Transforming the Narrative: An Analysis of The Transformers: The IDW Collection - Infiltration

By Nola Pfau

After my dense commentary on the Megatron Origin story, it’s easy to believe that might be the majority of what comprises the first volume of the IDW Collection, but that’s far from the case--it’s not even a third of the book! It’s just...the most dense, by far.

As I noted then, these books aren’t in publication order, nor even chronological order, so the next chunk of story are a series of six stand-alone character one-shots under the Spotlight banner--Blurr, Cliffjumper, Shockwave, Nightbeat, Hot Rod, and Soundwave. We’ll encounter several of these over the next few volumes, as they were a concise way to tether characters to the main story, as well as introduce various plot elements that would come to be relevant later. These all appear here because they take place millennia before what we think of as the primary Transformers story; their conflict here on Earth.

There isn’t a lot to comment on here, so I’ll be brief. Prior to joining the war, Blurr is a racing circuit celebrity who doesn’t care about much. In his story, witnessing the death of a former pit crew member motivates him to join the Autobots. Cliffjumper, pursued across space by Decepticons, crash lands on a planet where he spends a little time with the locals before said Decepticons find him, and he demonstrates why everyone is scared of the little red guy. Shockwave’s, while not really necessary, is at least fun: It casts him as a schemer who has his own plans for Earth. When he arrives on the planet during the time of the dinosaurs, he’s ambushed there by what would come to be known as the Dinobots, five Autobots who transform (surprise!) into dinosaurs. Here too is the story of how they come by those forms. Nightbeat’s story is purely a setup for a later payoff. He’s implanted with a bit of hidden code and made to forget about it (we’ll get there eventually). Hot Rod’s story feels much the same but even more unnecessary. It establishes him as a risk taker who got a team killed on a prior mission. While trying to make up for that, he “rescues” another Autobot who is secretly a traitor. Finally, the last establishes how Soundwave came to be installed on Earth in the mid-1980s, an era that G1 continuity has a certain level of connection to.

The Hot Rod story is a fun time to take an aside: there are two primary double-agents in main Transformers continuity; one for each faction. The one here is a Decepticon named Double-Dealer, known to the Autobots in his guise as “Dealer.” The second, an Autobot, is named Punch, except when he’s pretending to be the Decepticon “Counterpunch.” Both of these ridiculous concepts are invariably played extremely straight, with no sign of humor at their absurdity whatsoever.

At any rate, all of that preamble gets us to the other meaty story of the book; the Infiltration miniseries. Infiltration was actually the first IDW Transformers story in publication order; thus the first glimpse into a new take on the G1 continuity. For what was originally their opening story, they brought in Simon Furman, a British writer known for lengthy runs on the original Transformers comics (both US and UK), and for doing a similar establishing stunt with Dreamwave Productions’ Transformers comics in 2002.

Transformers Infiltration begins inauspiciously, following teenaged hitchhiker Verity Carlo as she scams her way onto a bus and into a mobile phone. While large chunks of Infiltration would go on to be the blueprint for modern interpretations of the Transformers coming to Earth, it’s easy to see why Verity might’ve been left out of the live action movies--not only does she lack the connection to old cartoons that the Witwicky family has, but she’s a morally dubious petty criminal, and I can’t think of anything that scares Michael Bay more than a complex, well-textured female character.

Unbeknownst to Verity, and in a frankly cosmic stroke of bad luck, the phone she’s stolen is actually being traced by Decepticons working covertly on Earth. It contains evidence, you see, of a secret Decepticon command bunker, information that would expose the Transformers to the world were it to leak. Given that the mandate for both factions is to operate incognito (thus, the gimmick of the whole franchise), the Decepticons are very focused on controlling that information. Thus, after killing the man who originally possessed the phone, they target its new holder, Verity. Verity, for her part, has left the bus and ended up in the passenger seat of one Hunter O’Nion.

The trouble with a name like “O’Nion” in a book like this is that it’s not really a funny joke to start, and when you insist on it, you’re stuck with the uncomfortableness of an unfunny joke oft repeated. At any rate, it isn’t long before Hunter and Verity are buzzed by a low-flying fighter jet in a conspicuous royal blue. This blue jet is Thundercracker, one of Starscream’s Seekers (I promise, we’ll get to what they are) as introduced in Megatron Origin.

Another aside: Here, he’s an F-22 Raptor, updated from his 1984 incarnation as an F-15, a move that would be repeated by Starscream himself in the 2007 live action movie. Thundercracker’s choice of disguise here is especially noteworthy given this comic was originally released in 2006; the F-22 entered service only a year prior in 2005, and only a hundred and ninety five were made before production ended in 2011. Of the six primary Seekers (that is, the named characters from the original cartoon), three appear in Infiltration, and all end up sharing the same alternate mode, each with different ostentatious paint jobs. Given that all three also end up active in US airspace, it certainly says something that the U.S. military doesn’t appear to notice that their complement of extremely top secret brand new fighter jets has grown by approximately 1.5%. This is probably why the live action Decepticons tended to favor more typical military paint jobs in the 2007 film.

Most of the time, splash pages are not especially useful to a story. Here, though, I appreciate it, first for the large, resonant sound effect, and also for the even larger fighter jet. Transformers as a franchise often likes to play fast and loose with scale; though robots are often different sizes, it’s usually not nearly enough of a difference to account for the size of some of these alternate modes. Here, we’re given a great example of what an F-22 actually represents, physically, against the familiar scale of (what is legally distinct from) a Volkswagen Microbus. When one considers that the Autobot Bumblebee often sports the even smaller Volkswagen Beetle as an alternate mode, the size difference becomes all the more distinct.

Thundercracker (just a...very satisfying name to say, even if a bit long) blows up Hunter’s car, but Hunter and Verity both escape. As they’re running for their lives, in the open space of the Arizona desert, the situation looks grim, until an ambulance heads straight at them from the other direction, intercepting the attack in order to...return fire with a roof-mounted energy cannon. The driver, an eerily calm-looking blond paramedic, misquotes Arnold Schwarzeneggar at them, and given their range of choices, they climb in.

The mystery of the ambulance is one of those small, well-executed things; in the hindsight of several years of movies and newer animated adaptations, it’s hardly a complex puzzle, but here it appears at the tail end of the first issue, a nice last-page cliffhanger to tease readers until the next one. It’s a mark of craft that Furman introduces a moment like this into his plot despite multi-decade legacy of the franchise; every Transformers story is someone’s first.

At any rate, the mystery is soon dispelled--the driver isn’t real, and the ambulance is Ratchet, the Autobot medic. He breaks protocol to save the pair, fending off not only Thundercracker, but a pair of sports car Decepticon chaos agents named Runabout and Runamuck .There are characters like this in the franchise, whom we will periodically run (heh) into: they do not have a lot of depth, but they do have toys, and thus an obligation to appear. Runabout and Runamuck live up to their names; they pursue targets at high speed, attacking them by ramming into them, or other similar tactics. As Ratchet observes, they like to play.

Still, he is able to escape all three and convey the humans in his charge to a safe location--the home of an associate of Verity’s named Jimmy Pink. I’d criticize this name choice, but there are celebrities with worse names, and honestly the entire meeting between Verity and Jimmy reminds me, charmingly, of the movie Hackers, all though Furman seems committed to inventing his own terms, such as “flash-mail” and “net-hiker.” There’s a bit of back and forth here before Ratchet’s secret is revealed to everyone, but it’s generally one of the weaker scenes in both the story and the larger canon; the thing about humans in a Transformers story is...they’re not that interesting a large portion of the time, and the point of first contact between humans and Transformers has been revisited so many times at this point that it’s like Peter Parker’s origin in a Spider-Man movie, or the death of Batman’s parents. You don’t need to see it play out! Everyone’s got the base notes by now.

The other weakness it has here is that the artist for this miniseries, E.J. Su, just isn’t very good at drawing humans compared to his work with robots. It’s not that he’s bad, mind you. Everyone is recognizably themselves, stays within a consistent general design, but there’s a looseness and lack of detail to them that is all the more glaring in contrast against his highly-detailed Transformers designs. The one bright spot, though, is Ratchet’s human driver hologram, a blond, middle-aged man with a perpetual, unnatural smile on his face that’s played for great effect in scenes of tension.

Su’s pacing is honestly very strong as well; he doesn’t do comics professionally these days, and that’s a shame, because I can only imagine how good he’d be with an extra fifteen years or so under his belt. As these hardcover volumes are designed to be complete, this one includes the #0 prologue along with the rest of the six issue Infiltration miniseries. With sixteen pages in that prologue and twenty-two in the first issue, that makes a total of thirty-eight pages of brand new (at the time) Transformers continuity and not a single full robot on page until the final page reveal.

From the perspective of years hence, it’s hard to imagine that; the prior continuity, put forth by Dreamwave, had fizzled into nothing when that company fell apart. The interest was there, but even that can turn sour if the product doesn’t meet expectation, and here, Furman, Su, and company delivered nearly two full issues of story centered around new, original, non-Transformer characters, all while teasing out the details of the conflict. It makes the last-page reveal really work here; we know as readers that the Transformers are present, but the time they’re putting in keeping their identities from these humans even as they battle in front of them is really centered. When we do finally see two robots in full, as they’re presented to the humans, they’re Runabout and Runamuck.

As I said earlier, these are not characters with a strong background. They are largely one-note evil henchmen, trusted with small jobs, the equivalent of goons. Yet, when presented here, for the first time, it’s artfully done; they’re drawn from the viewpoint of the humans they’re revealing themselves to, and they’re massive. Runabout’s left foot is in the lower foreground of the panel, and it’s a clever frame of reference; his transformation is such that his feet together form the front end of the car he transformers into, and so here it’s a complete chunk of that car, as though it were simply parked in front of the viewer. It anchors this surreal sight very well, and it helps convey some of the awe that Hunter, Verity, and Jimmy might be feeling in that moment.

I bring up points like this because, as flawed as many of the early beats of this particular continuity can be, it’s important to recognize the moments where they really succeed in questions of scope and scale; for all of the other troubles, there are moments of greatness buried in these early tales that do a lot to establish why this particular story endured for a near decade and a half. Another example, one of the few human-centric strengths to this story, is Verity’s reaction to this sudden explosion of violence in her vicinity. Verity, a runaway and an escapee of the foster system, has learned survivability techniques that require solitude and a lack of attention paid to her. Now, she not only has eyes on her, but they’re large, alien, robotic ones, and they’ll kill her to get what they want. Verity, a teenage girl, does exactly what you might expect: She has a panic attack.

It’s not handled perfectly; for instance, though it’s severe enough that she forces Ratchet to stop and clambers out of the vehicle, it’s resolved in about a page via a pep talk from Jimmy. I don’t love that it’s so easily pushed aside, but I do like that it’s here. It’s a strong note that fits with everything we’ve learned about her character so far.

The story as a whole escalates from there; Ratchet connects with the other Autobots on Earth, Ironhide, Sunstreaker, Bumblebee, Prowl, Wheeljack, and Jazz, to inform them that the Decepticons have significantly pushed forward their infiltration timeline by initiating Siege Mode, which is apparently stage five of a tried-and-true planet conquering stratagem. It’s apparently too soon for Siege Mode, which means something’s up, and it’s not long before we find out what that is: Earth contains a special kind of energy produced by a substance called Ore-13, and Transformers can use it to power up. Starscream wants to take advantage of this to betray Megatron and assume command of the Decepticons.

It’s a familiar plot, and an almost disappointingly pedestrian one, but then that’s the point.

The IDW continuity is one that draws on history and nostalgia both, and in these early years especially it put a lot of work into using things that fans were familiar with, and remixing those in new ways. That’s a dangerous gamble to play with a fan’s nostalgia, but in IDW’s case it largely worked; after all, Transformers fans are used to a little adaptability in form. Here, the broad notes of Starscream’s treachery and Megatron’s supremacy are met; the Autobots, still sans Optimus Prime, merely stand by as this internecine fight plays out in cartoonish fashion; a powered-up, aura-bound Starscream is still no match for Megatron, and once he’s defeated, Megatron wastes no time consolidating his command on Earth.

That marks the end of Transformers: Infiltration; the secret’s out, there are alien robots on Earth. What’s next? Transformers: The IDW Collection, Phase One, Volume Two. See you then!