Batman #69: If anything, this issue is a welcome relief as we more or less return to the present.
After the "Knightmares" ridiculousness -- itself suffering from "The Price" interruption -- King shows us Bane and Thomas Wayne (Dadman?) sparring. Thomas is eager to return to their plotting, while a naked Bane is obsessed with defeating him. (Paquette does a remarkably job of keeping us from seeing a naked Bane's junk. Bane fights with his knees in front of him a lot.)
Meanwhile, Batman finds Selina in his nightmare. He programmed himself this way, his failsafe for when his mind discovered that he had been exposed to the Scarecrow's fear toxin. He admits his real fear is asking Selina why she left him, something he has to face to overcome the toxin. She pretty much sticks to the script, telling him that she left him because he loves Batman more than he loved her. King's on stronger footing here than he's been in a while on the issue of Selina leaving Bruce, as I'll buy the fact that Bruce's commitment to Batman -- Selina alludes to his bat-inspired pledge that fateful night years ago -- would always trump Selina. It makes sense that it's Bruce's actual greatest fear.
King also supplies an initial answer to the Thomas Wayne mystery here, as Bruce reminds us that his father's last words to him were "Don't be Batman." In other words, both Thomas and Bane share a "motivation" to stop him. But, in his sparring with Bane, it seems like Thomas doesn't want Bruce to be Batman not because he's concerned about him, but because he wants to be the only Batman.
To be honest, this issue's main problem is that the "wedding' was almost 20 issues ago now. We've been waiting nine issues just to return to why Thomas Wayne is working with Bane. King really, really needs to do something, anything in this arc. Looking at the Comic Book Round Up website's rankings, this series is one of the few series that I've seen where the readers' ratings significantly trail the reviewers' ratings. In other words, it ain't just me. This issue begins to get us somewhere, but King has to pick up the pace and stop testing our patience.
Transformers #3: Nothing really happens here, though Ruckley fleshes out some of Cybertron's status quo. Unfortunately, he does so through extensive use of dialogue.
We start with Megatron railing against the Autobots' failure to stop the attack against him. After all, the Autobots are the security forces who control Cybertron; it was their responsibility to protect him. At Megatron's request, Soundwave puts together an Ascenticon Guard to address this failure. It's composed of Elita-1, Skytred, Refraktor, and Quake.
Ruckley then shows the Autobots are spying on Megatron; when they observe this moment, Quake's inclusion in the Guard particularly disturbs them. Orion Pax then asks Chromia why the security forces didn't intervene, and Chromia (somewhat reasonably) insists that they were there to provide crowd control, not foil an assassination attempt. She claims that the level of security need for the latter effort is beyond the security forces' abilities at this point. (If so, why are they spying on people? Isn't that the sort of thing an active intelligence service is supposed to do to prevent exactly these sorts of terrorist attacks? Are they just spying on them to know when shit is going to happen that they can't stop? Are they spying on the Rise? If not, it's pretty clear that politics, and not security, is motivating the spying.) When Orion asks about the Brainstorm investigation, Chromia tells him that they had their eye on 20 suspected Rise activists; they rounded up ten, but the other ten disappeared. Prowl interjects that someone leaked information about the raid to the Rise: the ten Transformers that they arrested were "innocent or irrelevant," which is why they didn't get the tipster's warning.
At this stage, a Transformer named Froid interrupts the discussion, and Ruckley is laying the seeds of a larger story here. First, we learn why Quake's addition to the Guard disturbed everyone. Clearly a prison psychologist, Froid describes him as one of the four failures of his career; he's apparently a sociopath with a nostalgia for violence. But, Froid then tries to convince Orion to give him access to one of his other failures. However, Orion denies his request because Sentinel Prime (who's apparently off-planet) has made it clear that won't happen. Clearly, whatever Froid did with his patient went well.
We then return to Bumblebee and Rubble, with Bumblebee promising to take Rubble to the moon given his ongoing fascination with it. Windblade arrives and tells Bumblebee that he's wanted at the Senate, so she escorts Rubble to his quarters. Rubble worries that Bumblebee is disappointed in him, but Windblade stresses how excited he was to be a mentor, given how few Transformers are made as a result of the Nominus Edict. She reminds Rubble how Brainstorm's murder has everyone really rattled. They arrive at Rubble's quarters to find Chromia there, unexpectedly. She's there with Geomotus, who is one of Froid's patients and apparently something of an oracle. Chromia informs them that they're using Geomotus since they don't really have any other leads on Brainstorm's murder. Barricade and Sideswipe are apparently tracking down Rise members, and Chromia needs Windblade to go to the transmission station with her. She then connects Rubble to her and Prowl's communicators, even though she admits they usually keep communications limited to mentors.
Ruckley had made a big deal of Bumblebee telling Rubble that he can't accidentally hail anyone since he's only linked to Bumblebee, so Chromia is clearly up to something here. After they leave, Windblade presses Chromia, noting that she likely installed tracking abilities when linking to Rubble. Chromia assures Windblade that the capability is inactive, but that they've got to be open to the possibility that Brainstorm's murder has something to do with Rubble. The weird part about this suspicion is that we, the readers, know that it doesn't; we saw Rubble discover Brainstorm's dead body. Ruckley has been spending a lot of time on the security forces' suspicions of Rubble over the last few issues, and I'll admit I don't quite get it.
We end with Orion walking through an oddly deserted valley were dead-looking Transformers are attached to the landscape. He appears before someone named Codexa, herself attached to a crystal-looking cave, and tells her that something is going wrong.
Honestly, I'm starting to lose interest here. I'm 100% here for nostalgia over the 80s cartoon show, and I'm happy to hang in here for a while. But, I'm also accepting the possibility that "a while" won't be as long as I thought.
Also Read: Nightwing #59
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