Ironhide 3 Review - Oh no not him!

Ironhide 3 contains two of my most hated Transthings™;

1) Alpha Cocking Trion
2) Transformers wearing clothes – the stupidity of which I hope is self evident.

So having seen the previews, and having felt very little happened in the preceding issues, I was rather expecting not to like this. Furthermore, despite an intriguing ending to the previous issue, not much has actually happened yet.

However, possibly because my expectations were pretty low, I really rather enjoyed this. While the whole thing still reads pretty quickly (which sadly seems to be becoming one of Mike Costa’s trademarks) there are definitely some rewarding elements to this issue.

The key one, at least for me, and probably what has deflected my anti-cartoon oh god not frigging Alpha bloody Tricycle bias (yes I freely admit it’s a bias, well done) is this;

Alpha Trion is a bit of a dick.

Usually when Alpha Trion pops up (probably in some crappy reality hoping BotCon fangasm masquerading as an official comic) he plays the tedious role of wise old exposition dispenser and you know that uberguffin Vector Sigma is not far behind. Here however, while he arguably still plays this role to an extent, he does it in the manner of a vain, self obsessed know it all.

This attitude, coupled with Ironhide’s utter lack of care for it, creates a surprisingly amusing issue with some lovely moments of character interplay.

I also think that Ironhide’s predicament in terms of his memories raises some interesting potential for future stories (and cheap exposition…) even if it is rather reminiscent of Green Arrow’s revival a few years back under Kevin Smith.

Couple these story elements with the gloriously clean Casey Coller art and this is probably the first of Mike Costa’s Transformers comics (despite at least quarter of the internet wetting their thongs over That Thundercracker Issue it didn’t really do it for me) that I have come out of the other side of with a smile on my face.

That’s not to say there aren’t faults. As alluded to before this isn’t going to take you long to read – Costa seems to specialise in wasting panels on extraneous scene’s (and here they are a bit further down the corridor) or boring talking heads.

Furthermore the reason Ironhide has (allegedly) been brought back seems a little ill thought, just in terms of the logistics of the task he has been given. Of course this may be part of a bigger plot twist in the final issue but Big Red seems to take it at face value which makes me wonder.

And that brings me to my final concern – there seems to be an awful lot to cover in the final issue and given the pace of things up until now, I can’t quite see it all being wrapped in a satisfactory manner.

Unless Shockwave turns up and spews 22 pages of exposition about how and why he is responsible for everything before falling down a hole, which has been known to happen.

But until then, this was a pleasant surprise.

Story 6/10
Art 8/10

Please note I consider 5/10 to be average, so anything above that is a degree of good.