Star Trek Vs Transformers #4 Review
This shouldn't work, but as with most things IDW, it just does.
Star Trek and Transformers are like oil and vinegar: they should not mix at all. Star Trek is a “hard science” sci-fi show about characters seeking out new lives and new civilizations, while Transformers is about a group of bio-mechanical aliens that can shape-shift into cars beating each other up. Any cook will tell you, though, that oil and vinegar do mix if there’s an emulsifying agent. The agent in this particular instance is that these are the animated shows meeting and not their live-action counterparts, and both combine to create something uniquely tasty.
In the penultimate issue of this five-part miniseries, the Enterprise is now kind of an Autobot with Kirk using his mind to control it from the inside to battle the Decepticons in a final showdown alongside other big name Transformers. Starscream has betrayed Megatron (because that’s all Starscream ever really does in the original animated series) and dilemmas are overcome.
Marrying these two very different animated shows is hard but not impossible with John Barber and Mike Johnson blending the two well. Amidst two robots punching each other, a la the Transformers, you also have Kirk battle to keep his own mind from being converged with Fortress Maximus. Those are two key features of either franchise and intercutting them the way they did shows that both writers knew what the heart of both properties were and ran with it.
As for the art, Philip Murphy’s character models, gestures and expressions make this more like animation cels rather than sequential art. It gloriously captures the cheap animation style and it's great. That is thanks in no small part to the color work of John Burcham who matches not just the colors but the saturation to bring this all into a lustrous look.
Five stars!