Who even remembers what was in this? Not me. Devastator, we assume. They killed Scrapper and he stayed dead, which is a bit forlorn given that the other constructions need him to do their big trick. ( )

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There's a bit of a gap between Infiltration and Devastation-- apparently some kind of escalation has taken place. Still, I was able to follow things well enough. Furman is really good at throwing the reader right into the action but also filling in everything the reader needs to know in the meantime. The Autobots are fighting both the Decepticons (Megatron has called in Sixshot, the living weapon usually reserved for phase 6 of the infiltration protocol even though it's only phase 3) and the Machination, a human conspiracy to reverse-engineer Transformer technology (they've captured one of the Autobots as well as their human ally, Hunter; this will later become important in All Hail Megatron).

Devastation follows a somewhat predictable format: action, reprieve, action, reprieve. The Autobots are attacked on their spaceship, escape, and then on the ground. Hot Rod and Wheeljack fight the Machination Headmasters on the streets, and then in a junk yard. But Furman and Su pull this format off very well. Basically, the tension keeps going up as the Autobots barely scrape through again and again, and the reader is aware of the bigger picture in the background, but the characters are too focused on staying alive to have to time to even notice. Furman dribbles out information at exactly the right rate to keep the reader intrigued.

Some of the plotlines I do have to withhold judgment on: Hunter being forced to become a Headmaster is a little more grotesque than I'd prefer from a Transformers comics, and I know where that goes in All Hail Megatron, but I also know that wasn't Furman's original plan for the character. There's also some stuff about the Dead Universe and about some weird alien horde that comes to Earth recruit Sixshot, and I'm not really sure how that fits into anything here. On the other hand, I do appreciate that Furman portrays the Decepticons as characters-- ones that stammer, and connive, and get sad when their friends die-- instead of unfeeling monsters.

If Devastation falls down anywhere, it's that it's clearly a small part of a larger whole. Optimus Prime decides to pull Autobot resources off Earth at the end, apparently in response to something that happened in another book, and there were two volumes where Furman paid off some of his plots (Revelation and Maximum Dinobots) that came between this and All Hail Megatron. At least, I hope he did, because I know many were cut short by All Hail Megatron. So what comes at the end of this is clearly not an ending, just a transition to a new phase. But if you're willing to accept that (and as a comic book reader, I've long gotten used to that kind of thing), this holds together pretty well.

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