Humble Comics Bundle - Hasbro Crossovers
Rick and Morty vs Dungeons and Dragons - I’ve never seen an episode of Rick and Morty (apparently it’s about a nerdy kid and his insane mad scientist grandfather), but I very much appreciated the different approaches they took to skewering D&D over the collection, including heavy references to different editions. I don’t have a particular desire to seek out the cartoon now, but I enjoyed this as a stand-alone.
Star Trek vs Transformers - Specifically, Star Trek: The Animated Series, teaming up with Autobots to stop an alliance of Klingons and Decepticons from destroying the galaxy. Hokey and a bit predictable, but entertaining.
Transformers and Ghostbusters - Apparently this entire thing grew out of a transforming Ecto-1 that was made for a con years ago. In this version of the combined history, Gozer the Gozerian was responsible for the fall of Cybertron, but the Autobots escaped in the Ark and eventually find a Cybertronian signal (Starscream’s ghost) on Earth.
My Little Pony and Transformers (issue #1) - This is a mash-up that very clearly takes the tone of MLP rather than Transformers, because even it its silliest, it was never this level of goofy cartoony. I don’t think that’s bad, though. I can already envision how the rest of the story goes, with the Ponies teaching Megatron the true meaning of friendship after a lot of explosions.
Transformers vs The Terminator (issue #1) - In a ruined future, Skynet is the last bastion of resistance against the Decepticons that have conquered the Earth. A T-800 Terminator is sent back in time to stop them, and he meets up with Sarah Conner just in time to see Mount St. Hilary erupt and wake the Cybertronians from stasis. This is another case where I can tell where the story is going-the Terminator will have to team up with the Autobots (and Sarah Conner) and there might be another round of time-travel shenanigans before it ends.
Jem and the Holograms: Infinite - Rather than being a crossover with any other property, this is a continuation of the 5-volume series and crosses over with an alternate-dimension version of itself. (Not the 80s cartoon version, unfortunately!) It’s a “bad future” version of the world where the secret of Synergy got out and got stolen by JemCorp, who had all of the protagonists killed and used holograms to impersonate them and divide society. (Almost all of the protagonists were killed; in a reversal of the usual trope, the lesbians survived.) The ending is inexplicably pat, with the main antagonists just vanishing. I have to guess there was another volume/spinoff coming that intended to use them.
Revolution: Heroes - A massive crossover event between all the properties IDW was doing ongoing stories with: Transformers, G.I. Joe, MASK, Micronauts, Rom and Action Man. (It clearly takes place after a lot of Transformers events, because Starscream is in charge of Cybertron and the Autobots and Decepticons are all on generally good terms.) The thing is, I only really known anything about the first two properties but all the rest have large casts of characters and interlocking plots. It’s nice that this summarizes tie-in books that aren’t included, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s a mashed-together mess of too many characters and trying to link them all through “ore-13”, which is apparently the name we’re using for raw energon crystals now. It’s also about 80% fight scene by volume.
Revolutionaries (volumes 1-2) - This follows Revolution as an ongoing series featuring a small group of the crossover characters. There are a couple of witty lines, but it remains a bit of a mess, stuffing too many characters that need explanations and flashbacks into an otherwise really thin plot. (The villains have a “Talisman” that can magically hurt Transformers and turn humans into monsters, or something like that. The heroes have to retrieve it.)
Transformers and G.I. Joe: First Strike - This takes place after the events from Revolution and Revolutionaries, though with slightly fewer players in the game. The magical Talisman is used by rogue G.I. Joe characters (including the constantly-presumed-dead original Joe himself) to attack the Transformers and the Joes have to go to Cybertron to rescue them. This spends a lot more time with Transformers I recognize and give a damn about (Damn, but Starscream is entertainingly smug), which is something. The big twist here is that “Kreiger”, the guy who knows so much about the Talisman, is secretly the Visionaries’ wizard Merklynn, and his goal for the entire crossover was to lead into the entertaining (but drastically different from the original cartoons) Transformers vs Visionaries, which I got in a different bundle and reviewed earlier.
This collection also included a fair amount of classic Transformers vs G.I. Joe material, which is very 80s. It also has Rom crossovers, but I have no particular knowledge of that property and don’t really care about it.
Overall: I liked the one-off crossovers between properties I initially cared about. I don’t really care about G.I. Joe, and the mess than was Revolution and its spinoffs…well, it was a mess.
Star Trek vs Transformers - Specifically, Star Trek: The Animated Series, teaming up with Autobots to stop an alliance of Klingons and Decepticons from destroying the galaxy. Hokey and a bit predictable, but entertaining.
Transformers and Ghostbusters - Apparently this entire thing grew out of a transforming Ecto-1 that was made for a con years ago. In this version of the combined history, Gozer the Gozerian was responsible for the fall of Cybertron, but the Autobots escaped in the Ark and eventually find a Cybertronian signal (Starscream’s ghost) on Earth.
My Little Pony and Transformers (issue #1) - This is a mash-up that very clearly takes the tone of MLP rather than Transformers, because even it its silliest, it was never this level of goofy cartoony. I don’t think that’s bad, though. I can already envision how the rest of the story goes, with the Ponies teaching Megatron the true meaning of friendship after a lot of explosions.
Transformers vs The Terminator (issue #1) - In a ruined future, Skynet is the last bastion of resistance against the Decepticons that have conquered the Earth. A T-800 Terminator is sent back in time to stop them, and he meets up with Sarah Conner just in time to see Mount St. Hilary erupt and wake the Cybertronians from stasis. This is another case where I can tell where the story is going-the Terminator will have to team up with the Autobots (and Sarah Conner) and there might be another round of time-travel shenanigans before it ends.
Jem and the Holograms: Infinite - Rather than being a crossover with any other property, this is a continuation of the 5-volume series and crosses over with an alternate-dimension version of itself. (Not the 80s cartoon version, unfortunately!) It’s a “bad future” version of the world where the secret of Synergy got out and got stolen by JemCorp, who had all of the protagonists killed and used holograms to impersonate them and divide society. (Almost all of the protagonists were killed; in a reversal of the usual trope, the lesbians survived.) The ending is inexplicably pat, with the main antagonists just vanishing. I have to guess there was another volume/spinoff coming that intended to use them.
Revolution: Heroes - A massive crossover event between all the properties IDW was doing ongoing stories with: Transformers, G.I. Joe, MASK, Micronauts, Rom and Action Man. (It clearly takes place after a lot of Transformers events, because Starscream is in charge of Cybertron and the Autobots and Decepticons are all on generally good terms.) The thing is, I only really known anything about the first two properties but all the rest have large casts of characters and interlocking plots. It’s nice that this summarizes tie-in books that aren’t included, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s a mashed-together mess of too many characters and trying to link them all through “ore-13”, which is apparently the name we’re using for raw energon crystals now. It’s also about 80% fight scene by volume.
Revolutionaries (volumes 1-2) - This follows Revolution as an ongoing series featuring a small group of the crossover characters. There are a couple of witty lines, but it remains a bit of a mess, stuffing too many characters that need explanations and flashbacks into an otherwise really thin plot. (The villains have a “Talisman” that can magically hurt Transformers and turn humans into monsters, or something like that. The heroes have to retrieve it.)
Transformers and G.I. Joe: First Strike - This takes place after the events from Revolution and Revolutionaries, though with slightly fewer players in the game. The magical Talisman is used by rogue G.I. Joe characters (including the constantly-presumed-dead original Joe himself) to attack the Transformers and the Joes have to go to Cybertron to rescue them. This spends a lot more time with Transformers I recognize and give a damn about (Damn, but Starscream is entertainingly smug), which is something. The big twist here is that “Kreiger”, the guy who knows so much about the Talisman, is secretly the Visionaries’ wizard Merklynn, and his goal for the entire crossover was to lead into the entertaining (but drastically different from the original cartoons) Transformers vs Visionaries, which I got in a different bundle and reviewed earlier.
This collection also included a fair amount of classic Transformers vs G.I. Joe material, which is very 80s. It also has Rom crossovers, but I have no particular knowledge of that property and don’t really care about it.
Overall: I liked the one-off crossovers between properties I initially cared about. I don’t really care about G.I. Joe, and the mess than was Revolution and its spinoffs…well, it was a mess.