The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Bi-Weekly Graphic Novel Number 81 - Incredible Change-Bots, July 2007

When I read Jeffrey Brown's work, I'm very often overcome with a feeling of identification. I don't know the details of his life, or how much of it he puts into his work, but I get the sense that he thinks, and more importantly feels, very similarly to how I do.

This book is a beautiful, zany, sort-of-critical-but-sort-of-not love letter to the original Transformers comics and cartoons (with a healthy dose of the Go-Bots thrown in), two series I grew up on. Brown's tale of the Change-Bots so neatly mirrors the original run of Marvel's Transformers that I think it would be virtually impossible to really appreciate this story without having read, at the very least, the original 4-part mini-series. We're treated to silly amounts of expository dialogue, waffling from characters about the sides they've chosen, and sublimely ridiculous relationships between giant, war-mongering robots and the unlucky humans who encounter them. In Marvel's series, this is played to an audience of children as little more than an advertisement (at least for the first little while), but Brown's commentary on the series is definitely looking at the kids who grew up on this stuff.

Which means that, while there's definitely love there, there's also a bit of criticism of how those original stories were handled. Brown wants us to know that those originals, with which we grew up, were written in such a way that we would never question the morality, the ambiguity, and the danger of a giant robot invasion of the planet. The rebooted Transformers from Dreamwave in 2002 did much the same thing, but with far less humour than Brown. I love toy-based comics from the 80s, though there's a part of me that wonders if I was programmed to like them because they were based on toys I craved as a child. I still search for Starriors, and am deeply affectionate for the 4-issue series from Marvel in the 80s. But from my adult (?) perspective, I have to question whether or not the stories are actually good, or if I'm suffering from the perspective of nostalgia and unfulfilled childhood want.

Wow. That was a bit deeper than I thought this would get.

Onward.