Transformers, Vol. 6: War's End (Transformers (2019))

but I guess I was hoping it would come together as some reviews suggest. I kind of liked the pace and tone of the story at the very beginning, but I quickly realised I didn't like Brian Ruckley's writing style, and should have stopped waaay earlier, but there isn't a Transformers graphic novel I *haven't* read, so I had to keep going.I think I read somewhere Ruckley hadn't written for the comic book format before and it shows. You can read a panel, a page, a comic, a whole book from this series, and not really have any understanding of what's supposed to have happened. Pages jump from place to place without any standard comic techniques to make it understand you were somewhere else. I didn't care about a single character, nor anything that happened.James Roberts' MTMTE/Lost Light run had some pretty out-there concepts, but it still all made sense. It wasn't to everyone's taste, not 100% to mine, but at least it had a flow, crescendos, moments you remembered, and endings. by contrast, Ruckley's stories and concepts are totally simple, and yet somehow frustrating and incomprehensible.Now I'm not expecting a Sandman or Watchmen from a Transformers comic, but I would literally put this below those awful Transformers/superhero/other franchise crossover attempts, or the godawful Heart of Darkness - at least they had the decency to keep it brief.Two consecutive issues end with the same 'dramatic' reveal of a big character, only for them not to be mentioned at all in the next issue. There might have been different comic lines converging being the reason the reveal was repeated twice, but who would know? As a collection of individual comics, none of these books bothered to introduce or recap where the story was at, nor inform us which comics were being collected. I imagine the editors couldn't be bothered to figure it out either. I'm not surprised IDW lost the license for Transformers.And it finishes with as flat and empty an ending as you could get, but I guess I shouldn't have really been surprised at that point.Pointless.

With one last overpriced book, IDW's final ongoing Transformers series ends pretty much exactly as it began, just fine. By no means has this series been "bad" per se but it's extremely striking how forgettable it is. As this book ends and the climax begins to crescendo, I had to go to TFwiki to remind myself what characters had done in previous books, because there are way too many characters that are all written with the same voice and who's motivations and defining traits boil down to "gets anxious sometimes" or "doesn't get anxious sometimes". Leaving aside the characters, I'm surprised by how little this saga truly has to add to the Transformers legacy. Despite little glimmers of interesting ideas both in the characters and world building, this series is ultimately resoundingly typical of Transformers fiction, with a basic story that is an absolute retread of too many Transformers narratives that have come before.I hate to criticize the art of comics too harshly, but I have to say that this book's art is particularly bad. Clearly, the process has been rushed, and the result is that all twelve chapters of this book have two to three different artists drawing scenes and panels basically at random, creating an effect that would be very distracting even if the art was good, which, with the exception of the handful of pages drawn by the eminently talented Alex Milne, it isn't.The fact that the book isn't very interesting and the art is bad wouldn't usually be a true dealbreaker per se, but the fact that this book, like the five before it, is sold at the ridiculous price of $40-$50 makes this an almost objectively terrible purchase. I would only recommend this to people who really liked the Transformers ongoing or Transformers completionists.