Optimus Prime #16 Review

Written by: John Barber

Art by: Kei Zama

Colors by: Josh Burcham

Published by: IDW

Last issue saw the beginning of the new storyline “The Falling” that John Barber explained, is the culmination of years of work on the Transformers series of books. And you know what, even as a new reader, you can tell that is the case.

A lot of the issue is dedicated to setting up a lot of story beats and pieces that you can’t help but know will come into play later on. At the end of the last issue we saw the arrival to Cybertron of the “Lord of Beats”, Onyx Prime - and his mission statement is quite clear: he is here to render judgement on Liege Maximo (another Prime) as well as to bring forth a better Cybertron, devoid of any of their new alliances (see: Earth).

However, before Barber gets to the continuation of the final pages of last issue, he brings into play another player: Soundwave. However, for any, like me, who haven’t been keeping up with the IDW Transformers universe, this seems to be quite a different Soundwave than you may be used to. This version of Soundwave seems to be one who appears to be a little fractured and not so sure of his place in the world - which I can only hope comes into play later on.

The rest of the issue is dedicated to not only Onyx Prime making his case for why Cybertron should now follow him, but also to see the different perspectives of the Cybertronians. We get to catch up with Starscream and the ghost of Bumblebee; we get to see the some small dissension between the Constructicons, and finally we get the continued inner monologue of Soundwave trying to process everything that is going on.

Kei Zama’s art is widely different than the other artists with Transformers books out this week and I love that! It may simply be that the inks are much darker in this issue, but that works to set the mood of the storyline. An all around excellent job by the art team this month.