 2006, it'd only been a year and a half since he'd last written a comic like this set on Cybertron. (Hell, Optimus basically still has the same design Figueroa gave him in Dreamwave's The War Within.)

I had no idea how Anthony would feel about this comic going in, but I think he ended up being kind of the perfect reader for it. I've gotten him to watch Animated, Prime, Earthspark, and bits of the Generation 1 cartoon, as well as most of the movies, so he gets the gist of Transformers already. He doesn't need the basics of the war explained to him. He knows who Optimus and Megatron are. But what he wanted was a story that took these robots and their world more seriously and portrayed them in a more mature light, something written more for adults rather than elementary schoolers. And Stormbringer was his first taste of how Furman does exactly that, with no expectations for what his best or worst work is like. So it worked out, and he thought it was okay. If you're looking for an example of what Furman stories are typically like, this works just fine.

Overall, Stormbringer is a perfectly fine arc, if not a particularly remarkable one. But it sets a precedent for the rest of the run in a way that derails what was special about Infiltration.

The rest of the run

The second miniseries set on earth, Escalation, certainly lives up to its name. People said they wanted less focus on humans and more robots punching and shooting each other, and Furman delivered. Much of the arc ends up revolving around one big, long fight the Autobots and Decepticons have in the snow after Megatron tries to rile up hostilities between Russia and a fictional former Soviet state. The action there is fine, with some entertaining moments sprinkled throughout, but it's not really anything to write home about.

By the third miniseries, Devastation, we've got Sixshot stomping around Pensacola as a giant white, purple, and teal robot wolf with wings.

While the subsequent All Hail Megatron era gets the blame for throwing out Furman's cloak and dagger infiltration protocol in favor of open Decepticon carnage (among other complaints), frankly Furman was all too eager to do that himself in the span of only a handful of issues on Earth. I get that things are supposed to escalate—it's literally in the name of one of the arcs! But it feels like the original premise and cast of characters was barely explored before Furman rushed to pile on the obligatory higher stakes, more subplots, and more splash pages full of dozens of battling robots that fans expected. And while I love me some big dumb robot action, I just don't think the execution is quite good enough here for it to feel like a fair trade.

The humans aren't entirely written out, of course. The B-plot of Escalation has Verity, Jimmy, Ratchet, and Ironhide investigating the disappearance of Hunter and Sunstreaker at the hands of a mysterious organization called the Machination.

I don't dislike the Machination plot, as shadowy paramilitary organizations that want to harness Transformer tech are always a good wrench to throw into the works. But the mystery of what the Machination are up to is stretched a little too thin for my taste. The investigation itself isn't all that interesting, nor are any of the generic paramilitary characters working for the organization. There isn't much meat on the bones of the story until Devastation, when Furman stops teasing and reveals that the Machination are using Sunstreaker as a template to make an army of Headmasters. (And also, they're secretly lead by the Decepticon Scorponok, who wants to take over the Earth.)

And like, that's cool! There's some great robot body horror stuff with poor Sunstreaker, whose disembodied head is being used as a central server for all the Headmaster bodies. And Hunter eventually gets a little hero's journey arc where he steps up as a Headmaster and helps save the day. But so much time is spent investigating this plot stuff in Escalation that it feels like there's little time left for character development. By the end of Furman's run, do we really know anything about Verity and Jimmy as people that we didn't know by the end of Infiltration? They end up spending half of the story just wondering where Hunter is. How about the incidental Autobots like Bumblebee, Jazz, Wheeljack, or Ironhide? Whether they're human or Cybertronian, most of the cast feels like they're merely in service to the plot here, rather than the other way around.

If there's one place where Furman's character writing has room to shine, it's of course the Spotlight one-shots focusing on individual characters. I generally like these, since it's great to have an issue narrated from the perspective of a character like Shockwave or Ultra Magnus to really get inside their heads. It's also nice to give some other writers chances to contribute, even if this means that some of them (mostly Spotlight: Mirage) are going to feel like weird outliers in an otherwise highly interconnected and tightly plotted run.

Some of my favorite Spotlight issues from this era include:

• Spotlight: Kup. The obvious pick, as the first story by writer/artist Nick Roche. He would go on to have great success with the later Wreckers comics, but Spotlight: Kup is already a showcase of what he does best: Transformer war stories where good bots die horrific, pointless, completely avoidable deaths, and even when the heroes win they just look back and wonder if the mission was even worth it in the first place. The scraggly art style here really helps sell Kup's derangement and makes this an absolutely unforgettable issue.
• Spotlight: Nightbeat. I've always liked Nightbeat's role as an Autobot detective investigating the mysteries of the universe, and Gorlam Prime and its organic inhabitants evolving into a Cybertron-like planet and a Transformer-like species is one of the coolest ideas Furman introduced in his IDW run—even if the implication that Cybertron had undergone a similar process was ignored later on, and the plot never went anywhere all that amazing. It's at least a cool idea in this issue.
• Spotlight: Optimus Prime. Mainly because the idea that the Primes before Optimus were actually horrible rulers responsible for a great deal of suffering was fresh at the time. Optimus struggling with the legacy of violence he's inherited and trying to do better would define his arc throughout IDW's continuity.
• And Spotlight: Shockwave, because Shockwave is always cool, and his scheme here sets up a conflict that would span, like... the entire rest of the continuity.

In practice, though, the Spotlights are both a blessing and a curse. They allow Furman to expand the story in a ton of different directions, depicting all sorts of heroes and villains across so many different worlds. But despite being sold as such, they aren't actually standalone stories. Almost every single one is setting up something that Furman will then reincorporate back into the main arcs. Some even dedicate quite a few pages to ongoing storylines that have nothing to do with the character whose name is on the cover. This exacerbates the feeling that the run is a bit unfocused, overstuffed with plot threads and characters vying for attention with not enough time to fully develop any of them. And, honestly, Furman uses the first person narration of the Spotlights as a bit of a crutch. A character like Nightbeat might feel super distinct when he's directly telling the audience what his deal is as a robot detective in his narration boxes, but when he shows up in Escalation, is him being a detective really relevant? Like, at all? He kinda just becomes yet another Autobot soldier.

Megatron's main Decepticon crew, too, begins to feel like a bit of an afterthought past Escalation, even though they're ostensibly the main villains, with how many other threats arrive from space.

The Machination plot takes up much of the focus across Escalation, Devastation, and the final arc of the run, Maximum Dinobots. But then we start to bring in the many villains introduced in the Spotlights, too. Scorponok ends up being the leader of the Machination, and he's far from the only rogue Decepticon out there working on his own schemes. Nova Prime and Galvatron's crew of lost ancient Cybertronians get quite a bit of set up throughout the Spotlights, but while the eldritch undertones of the Dead Universe, the mystery of Gorlam Prime, and their status as lost historical figures are intriguing at first, they kind of just end up being undercooked bad guys who want to take over the galaxy in Revelations. (Furman's run being infamously truncated by IDW certainly didn't help, but I'm not sure Furman would've added all that much more depth if given more time.) And then Spotlight: Sixshot even sets up a brand new team of planet-destroying aliens, the Reapers, who are then brought back in Devastation... just so they can quickly be killed by Galvatron so he can prove how strong he is.

Again, it's a lot of plot threads! While Infiltration started small and simple, Furman was eager to balloon things in scope as quickly as possible. And unless it's a Spotlight issue where a POV character is outright telling you their deal in the narration boxes, all this plot and all the big battles leave little room for nuance or character interiority.

At the very least, he manages to go out on a fairly high note with the Maximum Dinobots miniseries, which wraps up the Machination plotline nicely and manages to give the Dinobots and Hunter satisfying conclusions to their personal arcs along the way. It also finally lets Shockwave and Soundwave out to play after Furman shelved both of them at the end of their debut Spotlight issues. I don't know why he waited so long.

But, of course, there's one Spotlight that stands out in peoples' memories more than any other, for all the wrong reasons.

Spotlight: Arcee

Yeah, I gotta talk about Spotlight: Arcee. I know some of y'all were waiting for this. I might be a little less charitable towards Furman as a writer because I wasn't someone who grew up with TFUK in the '80s. Instead, in my mind, he'll always mainly be the guy who wrote this.

The issue doesn't start out so bad. In fact, it seems pretty cool! This radical new reinvention of the most well known female Transformer turns her into a vengeful badass out for blood, with incredible art throughout by future More Than Meets the Eye and Unicron artist Alex Milne. Truly one of the best to ever do it. He also gives Arcee metal abs and vampire fangs, and I love that. She looks awesome.

And then you get to Arcee's backstory, and learn why exactly she's out for revenge.

See, Furman has always had a particular hang-up regarding gender in Transformers. In his mind, why would a species of alien robots who don't reproduce sexually even develop the concept of gender like what we humans have in the first place? It's an understandable question to have, and one that could be explored in interesting ways. The problem is that, in his mind, the male-coded Autobots who run around fighting wars as big buff manly men and calling each other "he" and "him" aren't performing gender. Because masculinity is just the default, I guess! It's totally just a coincidence that they line up perfectly with human ideas of masculinity. But if you add a robot woman, then you're giving a robot a gender, and that's no good! They're not allowed to have those! So at IDW, he removed the concept of Cybertronian gender... by removing all the Cybertronian women the cartoons had established, leaving in only the guys. He'd only introduce the girls when he'd thought up a good enough explanation.

Well, in 2008, Furman gave us his explanation. At the end of Spotlight: Arcee, you learn that his big idea to explain the concept of fembots is... this:

Yes, Arcee was a "genderless" (male) bot who got forcefemmed as part of a random experiment by the Cybertronian mad scientist Jhiaxus, and now all the other robots can subconsciously sense that she's different and that they should use she/her pronouns around her. They take one look at her supple metal thighs and permanent coral blue #2 lipstick and know that right there's a she/her! They can practically SMELL her PRONOUNS! But the experiment and the transition made Arcee go CRAZY, so now she wants to kill the guy who forcefemmed her, along with anyone else who gets in her way. And she HATES that people see her as a woman. This is her curse! Also, because she's a special mad science experiment, she's the only female Transformer in this universe, according to Furman. Sorry if you were hoping to see Elita-One, or Chromia, or Moonracer, or Firestar, or Blackarachnia, or Airazor, or Minerva, or...

It's up for debate whether this origin story is better or worse than the one he wrote for Marvel UK in 1989, where a literal angry feminist mob demanded that the Autobots build a female bot for the sake of representation and then got angry when they made her pink. Or Dreamwave's plans to make all the female Autobots agents of the evil alien Quintessons, which only never made it to print because Dreamwave went out of business, leading to the Transformers comic license moving over to IDW.

Either way, this sucks. It suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkssssssss. I don't believe that Furman did this out of active malice towards women. I think he did this because he's a dipshit boomer comic book writer who's in way over his head when it comes to writing about gender. Guys like that are a dime a dozen. But it still sucks either way. It creates a world where men are the default and women are a sick aberration, not to mention the wildly transphobic undertones resulting from this horror story about a transition gone wrong. The cyber-estrogen just overwhelmed her senses and made her CRAZY!!!! What kind of a sicko would even DO that to someone?

Also, frankly, Furman's excuse that this is all simply driven by respect for the worldbuilding is bullshit anyway. If that's the case, then where are all the human women, Simon? You don't need a lore reason for them! Why is it just Verity and a couple minor incidental characters who appear for a few panels each? What's with Verity being so moody and fickle compared to the level-headed boys, who keep calling her "prickly" behind her back? Why did you lose interest in doing anything with her so quickly, letting Hunter's big Headmaster arc completely overshadow her even though Infiltration set her up as the protagonist? (She and Jimmy "die" in a teleporter accident near the end of Devastation, are completely absent from Revelations, and are only revealed to have survived at the very end of Maximum Dinobots when they show up for exactly two panels to give Hunter a hug.)

The answer, of course, is that Furman might just have some internalized misogyny that he refuses to unpack, and it's reflected in his work. And so it's Spotlight: Arcee and his treatment of the female cast, more than anything else in his massive body of work, that defines Furman's legacy for me, along with many other women from my generation of fans who came up reading the IDW comics. I like some of his other work, but in the back of my head he'll always be the Spotlight: Arcee guy to me.

And also the guy who conceived of the Energon enema.

Spotlight: Arcee's long shadow

His successors would end up spending the next decade, literally the entirety of the continuity up through its very last published issue in 2018, undoing the damage Furman did with this single issue in 2008. It wouldn't be until the 2013-2014 Dark Cybertron crossover event that IDW would come up with a way to introduce female bots into the continuity without completely contradicting Furman. (The short version is that the Transformers might not have multiple genders on modern day Cybertron... but they do on all the Cybertronian colony planets, which they come back in contact with after millions and millions of years apart. Why they forgot about the concept of gender on Cybertron is never fully explained, which is perhaps for the best.)

But the most fascinating side effect of this idiotic act of misogyny, though, is that it unintentionally opened the door for later IDW Transformers comics to become the queerest mainstream comics I've ever read.

When James Roberts began writing the fan favorite series More Than Meets the Eye, he wanted to explore the subject of Transformer romance. And if Furman said that there aren't any women on Cybertron, then, well... I guess he's been left no choice but to declare it the robot yaoi planet! His hands were simply tied, folks. And so he famously wrote multiple gay Transformer couples into the series, implying that that's the norm on Cybertron, and attracted a whole bunch of new queer fans to Transformers in the process. If you've ever wondered why there's so very much Transformers yaoi out there, it's not entirely because of this series, but it certainly didn't hurt.

Later on in MTMTE's sequel series Lost Light, Roberts (with help from fandom story consultant Rachel Stevens) would tell the story of Anode and Lug, a pair of trans lesbian bots. After leaving the all-male-by-default Cybertron and exploring the universe, they learned about the concept of gender from other alien species, which in turn helped them figure out some things about their own feelings that they previously didn't know how to put into words. This offered a more positive alternative to Arcee's traumatic forcefem backstory. 

And, of course, Arcee herself would continue to remain a prominent character, seeing a whole lot of character development and several major retcons along the way. Her rage slowly cools, and writers Nick Roche and John Barber and story consultant Jenevieve Frank would retcon it so that she had actually willingly transitioned all along. Her quest for revenge was merely the result of Jhiaxus treating her as a lab rat, giving her "bad meds," and leaving her to die after the operation—a story of a trans woman seeking retribution after a case of medical malpractice. But she did want the operation.

Throw in a romantic arc between her and IDW-original fembot Aileron, and we end up with the longest Transformers comic continuity ever prominently depicting the most famous female Transformer as an out and proud trans lesbian.

You love to see it. Funny how these things work out sometimes, all because one comic writer did something very stupid and bad and a bunch of other writers spun it into something better.

Closing thoughts

Anyway: the Furman run! I've criticized it a lot here, but what did I think of it overall, if we set aside that one infamous issue?

Eh, it's pretty decent.

The last time I read it in 2016, I actually thought a lot of it was a total slog aside from the high points of Infiltration, a few Spotlights, and Maximum Dinobots, so I guess I've warmed up to it more. Taking it slower has helped me appreciate the individual stories and the way they build upon each other, rather than marathoning it and letting it turn into a haze of Furmanisms standing between me and MTMTE. Some of the stories are pretty good, some of them are kinda mid, he throws a few too many ideas at the wall and dilutes what worked about Infiltration, but in the grand scheme of Transformers comics they're perfectly average. And the art's great throughout, which certainly helps. You can't say the same thing about the Mike Costa era...

I think this run mostly just suffers for me because I know how much better the later comics get. More Than Meets the Eye with its mix of comedy and character drama, bringing a much more intimate and personal view of Cybertronian society. John Barber's comics that turn the messy continuity he inherited into something genuinely great. The currently ongoing comics Daniel Warren Johnson is doing at Skybound, with their mix of wrestling-inspired action and my new favorite version of Optimus Prime. (If you want to see me gush about those, you can do so here.) But it's not really fair to judge these old Furman comics for not being as good as their successors. They're not my favorite, and I think it's worth criticizing Furman rather than putting him on a pedestal as the unimpeachable best Transformers writer ever—he's not even in my top five at this point—but at the very least, both his successes and his failures were important in shaping everything that's come since.