The Transformers Classics, Volume 4

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

At this point, you either love Bob Budiansky's approach to Transformers, or you don't. I don't. Characters with ill-defined gimmicks are just piled on again and again. I know this isn't all his fault, but I still have to read it, and I don't like doing so. The one bright spot for most of this book is Ratbat, Decepticon fuel auditor, the only evil leader awesome enough to gloat about his account books.

But the Headmasters clog up an already overcrowded book, and there's not too much to inspire here, until the very end. The four-part "The Underbase Saga" starts off kind of dumb when Jesse infiltrates a Decepticon base disguised as a beach to rescue Buster, who has become a total waste of a character by this point. (I think he spends this whole volume as a hostage.) How the Decepticons could get away with this strains belief, even in this comic. It all becomes worth it, though, for Starscream ascending to ultimate power. Previously, he's been a big nonentity in this series, but I always enjoy a good supervillain-on-the-way-to-godhood rant.

It's not Bob Budiansky's best story, but it is his best in a long while, and a fitting subject for the climax of fifty issues of The Transformers.