‘Future State’ May Be Over, But This Kind of Writing Still Deserves a Round of Applause (working on pics)

I can’t help but remember when I first saw Transformers: The Movie. That was maybe the first time in my life I recall being so excited over something so nerdy. It wasn’t just cool because it was good old Transformers cartoon violence. It was the uncertainty of it. The film represented the first time I remember the good guy not being assured a win. The Decepticons jumped and killed Optimus Prime, the Superman of the Nintendo generation. From that moment on, when the Matrix of Leadership passed on to Ultra Magnus, this unfamiliar figure (unless you’d seen his debut in the Japanese version)….it was a whole new ballgame. That’s what I think of when I read these Future State books that have been rolling out for the past month or two. DC took an interesting detour after the universe making/breaking event that was Dark Nights: Death Metal. Usually, with these events, we get an ending that ends up serving as a hard reset. It essentially announces a line-wide relaunch that’s supposed to take the franchise in some bold new direction while lightly touching on the ramifications of said reset event. Well, that happened but not in the way we expected. What we got was a flashforward into the future (or A future) of the DC universe as we know it now that the multiverse has been upended and reimagined (or something). It’s weird, risky, audacious and not all of these titles hit the mark….and it’s exactly the kind of comic book writing DC should have been trying to give us ages ago. And the…