I don't know what was worse: Watching my beloved New England Patriots get beaten soundly by the lowly Buffalo Bills, or learning that IDW was planning on killing off Optimus Prime in their ongoing Transformers series. 

Those of you old as I am will remember Hasbro trying something similar in the 1986* animated Transformers movie. 

What happened was they discoverd that no matter how many Stan Bush or Vinnie DiCola songs they played, people would not warm up to Rodimus Prime the way they did Optimus, and the toy line decreased in sales until they brought Optimus back not once, but TWICE in the cartoon. Once as something of a Decepticon zombie, and again for good in the apropriately titled "Return of Optimus Prime."

If you haven't guessed already, I'm something of a Transformers dork. 

My apartment currently features no less than a dozen Optimus Primes on display, all of the G1 Toys 'r' Us reissues from a few years back, the entire run of the original cartoon and several more boxes of figures, dvds, books and other paraphernailia in various states of storage. 

Comics-wise, the sales on IDW's Transformers books have been decent for books of their ilk, so all I can do is hope that they have a good story up their sleeves, and have learned something from previous attempts to kill Optimus. 

Namely, don't kill Optimus. 

Today's mournful page was done by Joe Cooper:

Joe Cooper is an American Cartoonist born in Detroit, MI. He is one of those people whoís drawn for as long as he could hold a pencil. As a result, he suffers from a grotesque callous on his right middle finger.

Joe attended the prestigious School of Visual Arts in New York City. He graduated with honors in May 2000. He started working professionally before graduating with titles like Baby's First Deadpool Book, and Ka-Zar for Marvel Comics. 

Some past clients include, Dynamite Entertainment, DC Comics, Marvel Comics and Image Comics.

Joe currently lives and works in Santa Barbara, CA.

See you back here Wednesday!

-Moss

*My mistake on the release date. I was confusing it with the tv series :)