IDW Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #6 Interiors Review

By Gareth Watson | Follow on Twitter

There’s no other way to say it, Interiors is fantastic! Easily the best issue of the ongoings to date and that includes both titles. You have been warned! Roberts manages to squeeze so much out of one issue that it is very likely you may have to pay for extra postage if this is being delivered to your house. Adjust your awesome meter folks, this one goes up to eleven!

Interiors is a quasi-sequel to Last Stand of the Wreckers with Nick Roche rejoining his former writing partner Roberts and series regular colourist Josh Burcham as we learn that there might still be more to what happened on Garrus-9 than we realise.

This issue also gives us ties to Chaos Theory as Whirl takes centre stage in what is undeniably his best issue to date.

Yet there’s more as we spend quite a bit of time deconstructing Fortress Maximus especially in light of his own psychotic outbreak in the last issue and we get to the bottom of the consequences of what he was put through before he was taken out on Garrus-9.

In amongst all of that there are the usual ‘below decks’ shenanigans. These are great as always with some genuinely funny dialogue between the off duty bots, including a not quite accurate impersonation of Magnus by Tailgate who is still in the process of being indoctrinated into the Autobot way. Personally I love these scenes between the characters during their downtime and even though the dialgoue is sometimes a little too anthropomorphic considering we are dealing with giant alien robots it’s hard not to get caught up in it all.

And to top it all off a very bad thing happens, a very bad thing indeed.

It’s tough to give too much away without spoiling what is a genuinely interesting situation into which the crew of The Lost Light find themselves this issue. The preview for this issue stops just shy of the really juicy stuff kicking in.

All I will say is that the revelations that take place throughout this issue are probably the most significant of the series to date and by the time you read the last panel (and boy, what a last panel) you will be bursting at the seams with excitement to see where things are taken.

As mentioned Nick Roche is back onboard for art duties this month and as always he does a great job. Some of his panels featuring Fortress Maximus are suitably epic and really convey the size and strength of the character.

Credit must be given to both he and regular artist Milne as they both ape each others styles very well. As a matter of fact Milne did such a faithful job carrying Nicks designs through on his run in the series that you might not even pick up on Roches return at all. It’s really quite a subtle change. With Burcham providing his ever reliable colour palette to proceedings the job of distinguishing between both artists is made all that much harder.

When it was announced that James Roberts would be giving us an ongoing series I think few realised exactly how good a job he would do. I mean he helped Roche with LSOTW and that was one of the best books to come out of IDW but this time he’d be on his own left to his own devices.

When I saw that his run was going to be some Star Trek Voyager style Lost In Space adventure I do admit to getting a little worried. Having said that here we are 6 issues in and the man has hardly missed a beat. This is easily the stand out issue of the series so far and I cannot wait to see what he has planned next.

This Months Robertsism

Just for fun I have decided to start a new feature for these reviews. Each issue I will take a line of dialogue that I particularly like and will include it at the end of the review. Why? Just cos!

When discussing what happened at Garrus 9 with Rung:

Fortress Maximus: “Even Tailgate knows, and someone had to draw him a picture of Optimus Prime the other day…”