Written by Brad Mick, drawn by Pat Lee.
Published by Dreamwave, collecting issues one to six.

The Dreamwave Transformers franchise rolls onward with the second six issue Transformers Generation One miniseries, collected here into one lovely graphic novel. Pat Lee returns on chunky art duties but the writer this time out is newcomer (at the time) Brad Mick. There's no drastic change to the tone and attitude that made the first book such a great read, however. In fact, the darkness and despair drives deeper and deeper for the majority of Volume Two, which is reflected in the colouring as Optimus Prime and comrades return to a very black Cybertron indeed. Following on from only one of the two plot points introduced at the end of the Volume One book, the Earthbound Transformers have been drawn against their will to Alaska and set about trying to rip each other to pieces. The arrival of Scourge (a Transformers: The Movie Decepticon and servant of Unicron) and Shockwave shakes things up. Shockwave is accompanied by a group of both Autobots and Decepticons, proclaiming the war on Cybertron over and everyone united under the rule of Decepticon Shockwave and the Autobot Council. The Earthbound Decepticons are taken back to their home planet and soon half of the Autobots (Optimus Prime included) are taken into custody and return home. I won't drag on with the full plot and spoilers, but suffice to say things proceed to get more and more complicated from then on, with intrigue, mystery and betrayal aplenty.

Brad Mick appears to take a clearly different approach to the Transformers, compared to previous writer Chris Sarracini. Like long-time Transformers scribe Simon Furman, Mick takes the plot based and high concept line with the giant robots. So gone is Sarracini's focused characterisation of the two opposing leads, Optimus and Megatron, and there's more room for everyone to get a piece of the character pie. The most notable characters to infact come out of this book are Shockwave, Ultra Magnus and most of all Grimlock. Mick writes a Grimlock very similar to the Grimlock written by Furman in his first War Within book. That's a very different Grimlock to the one Furman wrote back in the eighties and a very very different one to the character that appeared on screen. Instead of being a comedy Dinobot he's instead a a simple talking yet incisive and dangerous individual (he's also got some good one liners too, but not in the "me dumb Dinobot" fashion). At some point during this book the decision was made to start an ongoing Generation One series (which I'll be looking at in six issue chunks along the coming months), so from that point of view the widening of the characterisation net makes more sense. The book can be just as enjoyable, but now the plot plays a much larger role in fuelling that. Quite lucky then that Brad Mick seems to have quite a knack for pushing out an interesting, multithreaded plot.

Mick lays out a good framework for future stories with Shockwave's rather mysterious machinations involving the true nature of Cybertron and the Transformers. It also looks like perennial dark lord of the Transformers universe, Unicron, is on the horizon - which would explain Scourge's presence. He also manages to renovate the past and present with the united Cybertron idea. Across the six issues worth of comics Mick creates a back story for Cybertron after Prime and Megatron left that feels like something of substance and, most importantly, interest. He makes the "thousands and thousands of years of war" concept work as well it can and, in stark contrast to the trend in mainstream Western comics at the time, tells us so very much in so very few pages. Of course, this history might seem wondrously interesting now when it's still very mysterious to us as readers, but time will tell whether further exploration of it in the ongoing series and War Within serials will succeed.

Pat Lee is back pencilling this book, so his chunky Transformers return. Volume two is a much denser work, visually, due to the almost insane number of characters employed (the two books really are opposite ends of the spectrum in that regard). My opinions on Lee's success in dealing with such crowded pages varies from day to day (and page to page). Today I am feeling more appreciative of his work so I will say that most of the pages look good, perhaps even better than those of Volume one due to the larger number of players (detracting from Lee's faults). Some just don't work though, veering too far towards being hard to follow as a result of the busyness. Still, with Edwin Garcia delivering the same kind of top quality backgrounds he did in Volume one (the Dreamwave books adopted the odd yet successful approach of having a separate background artist in many cases) and some excellent colouring from the Dreamwave staff, it's hard not to enjoy the majority of the pages. Lee's inconsistent proportions are again present here, and his fear of sharp edges reaches some ridiculous new highs in a few places. Still, I'll let him off for cramming in so many homages (to TV, movie and the UK comics versions of Transformers) and cameos. He also does a few mean splash pages and dramatic images in here, which are just what the doctor ordered in a Transformers book.

Stepping backwards and taking an overall look at Transformers: Generation One Volume Two "War And Peace", it's a pretty satisfying package for a Transformers fan. The fact of the matter is that it's just not as accessible to the average reader as Volume One was, which is in some ways a shame. It's also not quite as well structured as a self contained story. The ending to Volume Two is rather odd in regards to the Prime, Magnus and Shockwave side of things and it's geared more towards setting the scene for the ongoing series than I perhaps would have liked. Still, it's hard to fault Volume Two for Trans-fan pleasing action and plot. It's still dark but it's got more of an edge of fun that was overshadowed with misery (welcome misery though) in Volume One. Still a book well worth picking up if you're a giant robot fan, but you need to be a Transformers person to get the most from it..