Shockwave

All right, so this is written by Robert Kirkman, artist Carl Kirschel, colorist Mike Spicer, letterer Russ Wooten, editor Ben Abernathy, publication design Andres Juarez, production Abigail Lee.

On Cybertron, the headless but somehow still alive Shockwave gloats over his prisoner and torture victim Alpha Trion.

Shockwave tells Alpha Trion that soon he will lead Shockwave to Vector Sigma so that he can access its power.

Alpha Trion remains silent, so Shockwave stabs him with a metal spike, drawing more of Alpha Trion's energon blood.

Alpha Trion screams in pain, delighting the sadistic Shockwave.

Alpha Trion begins to speak, and Shockwave is pleasantly surprised that he's apparently already been broken.

But Alpha Trion's resolve isn't weakened so easily.

He tells Shockwave that it looked like he's lost his head.

But yeah, no, overall, I did enjoy this for the most part.

And that ending point with Shockwave finding Vector Sigma, that is a good cliffhanger ending for the first issue of this new arc.

So a question I want to throw out there, because they keep teasing this and keep throwing it aside whenever they can.

So Perceptor was able to fix Bumblebee up as much as possible, right? But he said there's not enough of a spark left.

There are, yes.

No, but this is the point.

Like, isn't it? Like, we got Shockwave, we got Jazz, we got Alita 1, we got Hot Rod.

And we're getting the

Uh, but you definitely see Ironhide here [laughs] despite being dead and despite being, um, well, one of the Autobots.

You also see Shockwave, uh, zip into frame here despite, uh, despite not being part of this mission at all.

Thundercracker streaks into frame as Rumble, the purple one, uh, zips out of frame despite not being deployed out of Soundwave yet.

And finally, Skywarp streaks in as well, and mercifully that is the end of the scene because then we cut to Blaster inside his crow's nest, and we've already talked about that already.

There is a write-up in TFWiki, uh, under the incredibly robust Animation Errors subcategory, but it describes this aerial attack, "In a wide aerial shot of the city under attack, a Reflector flies by in Ironhide's color scheme." I don't know about that.

It, it looks like [laughs] Ironhide, but, uh, uh, but, uh, uh, Shockwave also makes his only appearance in the battle considering both his role as Cybertron's guardian and his absence from any other scenes during the battle.

His presence is probably an animation error.

Rumble also flies past despite being inside Soundwave at this point.