Written and drawn by Daniel Warren Johnson

Colours by Mike Spicer

Lettering by Russ Wooton

Published by Image/Skybound

Spike and Carly are ready to get out of town. Spike is the son of a man who deals with combat related PTSD by climbing into a bottle and has friends who don’t seem minded to do anything about. Spike’s plan is to get to Cal, study, become an astronaut and never look back. Carly’s plan is to go to art school, riding her gloriously painted van all the way there. They’re clearly something to each other but they aren’t quite saying it out loud. Especially when a landslide drops them into a cavernous spaceship full of vast, seemingly dead robots…

This is such a fun time. Warren Johnson’s gritty, dirty-fingernailed style is an incredibly good fit for the franchise and he has an instinctive understanding of the scale of these characters that makes surprising pages really sing. There’s a splash page of Sam and Carly in one of the Ark’s engines that’s stunning in its simplicity. Best of all there’s a multi-page action sequence which showcases every single one of the book’s strengths. Spicer’s colours light the scene like an inferno and Wooton’s expressive lettering is as huge and expressive as the action itself. I especially loved ‘GRAPPLE!’ and ‘CHOMP!’ as sound effects.

Best of all though is just how gnarly the fight is. Two major characters are flat out killed and we get to see Prime clothesline and suplex Starscream with bone-crunching power. Warren Johnson has always done action very well and his supernatural wrestling series, DO A POWERBOMB!, is a favourite of mine. The action here marries that intensity with the huge scale of the characters and leads to my favourite moment in the book. Prime, horribly outnumbered, frantically reaching for his rifle as Sam and Carly push it towards him. To Prime, it’s a weapon. To the humans, it’s a pickup truck sized object they can barely shift. But they do, because even here, the first time they meet him, the pair instinctively trust Prime. It’s a great moment in a great scene and it sets the power dynamic of the book up brilliantly.

It also carries us through the pages at a dead sprint. The two sides fight to something approaching a stop, the autoboots sacrificing a major asset to flee. Starscream, now in charge of the Decepticons and suddenly not sure how he feels about that, is sent to search for power and in doing so, runs straight into Spike’s dad. Elsewhere, the Autobots struggle to regroup after the loss of two of their own and have no idea that the fight hasn’t stopped, it’s just shifted. It’s breathless storytelling that misses no beats and ends with a moment of pure evil for everyone’s favourite terrible jet. It also ends with a story from Warren Johnson about his love for these characters and that love is visible on every page here.

Verdict: In later months we’ll see how GI Joe fit into this but for now, this isn’t just more than enough, it’s a fantastic start. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart