Advance Review: ‘Transformers Beast Wars’ #3 Displays Logical Actions

Cover A features art by artist Josh Burchham. He also provides the interior art. Thus this cover provides a preview of what Burcham does with the interiors. Also both the interiors and Cover A showcase a suitable color palette. As for the designs the interiors still feature too much minimalism with the robot designs of Tarantulas and Scorpnok. Specifically the respective animal appendages are either barely existent or weird in design. However, Burcham’s sense for choreography and panel layouts somewhat make up for this small problem. Burcham also nicely adds in the quirky facial expressions that one can see in Beast Wars: Transformers (1996-1999).

Artists Dan Schoening (with colorist Luis Antonio Delgado assisting with coloring) and Josh Perez provide the variant covers for Transformers Beast Wars #3. Schoening and Delgado create another marketing image with Cover B. This time with it feeling like a cross between a toy and an animation promotional. While not terrible it does look awkward due to the posing of the characters. The Retailer Incentive Cover looks busy, but in a calculating way. This is due to the design having an asymmetrical mirroring of character positions. Both variants feature an excellent selection of hues for their respective visuals.

Writer Erik Burnham creates a script that is arguably stronger than the previous two issues of Transformers Beast Wars (2021-present). Mainly this issue’s plotting seems tighter than the first issue. Burnham also arguably does better with the characters’ internal logic than in issue 2. As for the lettering letterer Jake M. Wood does a fine job on dialogue. Though the type of caption box Wood uses for some narration is rather poor. Also a tiny bit of Burnham’s dialogue hurts, a choice Wood makes regarding the positioning of this narration. Yet these flaws are only a tiny bit jarring, and therefore this issue still maintains a high level of quality.

Transformers Beast Wars #3 comes out Wednesday April 7th, 2021.