Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

I realized I did this wrong - I did it for 2013.   I don't care.   I'm sticking with this, because I think it blew away everything I read in 2012, too.   

Ah, More Than Meets the Eye Volume 3.   While I love this whole series, and while this isn't the book that had Grimlock...  This is probably the best of the series.   Which is currently my favorite book series.   Read more under the cut. 

I appreciate this more now that I've read the advertisement for Dark Cybertron.   Clearly Roberts and Barber have been leading up to this for a while.   Well, Barber I assume, because Volume Four of Robots in Disguise STILL hasn't come in for me.   Deep breath. Other issue. 

I can see that Roberts, at least, has been setting up this huge event starting here.   But that's not what makes it so brilliant.   His laugh-out-loud one liners, his understanding of human nature - even when it's human nature being played out by big autonomous mechanical lifeforms - is astounding, and he takes an old franchise, plays with the new continuity and keeps it true to both. 

Empurata and shadowplay are, I believe, introduced in this volume.   At least, they were introduced to me as concepts.   It's absolutely chilling, especially when you see what Roberts has done with a fan favorite character.   One which elicited absolutely no sympathy from me.   HIs backstory here blows me away every single time, because while the character ends up being the same bastard I've loved to hate, I actually feel really, really bad for him.   *so confusing.   so very confusing -_-  I love it*

It also delves more into politics than most of the More Than Meets the Eye volumes, and that's a nice change of pace.   While there have been inter-crew politics, and verbal - and physical - sparring, this takes a longer view, going back into the history of the crew and their once and future nemesis.   It also takes a wider view of politics, and how Cyberton was once ruled, and the justice system that was perpetrated under... not Decepticon rule.   Bad, bad things happened, and it doesn't quite make me trust the Autobots as much as I used to, at least not all of them.   Or I can see them falling back into those systems, and it's a scary thought. 

Roberts takes a world I loved, asked deeper and deeper questions, and made me question the status quo with this volume.   This is the turning point for me in this series - this is where I start to see his larger plans at work in retrospect, and where I initially simply decided that he was my favorite writer for expanding the world in this way.   

This is simply a must read for Transformers fans.