Reading – Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye Official Guidebook

NOTE: I originally posted this on my LJ in 2008. I’ve moved the post here so that it can be cataloged with the battlegrip.com Transformers posts and so that I don’t lose it.

While poking around at Rogues Gallery, a Round Rock, Texas comic and game store that I try to hit at least a few times each year, I spotted IDW’s Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye Official Guidebook*. A 260-page trade paperback written by James McDonough and Adam Patyk, it only took me a few moments of flipping through the book to decide that yes, this must come home with me.

Note: This is a compilation/reprint of a series published by Dreamwave in 2004. I do not own the original version so I do not know what, if anything, was changed for this edition of the book. There’s a very good chance that this is the same as the older edition (just with a different cover).

So just what is it?

The cover reads “Aerialbots to Pretender Monsters” and it doesn’t lie. Other than a few pages at the beginning of the book – as well as an ad, a couple of full-page illustrations, and an index at the end of the book – each page of this book presents a Generation One character including illustrations of each character in all forms (the primary, robot form is a large illustration while other forms are small illustrations), a short bio, a section on weapons and abilities, a section on weaknesses, and a quote. A few characters – like Fortress Maximus, Optimus Prime, and every single damn Pretender – are given two or more pages.

So how is it?

Pretty much, if you’re a fan of G1 Transformers*, the book (looks like it) is a solid block of awesome. The artwork – from more artists than I care to list here but rest assured that Pat Lee and Don Figueroa both have artwork inside the book – is spectacular, dynamic, and beautifully colored; the art alone is almost worth the cover price.

Luckily for us, the book includes more than just artwork. This is the (almost) definitive Transformers* sourcebook, with a lot more character detail than you can find in Simon Furman’s Transformers: The Ultimate Guide* book from DK (though that book, published in 2004, gives a much broader overview of the Transformers line – including Beast Wars* material – than this book does). What impressed me was that the authors weren’t happy with just giving us a rewrite of existing information. No, they also dove in and wrote material on the Omnibots (only available through mail order back in 1985/1986; see the Transformers Wiki Omnibots page), Powerdashers (another mail order toy; see the Transformers Wiki Powerdashers page), and the entire Micromasters series (which was created in the late 80s).

The information doesn’t appear to follow any one Transformers source but, instead, appears to be a melding of different ideas with the authors selecting whatever best fit the current comic continuity and ignoring anything that didn’t fit their specific needs. In places the material is a bit vague – the entry on Galvatron, for example, doesn’t exactly state that Galvatron is a reborn Megatron but it does say:

“He is everything Megatron was and much more – the logical extension of the cunning and power that first formed the Decepticon army.”

There’s no mention of the rebirth, or Unicron, but the text implies the connection. This feels like a mistake to me, since the authors assume that everyone reading the book knows about the characters. Mistakes like that drive me to ask . . .

NOTE: One correction: Galvatron’s Weapons/Abilities section does mention Unicron by name:

“The power of Unicron courses through his every circuit . . . “

So the implication as to Galvatron’s creation is stronger than I first thought, but it isn’t clearly spelled out.

Why isn’t this book perfect?

Besides the problem with incomplete material, which is only a serious problem if you don’t know the series, the book has a couple of other flaws that, frankly, drive me a little insane.

• Page References – There aren’t any. Take the Autobot clone Cloudraker as a perfect example of why the book needs page references. Within the character’s bio there’s a mention of his clone twin, Fastlane, and a direct reference to “see Cloning Process” yet there are no page numbers. (What’s worse is that “Cloning Process” isn’t even in this book, you’ll need Volume Two* to learn about clones.) This is just sloppy work. Which doesn’t surprise me since the book also has major . . .

• Organizational Issues – The book opens with the Aerialbots, listing each character in alphabetical order by name, and then moves to Airwave (a Micromaster). The problem is that sometimes characters are listed by subgroup – Constructicons and Dinobots, for example – and other times by name – Pretenders, Targetmasters, Headmasters, and several other subgroups are spread out throughout the book. Now it looks like the goal was to keep narrow subgroups – those that were all of the same affiliation (either Autobot or Decepticon) – together while larger subgroups – the ones that appear in both armies – listed alphabetically by name rather than subgroup, but the end result is a mess. And to make matters worse there isn’t an overall description for each of the different subgroups (it would have been nice if the Constructicons section had started with a one-page description of the group. The combined version of each combiner type – Devastator, for example – tries to act as a sorta guide for the subgroup, but that really doesn’t help with the Dinobots and the attempt is half-hearted and poor. Major editing, and more writing, was needed to make this book truly fantastic.

Why will I keep it?

Because despite its problems – and those problems I mentioned really do get under my skin – it’s just a fun book to flip through. The art is great, the number of characters included is staggering (even the Mini-Spies get a mention), and I’m a sucker for these big catalog books. Sure, the book could have been seriously improved with more attention but what we did get is a lot of fun.

I’ll keep this and, if you’re a Transformers* fan, I recommend that you grab yourself a copy of Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye Official Guidebook*.