Transformers More Than Meets the Eye

When the Transformers Ongoing portion of The Transformers IDW reached its peak in "Chaos", fans were... divided. So another reboot was launched, the third so far (the other two being Transformers: All Hail Megatron and the Ongoing itself), fourth if one counts the original "Infiltration" series. This reboot had two stories of the Transformers going in different directions. One was Transformers Robots in Disguise, and after the success of Transformers Last Stand of the Wreckers, James Roberts was brought on to write the other, this series (with the other LSOTW fellow Nick Roche helping with the first issue and the series' prequel). A rotating series of regular artists drew the series, Alex Milne being the most prominent.

After the Matrix was depowered, it revealed itself to be a star map which would lead the Transformers to their ancestors. Rodimus thus decides to lead a bunch of Autobots and a few others on a quest on the Lost Light to find those ancestors, the Knights of Cybertron. Along the way, the bots encounter mysteries, horrors, and strange occurrences.

A critical and commercial success, More Than Meets the Eye ran for four years (2012-2016) and fifty-seven issues. It was quickly rebooted as Lost Light which lasted for two years (2016-2018) and twenty-five issues and wrapped up the story.

Though the series is technically part of the Hasbro Comic Universe, aside from its Revolution tie-in, it didn't play a role with the rest of the Shared Universe, even sitting out the Transformers: Unicron Grand Finale.

Tropes used in Transformers More Than Meets the Eye include:

• Adorkable:
  • Rung, a naive, somewhat strait-laced dork with Opaque Nerd Glasses and gangly limbs. He spends his time doing things like geekily building model spaceships, trying to tiptoe around interacting with a ship full of loons, and needing to be rescued.
  • Rewind, who runs around after Chromedome like a devoted puppydog, and gets picked on regularly for his tiny size and the fact he turns into a giant memory stick.
  • Tailgate, who is trying to cope with catching up on six million years of lost time while having a very cheerfully naïve and earnestly awkward personality.
• Ambiguously Evil: The Galactic Council. Though they're said to be little more than extortionists in fancy hats, they do seem to legitimately keep the peace in parts of the galaxy.
• Amnesiac Hero: Skids. He knows from records his name and that he's a theoretician, but remembers nothing of his previous life before ending up on a shuttle crashing through a portal onto the same planet the Lost Light had also crashed on. He ends up becoming a sort of impulsive Action Hero, a far cry from his typical mild-mannered Actual Pacifist portrayal in stories. The Season 1 finale reveals that he's Autobot black ops and wiped his memory voluntarily.
• Big Bad: Lots of people fighting for this spot.
  • Disc One Final Boss: The Decepticon Justice Division. After learning that a defected Megatron is on the Lost Light, they confront Team Rodimus at the end of Season 2 only to be easily defeated by Megatron.
  • Bigger Bad: The Grand Architect/Adaptus. Forever devoted to forcing the Cybertronian race to evolve in the crucible of war, he founded the galaxy-wide Architects and began building their martial might for the alternate Functionist Council. A Council that deifies him and uses his teachings of "the perfect shape" as the basis for their philosophy.
  • True Final Boss: The Functionists. Having turned their Cybertron into a planet-sized effigy of Primus, they waged a galactic genocide in their reality and crossed over into the primary timeline to continue it.
  • Big Bad Wannabe: The Omega Guardians. After being The Man Behind the Man for Adaptus, they announce themselves as Generic Doomsday Villains... before Nickel crushes the Magnificence, destroying their medium for communication, ending their threat.
• By-The-Book Cop: Ultra Magnus, typically Played for Laughs. Also Red Alert, though with a more paranoid angle.
• Cast Full of Gay: By default. Following the War of the Primes, all of Cybertron was male.
• Comically Serious: Ultra Magnus is played as this to the hilt for comedic purposes, serving as the Straight Man even to other serious characters. He can't even bring himself to say the word "fun", at one point, having to prompt someone else to say it for him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Everyone, to a certain degree, but Ratchet, Drift, and Cyclonus especially.
• Deconstruction: See Meaningful Name below, but also transforming itself. The series shows how it integrates into culture, how some bots die in their preferred forms, how it can be addicting, how some alt-modes can considered embarrassing or to say negative things about a person's history or personality, and how it's vital to how the Transformers live, instead of being just a gimmick to sell toys or used only for disguise. The biggest example was the crisis on Delphi, where bots' organ's liquefy and come out their optics, thus crying themselves to death, via a sonic-based disease that activates only when they transform.
• Distressed Dude: Rung is pretty much the exact wrong combination of Non-Action Guy, Weirdness Magnet, and Chew Toy. There's even a scene of Skids saving him from certain death and carrying him around afterwards in a manner visually similar to that of a swashbuckling action hero carting around a rescued love interest.
• Early Installment Weirdness: The early issues treat the Guiding Hand as a forgotten concept, known only to Optimus Prime due to his holding the Matrix. As early as issue #9, it's revealed that everyone on pre-War Cybertron knew about them.
• Evil All Along: Pharma had been killing patients, and sold out Delphi, creating the virus as part of the selling out. Subverted with Ambulon, who was a Decepticon, but defected, and didn't start the virus despite suspicions.
• Expy: The Sparkeater is one to the eponymous monster from the Alien series.
• Fauxshadow: Season 1 frequently hints that the Lost Light has a Dark and Troubled Past. But Season 2 reveals that it's so advanced due a Stable Time Loop.
• Foreshadowing: Tons about the true nature of Rung being this timeline's version of Primus. He has a knack for surviving what should be fatal wounds, he's in peak condition despite being absolutely ancient and he can produce crystals that can store spark energy.
• Forgot About His Powers: Whenever any Cybertronian need to get somewhere quickly, they either run or hitch a ride on some form of transportation. As Chromedome lampshades in issue #17, they're Transforming Mecha capable of converting into motor vehicles yet they never use their alternate modes to quickly get around.
• Interrogating the Dead: Chromedome's ability to read the thoughts and memories of other Transformers via surgical means is often used as this.
• Ironic Echo: "It's not a good name, but all the best were taken" was funny when said about Dent, but takes on a darker meaning when said about Ambulon's name.
• Jerkass: Whirl, voted "Autobot most likely to defect". Twice. He is disliked by many; even the normally bleeding-heart Ratchet hesitates to repair him. He mutilates corpses in his spare time, and is probably unhinged. After the war he and Sideswipe liked to beat on Neutrals. Before the war, he exercised his authority as an officer to beat a defenseless and innocent prisoner while the prisoner was restrained. That prisoner grew up to be Megatron!
• Legacy Character: Ultra Magnus died some time after Primacy. Since then, smaller bots have been controlling Powered Armor fashioned in his likeness to keep alive the image of an "immortal lawman". The one in this series' true name is Minimus Ambus.
• Lighter and Softer: As an adventurous romp full of snarky humor and witty dialogue compared to its sister series Robots in Disguise being a more serious and political storyline. (Though that doesn't mean this series is "light and soft" full stop, as there's still plenty of creepy horror and intrigue going on.)
• Loophole Abuse: After Dark Cybertron, Megatron asked to be tried on Luna 2, claiming Raskol Arena was the only place large enough to hold the then population of Cybertron. In reality, Luna 2 had an obscure law that would allow him to be tried by the Knights of Cybertron. When Megatron invokes it, he's stuck on the Lost Light so when they find the Knights, he can be impartially tried.
• Loose Canon: The series has very little connection to the other Transformers comics, having a markedly different Cybertronian noosphere and even biology in some cases. Compared to every other Cybertronian, the ones in this series seem to be the only ones who venerate the Guiding Hand and the Knights of Cybertron above the Thirteen Primes.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Possibly deconstructed: One of the doctors at the Delphi medical facility was named Ambulon, like Ambulance. It's actually short for ambulate: to move about. Ambulon was an ex-Decepticon who went rogue after being forced into a combiner procedure, and now can only turn into a leg. Another bot was named Dent: his name used to be Prowl, but he had to change it because of the confusion.
  • Also played straight in the form of the name of the Autobots' ship, the Lost Light, which does indeed become lost after an accident causes an explosion in their navigational drive.
• The Medic: Ratchet, First-Aid, Ambulon, and Pharma before he went evil.
• Mood Whiplash: The series is full of witty dialogue, slapstick, snark, and humorous character interactions and situations... but it's also full of creepy horror, Squick, shady characters, betrayals, and Ominous Foreshadowing. Sometimes all in the same scene.
• Motor Mouth: Swerve loves to chatter whenever possible, to the point of annoying the bejeezus out of everyone else. He claims his nickname at the Academy was "Shut the Hell Up".
• Plot Detour: As is frequently lampshaded, the whole series is a giant one. The crew set out from Cybertron to find the legendary Knights of Cybertron. It takes them all of one issue to abandon this quest (though in fairness, their initial FTL jump malfunctioned) and just bum around the galaxy getting into wacky hijinks or doing unrelated heroics. The biggest case occurred in the Dark Cybertron crossover where they returned to Cybertron for several issues. Out of a 57 issue series, it's not until issue 41 where they actually make some form of progress. By the time of Lost Light, it's clear they're not even trying to find the Knights of Cybertron anymore and only stumble upon the truth of the Knights because of a Bigger Bad's Batman Gambit.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Swerve, definitely. Rung, Rewind, and Tailgate are also played as this at times.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The opening arc heavily hints that Prowl planted a bomb on the Lost Light that caused its malfunctioning launch. And while Prowl was responsible for that launch, it turned out to be because one of his agents was planting a tracker on the engines and him standing too close caused the malfunction.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Sparkeater is one to the Alien franchise.
  • The concept of 1984 refers to thought warfare, similar to the Thoughtcrime from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• The Shrink: Rung serves as this to a ship full of some of the most neurotic Autobots ever assembled.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Brainstorm constantly behaves like he's a celebrity and Primus's gift to scientists, but nobody else treats him with as anything other than a typical Autobot nerd.
• Stable Time Loop: "Elegant Chaos" storyline is one for the Lost Light crew. After Brainstorm decides to time travel back to try and kill Megatron, he arrives at the mine where Megatron worked but ends up causing the evacuation. When the rest of the crew assumes he's out to kill Orion Pax before he becomes Optimus Prime, since the Decepticons funded the time machine's construction, they travel back along Optimus' timeline. In doing so, Rodimus helps Pax defend the spark that will one day become Rodimus while Chromedome loudly tells two thugs where the then-benevolent Shockwave will be in a year's time so he can be arrested for being the Senate's Token Good Teammate. Whirl then shoots a third thug with a sparkeater gun, creating the legend of the sparkeaters and inspiring Brainstorm to one day build the gun before the arc comes to close when Rodimus and Cyclonus go upgrade the FTL drive of a yet to launch starship so it can give off enough power to recharge their time machine. That ship turns out to be the Lost Light with Rodimus and Cyclonus accidentally sending it forward in time where its previous owners will find it.
• This Is Wrong on So Many Levels: The overall reaction to Chromedome's methods for Interrogating the Dead.

Chromedome: "Ratchet, could you put his brain back in his head? With corpses, I prefer to go through the eye sockets." Drift: "I cannot begin to tell you what's wrong with that sentence."

• Unreliable Narrator: Justified and Lampshaded with Cyclonus. He was absent from the war, and not privy to many of the details. His brief retelling of the war to Tailgate paints the Decepticons in a positive light, because the old Autobot regime (which he was familiar with) was corrupt. When Tailgate is set straight with the details, he confronts Cyclonus, who says that he gave the briefest version of a war he was absent for, and never told Tailgate to pick a side.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Megatron of all people.
• Warrior Poet: Drift spends a lot of time spouting various flowery philosophical statements, and apparently writes all of Rodimus's grandiose speeches.