Form Follows Function

« Transformers vs. G.I. Joe #4 »
"Form Follows Function"
Publisher	IDW Publishing
First published	November 26, 2014
Cover date	October 2014
Written by	Tom Scioli and John Barber
Art by	Tom Scioli
Colors by	Tom Scioli
Letters by	Tom Scioli
Editor	Carlos Guzman
Production by	Chris Mowry
Continuity	Transformers vs. G.I. Joe

While Scarlett's Joes make peace with the Autobots, another group led by Psych Out gets caught between the deposed Autobot leader Hot Rod and revolutionary Blaster, and the Joes' non-human unit clashes with the Oktober Guard.

Synopsis

In Decepticobracropolis on Earth, Duke's undercover mission has gone wrong. Though his identity has been discovered, he doesn't take it lying down: after stuffing a grenade in Frenzy's mouth to free himself from the robot's grip, he fights his way through a team of Cobra troops, and takes down loquacious Cobra pugilist Big Boa. Out for a bit of personal revenge, he then hunts down the apparent turncoat Snake Eyes, who has just completed a meditation ritual and believes his mastery of body and mind will allow him to make the journey through the M.A.S.S. Device that has killed so many others. Duke tackles Snake Eyes through the M.A.S.S. Device portal, and the pair are sent tumbling through the void between worlds.

In T.H.E. P.I.T., Doctor Venom conducts an arcane experiment with Soundwave's remains, General Flagg's Bumblecycle and some Joe greenshirts. As Venom reads in the native tongue of Cybertron from some kind of grimoire, the Bumblecycle springs to life and begins coiling around his arm...

A fleet of G.I. Joe green bombs hurtles through space towards Cybertron, led by a supply rocket manned—so to speak—by G.I. Joe's "non-human personnel" unit U.S.7, made up of the team's animal sidekicks and captained by Polly, aka "Seasick". As they draw near to the metal planet, U.S.7's ship is attacked and boarded by G.I. Joe's Russian counterpart, the creepy, kooky Oktober Guard, but after only a few moments of fighting, their ship is snatched out of the air by the gigantic Fortress Maximus. The energy-starved colossus pulls them down to Cybertron's surface, shakes animal and guardsman alike out of the ship, and tosses them down his gullet.

At Cybertron's north pole, a Joe team is marking the huge rocket-furnaces growing out of the planet's as targets for the approaching wave of green bombs. Team leader Psych Out is dismayed; he is fascinated by the constantly morphing geography of Cybertron, and would much rather be investigating the two curious mountains that have sprung up at the south pole. Though they successfully accomplish their task, misfortune strikes when the team are suddenly snagged in a turborat trap, laid around the furnace to catch robotic vermin. The traps are collected by Hot Rod, a fallen Autobot leader once known as "Imhotep Rodimus", now a maintenance worker for Megatron's empire. Loading up his traps and going on his weary way, trying to ignore the grisly sight of the smelting pits fueling the furnaces, Hot Rod finds his path barred by Autobot revolutionary Blaster, who is appalled by the once-great young hero's defection and eager to take him out. As the two Autobots fire on each other, the Joes are blasted free from their trap, but at that point, the green bombs begin falling. One bomb-blast kicks up a chunk of rubble that knocks out Blaster; Decepticons Apeface and Demolisher arrive in time to see Hot Rod standing over his fallen body and, believing he has defeated Blaster, congratulate him on a job well done. Disgusted by words of praise from the lowest of the low, Hot Rod is galvanized into action: he hurls the two Decepticons into one of the furnaces, loads Blaster into his alternate mode, and heads off for Metroplex. This is good news for the Joes, who secretly use their grappling hooks to hitch a ride on Hot Rod, enabling them to outrun the green bomb blasts.

In the terraformed Iacon, Bazooka is in a portable toilet that is thrown through the air when Brawn's Autobot unit attacks. Emerging from the collapsed commode, he is horrified to see what appears to be a battlefield strewn with dead bodies... but as he cradles Scarlett's fallen form, she and all the other combatants turn out to be alive. Before hostilities can break out again, though, the crawling form of Metroplex climbs appears and disgorges Grimlock's Autobots and the small Joe team they had captured. Grimlock loudly announces that a truce has been brokered, and the Autobots and Joes all have a dance party to cement their new friendship. During the celebration, Bazooka tries chewing on some of the foliage that the terraforming process has created, but the bizarre techno-organic leaves prove to be psychoactive, and induce a hallucination of some kind of composite intelligence known as "Primus".

The mesmerized Bazooka tries to explain what he is seeing, but Grimlock mistakenly believes he is asking about Optimus Prime, and explains how the lost Autobot leader fled the planet after being defeated by Megatron; Rodimus was Optimus's appointed successor, but Grimlock overthrew him. The other Autobots grumble that Grimlock is twisting the facts, and that nobody knows why Optimus left or where he went...

Lost in the interdimensional gulf, Duke and Snake Eyes continues to struggle, both clinging onto the ninja's sword, which somehow seems to protect them from the ravages of the space between realities. Oblivion looms, but just then, the two are snatched to safety by the claws of a mysterious, misshapen robotic creature... which the two soldiers have no way of knowing is Optimus Prime himself, his body reconfigured into a form that can survive in the void!

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"Trickings and Treatings, G.I Joes. Come and get your sweeties."

—S.H.R.I.E.K. announces the October Guard's arrival

"Turncoat! The once-great polymath warrior prince Imhotep Rodimus spends his days cleaning turborat droppings and hauling energonic hot rods to fuel Megatronian death engines!? How far have the mighty fallen? Are there no heroes left on Cybertron?"

—Blaster, a mite peeved

"The party gets weird. The dancing simultaneously speeds up and slows to a crawl. I see each creature, man and cyberman, become the same centipede. It's life cycle, womb to tomb is arrayed before me. I see Earth growing ever larger, haloed by the sun just behind it. The bodies merge. The minds become one. Is there a name for this? I hear it spoken... two syllables... a name? A call to action? A plea? A command? A prayer? PRIME US."

—Bazooka has a vision

Notes

Continuity notes

• The street preacher from issue #1 is revealed to have been one of Snake-Eyes's teachers, the Soft Master (see "G.I. Joe references", below).
• As the green bombs strike, an image of Joe Colton's eyes appears over the scene, and the narration recalls his lifetime dream of remote warfare, as introduced back in issue #1 with his Coltonbolt.
• Shipwreck and Polly have received cybernetic upgrades to replace the damaged portions of their body following the injuries they sustained last issue. The issue's commentary notes that Shipwreck's cybernetic eye can see through Polly's own.
• Though Grimlock's "cave-painting" style recap of Cybertronian history seems to imply that Optimus left Cybertron aboard Omega Supreme, the Autobot leader's fate, reveal at the issue's end, seems to indicate their belief is incorrect. Indeed, back in issue #2, Megatron mentioned that he had "booted [Prime's] hide into the void", suggesting he is responsible for stranding him in interdimensional space.

Transformers references

• Classic Cybertronian locations the smelting pits and the Sea of Rust put in appearances.
• It's not clear what it means yet, but the two "mega-mountains" that have emerged from Cybertron's surface certainly are reminiscent of Unicron's famous horns.
• While the depiction of Rodimus is a fairly dramatic departure from the flawed, insecure hot-head he has historically been portrayed as in fiction, it actually lines up fairly well with his original toy bio, which depicted him as a wise and trusted leader in a similar vein to Optimus himself.
• Blaster's grim, uncompromising depiction in this issue hearkens back to the original Marvel series, which also debuted the character in a story revolving around the smelting pits.
• A surprising face among the Decepticons is the Armada Decepticon Demolishor, but not unprecedented, as a Generation 1 version of the character also exists.
• The Autobots and G.I. Joe boogie down to establish their truce, probably a reference to The Transformers: The Movie, when the Autobots and Junkions did the same.
• Optimus Prime's form is based around a mistransformation of his original toy, rather than a new body.

G.I. Joe references

• As Snake-Eyes meditates, he recalls the teachings of his masters. While unnamed in the issue, they are recognizable to G.I. Joe fans as the Soft Master and the Hard Master, names reflected in the philosophies Snake-Eyes remembers them espousing.
• Doctor Venom's experiment with the Bumblecycle already looks pretty gruesome, but it becomes even more horrifying when you can recognize the device that one of the "greenshirt" Joes is strapped into as the Brainwave Scanner, a particularly torturous mind-reading device of Venom's design that appeared frequently in the original Marvel G.I. Joe series.
• The Joes' animal team is made up of all real animal partner characters from G.I. Joe history. Franchise mainstays include Law's German shepherd Order, Mutt's Rottweiler Junkyard, Spirit's eagle Freedom, and of course, Shipwreck's parrot Polly, now granted a codename of her own, "Seasick". Less well-known are Spearhead's bobcat Max and Dusty's coyote Sandstorm; the odd-beast-out is warthog Clyde, who is not originally a Joe animal, but actually owned by the Dreadnok poacher Gnawgahyde. His file card here notes he was "liberated from a poacher" in reference to this.
• The Oktober Guard are the Russian counterpart to G.I. Joe, and have featured in much past Joe fiction. Originally named for the October Revolution, they are here completely reimagined as a Halloween-themed horror team. Only team bruiser Horrorshow gets to retain his original name, given its appropriateness; infantry trooper Schrage becomes torture robot "S.H.R.I.E.K."; team leader Colonel Brekhov is now "Colonel Breakoff" (as in, "breaking off your fingers"); flamethrower-wielding mechanic Dragonsky is reinvented as fire-breathing reptilian quadruped "Dragun"; paratrooper Stormavik is replaced by the diminutive Münchnik; and Daina, the only member of the Guard to have appeared in Transformers fiction before, has become "Denia" (that is, she'll "deny ya" mercy).

Real-life references

• The title is derived from architect Louis Sullivan's famous dictum that "form ever follows function", often quoted by Modernist designers.
• The one-page scene of Doctor Venom working on the Bumblecycle is labelled "Tales from T.H.E. P.I.T.", a reference to the classic EC horror comic, Tales from the Crypt, complete with a direct homage to the comic's logo. This comes on the heels of last issue's reference to Venom as the Crypt Keeper, the comic's host.
• The Joe's "non-human personnel" team is named "U.S.7" after the comic book We3, about cybernetically enhanced animals.
• U.S.7's ship is designed to resemble Snoopy.
• The Joes announce their intention to "Steranko" their way out of Hot Rod's cage, a reference to comic book artist Jim Steranko, who performed as an escapologist in his younger days. Steranko is particularly well known for the psychedelic spy/military stories he told on Nick Fury, a big influence on the look and tone of this series.
• As the Joes and Autobots party together, some words (not in a speech bubble, but probably intended to convey a chant or song) read "Yub Yub"—a reference to "Yub Nub", the Ewok victory song that plays at the end of the original theatrical release of Return of the Jedi, as the Ewoks and Rebels have a similar celebration.
• Barbecue quips that the planetary engines are hot enough to "turn [them] all into M.R.E's"; "M.R.E." stands for "Meal, Ready-to-Eat", a kind of military field ration. M.R.E.s replaced the unpopular "C-rations", which the characters of the original Marvel G.I. Joe run would often comment on with relief.
• Hot Rod was once known as "Imhotep Rodimus". Imhotep was an ancient Egyptian polymath: an accomplished engineer, physician, and architect of pyramids. He was also chancellor to the pharaoh, perhaps mirroring Rodimus's high status as Optimus's choice of successor. Given Scioli's penchant for wordplay, it's not surprising that you can find the name "Hot Rod" within "Imhotep Rodimus".

Errors

• As Bazooka has his vision, quoted above, "it's" is used instead of "its".

Other notes

• This issue was originally solicited for release in October, with the solicitation blurb specifically noting that the Oktober Guard were appearing "just in time for Halloween". Unfortunately, the issue didn't make it out until the end of November.
• Naturally, when Bazooka's portable toilet is sent flying into the air, the onomatopoeia is BA-THROOM.

Covers (4)

• Standard cover: Megatron, Apeface and Astrotrain fend off a G.I. Joe attack, by Tom Scioli
• Subscription cover: Soundwave versus a small group of Joes, by Riley Rossmo
• Cover RI: Optimus Prime, Sky Lynx and Scarlett by Tom Scioli; connects to the RI covers from issues #2 and #3 to form a larger image
• Yesteryear Comics exclusive cover: The Baroness and Ravage, by Jamie Tyndall and Ula Mos, available exclusively from Yesteryear Comics

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Reprints

• Transformers vs. G.I. Joe Volume 1 TPB
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• Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 73: Transformers vs. G.I. Joe, Part 1

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  Volume 1; cover art by Tom Scioli

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  Quintessential Collection; cover art by Scioli

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  Definitive G1 Collection: Vol. 73: Transformers vs. G.I. Joe, Pt. 1; cover art by Don Figueroa and Scioli

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