Jessica (HDB)

Please pardon me while I go find a corner to sob in.

No, seriously. John Barber and James Roberts were evil (and brilliant) enough on their own, but together? Dark Cybertron is a force to be reckoned with. My poor, fractured emotions. If I thought things were going downhill before, that just means I wasn't at all prepared for what takes place in this volume. Everything. Literally everything, is falling apart. Remember how I said before that the thin line between black and white was blurring? Well, it's officially gone. It's all shades of gray now.

Where before Bumblebee's crew and Rodimus' crew were separate, now everything is converging. I'll admit that I wasn't sure how they were going to manage that. I mean, the Lost Light was out in the middle of nowhere, Pax and his posse were lost in the Dead Universe, and everyone else was on Cybertron. How you bring characters, who are as far away from one another as is possible, back to one spot? Well, I'd tell you but it would ruin the surprise. So I'm not going to. Go read it.

This ends on a massive cliffhanger, and it's only because I had the second volume right next to me that I didn't have a panic attack. Despite how many times some of these characters have almost died, and come back to life, I still fear for them. That's the work of those brilliant authors I spoke of before. They make you care, and then they smash your emotions to bits.

My only gripe about this was the fact that the art was all over the place. I know they had guest illustrators, so it makes sense, but it was jarring. If I'm already going to frantically and worriedly be reading panels, I need my characters to stay consistent. Stand by for my review of Volume 2. It's going to be a doozy.