So behind that it's from May 8th.   General anxiety, anxiety about my fellow Jews, depression, and stress have made it hard for me to really function, and either read or review for large swathes of time. 

Tom Taylor's Gabby is brilliant: innocent and hiarlious, full of heart and warmth while she's threatening anyone who wants to hurt her or her family.  

Far superior to the movie version of Gabby, although I'd been hoping she'd be another clone - this time of Laura Kinney, aka X-23 from the Logan movie and comics.   

He's still not at Roberts level, or hasn't reached the heights of Barber or Scott at their best, but he's winning me over.   It's more tense, it's better, it's not all fucking Rubble - who still annoys the crap out of me*, and Barricade is alive again.  Took a while to get there, but I'm glad I stuck out the first couple issues which I, quite frankly, hated after the MTMtE and LL runs.   (And yes, RiD, OP, TAAO, and all the one shots and trilogies were pretty damn good too.)

Look, this hasn't reached five star level - not even at issue six, which I've read.   (I'm still a month behind on reviews!)    But it's getting better. 

*look, if I want to see through anyone's eyes, it's not a baby OC, okay?   

There are a couple things happening here: it's not all about Rubble, the plot twists are better, and I was reminded that favorite characters can come back.   Yaaaas.   Barricade.   Mmm. 

He doesn't show up in this, but it didn't matter.   The possibility of seeing him again is all I need, thank you very much. 

The art gets better, and Ruckley seems to be saying 'I was just setting everything up in issue one and two.'   I think this might be a bad idea for comics though; even setup needs to fascinate me to buy issue #2, unless I really, really want this series not to suck.   Ahem, yes, like with this.  I'm glad I stuck it out, but if I hated issue one?   Well, I'd have never moved onto issue two.   Ruckley, I suspect, has more wiggle room in a fantasy novel, especially as an established writer.   First of all, convention can call for slower writing - he does epic fantasy, so many of those books are humungous - and he isn't selling it chapter by chapter.   If he were, I think he'd find the need to hook people immediately. 

I'm now seeing that he can write well, even if he's no James Roberts, aka the man I judge all writing by.   (I imagine he'd be shocked, maybe even embraced if he knew this, but, yeah, it's true.)   So I'm hoping this continues to be amazing.

And only because this is the last issue.   Very sad.   At the same time, I'm happy that it didn't get dragged on so long that it became tedious or stale.   So again, mixed feelings, but mostly I want to cry revisiting that this was the final issue. 

Highly recommend this series, though. 

This is coming to a close - but it's so good.   So how good it is makes me happy, while the fact that this series is coming to an end?   Makes me so sad I could curl up into a ball and weep.   

All.  Day.   Long.   

Anything I say about this, as far as plot and all, seems so wrapped up in previous issues and the Unicron mini-series that ends this all, so I'm not going to say.  I'm just going to say that I have mixed feelings about this all.