4 out of 5

What a dang pleasant surprise.  Recently getting interested in John Barber’s work, I was a little stymied to discover he was a notable architect of / within the Transformers comic world, which was a huge comic universe I didn’t really know how to broach.  When the Hellboy movie got me into that series, you at least have a handily numbered series of trades to tell you where to begin, but glancing at the Transformers rack at my comic shop..  There were no less than 5 different #1 trades, several bearing John Barber’s name, and maybe of slightly different continuities – movie, comics, video games.  Geez.

Thankfully, the internet provides: The Transformers wiki has a John Barber page, and Sector 7 was listed as the place to start.  To my chagrin, though, it was a “prequel” to the ‘Formers movies, which I have thus far avoided due to a Michael bay / Megan fox / Shia LeBouf allergy.   I figured John Barber was going to have only the briefest of appearances on my mental authors-of-note list.

But damn if Sector 7 didn’t turn out to be a ton of fun, and, indeed, a pretty great reading place to start.  My wallet – soon to empty itself on more Transformers stuff – might not be happy, but I sped, enjoyably, through the read.

The amount of imagination and work Barber put in to tying the Transformers Earthly-origins into existing movie / comic / book mythology and weaving it into tweaked American history from the early 20the century is simply astounding, especially given how transparently it’s executed in the script.  There’s some clunkiness with the dialogue going out of its way to underline a name or historical reference, but it’s never so overt as to feel like a history lesson, and its always applied in the course of story plotting.  Reading Barber’s issue by issue annotations – appreciably reprinted from the original issues in the back of the trade – is eye-opening; his explanations are so chummy and genuine, it reinforces the natural, fun flow of his writing, which is what had initially grabbed my attention.  This seems like a dude who enjoys his craft.

There’s also an undercurrent of intelligence to the story – which I have to believe isn’t echoed in the movies whatsoever – with Barber giving us fun puzzle pieces to connect from decade to decade (time spans covered in particular issues) as the eponymous Sector 7 – apparently a government agency involved in keeping the world safe from / trying to understand the evolving Transformers popping up around the planet – comes together.  While we’re mainly tracking one man’s journey through all this (Simmons), focus spans out to his family and friends, Barber somehow jamming in great character into only a few panels, while action and history spirals out around us.

The only real minus here is the art.  A different artist handles almost each issue; things get more formally “comic” looking in the final issue, but Joe Suito, who does the first two books, has a computer / draw mash-up style that completely drops backgrounds, gives us no sense of space, and makes any non-direct perspectives look incredibly alien.  His followup, Chee, is a bit better, dropping the computer in favor of a thick pastel-like look, but his panels are still pretty space / background lacking.  The final two issues thankfully shape up, especially issue five with the great Jon Davis-Hunt.

This being from an “earlier” era for IDW, the trade feels a bit cheap (my binding is falling to pieces), but the reproduction is bright, and they included all covers plus the annotations, so overall, no complaints.