Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

This volume starts off on some high notes, and, well, ends on them, too.   (It's just the first high notes don't make me cry and shake in anger.)

From a mission gone wrong, to one of the fluffiest pieces in which you see some of the crew have a day off in Hedonia, to the Overlord arc, in which the aftereffects have yet to be fully realized, this is a fantastic volume.   It's all brilliant, and makes me wonderfully happy, while being a slight let down from the previous volume.   As I called before, there's just not much that can match the perfectness and awe-inspiring end to volume 3.  

The beauty of this volume is how much it tries, and how it makes that effort seem effortless.   It tears you through joy, and heartbreak, and rage; it ranges from deadly serious to ridiculously funny.   It runs the whole gamut, and you enjoy every single second, every single brilliant second.   It cuts through the pain with humor, and makes serious points even when funny. 

The prose story is far superior to Eugenesis - clean cut, to the point, and as heartbreakingly funny and seriously funny as the graphic novel.   It's four pages at the end called Signal to the Noise.  It uses humor in the same way, and has the same characterizations that Roberts brings to life along with the various artists he's worked with on this series. 

In the end, this is all about what people do with themselves after a war they've been fighting for millions of years.   A civil war, and yeah, they've been fighting that long - not through generations, mind you, but they themselves have been fighting.   These are the lost, the vulnerable, the psychotic, the outcasts and outliers, the broken and all of them are trying to put things right and have their world make sense again.   It's a long, long journey and this is jus the start.   

The betrayed, the forgotten, the betrayers and the ones best forgotten: Roberts puts the painfully glaring spotlight on them all, and makes you laugh while they squirm, and squirm when they laugh.   If you chose to join them, be warned you will share their joys, and their pain, and they tend to go from the highest peak to the shallowest grave.   Roberts enjoys playing roller coaster with your emotions, toying you, and shocking you, and as much as you might want to protest that you don't like it, he does it so skillfully, so intelligently, with such care and sympathy, that you don't.   You can't, really.  

Although I will say this after reading through.   I stand by my statement that Rodimus is a horrible leader.   He's still too immature, and too much of a risk taker, and he's played with the crew's life since day one.   I understand why he's leading the Lost Light, why he's the captain: it's in his nature to rebel as he did, and to do so in such a flippant way that puts so many bots in danger.   I will, however, never forgive him for what's happened in this volume.   Never.   

I hate you, Rodimus.   Your stupid name just reflects your own inner stupidity.   I sincerely hope you go offline permanently.   Yes, I'm talking to a fictional character.   I don't care, because if he were in front of me now, I'd say that, watch him toss around his office, then try to hump him into stasis.   (I'm angry, not celibate.)

Although there is a pretty big continuity error.   Given how readily Magnus told Tailgate to relax in an earlier volume, I find it hard to believe that now Magnus doesn't believe relax is a word, or that he says he has to 'learn how to reflex' in this volume.