Jeffrey Brown: Incredible Change-Bots Two (Top Shelf, 4/12/11)
Even for someone like myself, who has the very briefest experience with Saturday-morning cartoons like Transformers, Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots Two is a highly enjoyable send-up of the genre and a silly little slice of nostalgia. Something about recasting transforming robots as incompetent, bickering armies, or featuring a robot with a gun for an arm as having an existential crisis, works perfectly as both an absurd tribute and satire of shows that were, even in their heyday, thinly disguised means of selling toys.
The graphic novel continues the story of Incredible Change-Bots, in which the Fantasticons and Awesomebots destroyed their own planet through war and then traveled to Earth, which they also destroyed. The sequel continues in the same endearingly nonsensical vein. The leader of the Fantasticons, Shootertron, was left behind when the rest of the Change-Bots left Earth and tries to regain his memory with the help of farmers and the ridiculously ineffectual US government that wants to use him as a weapon.