You may be familiar with The Transformers, but, if not, the classic cartoon theme song provides everything you need to know: Autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons. The longer version is that there’s a race of sentient robots from a planet called Cybertron that are generally able to convert* from one form to another — a bot mode and an “alt” mode, usually a car or a jet, but sometimes a gun or a boombox or a different colored boombox. For millions of years, Cybertron had been ravaged by a war between two factions, the Autobots and the Decepticons, until the war eventually brought them to Earth.

Publisher IDW had the license to make Transformers comics for years, and after successfully covering the whole civil war thing for a while, it did the vaguely unthinkable and allowed the war to run its course and come to a peaceful-ish conclusion. One of the comics that spun out of that was More Than Meets The Eye, arguably(?) one of the high points of the whole damn multimedia franchise.

Please appreciate how quickly I am condensing this for you, but the basic premise of MTMTE is that Rodimus (the aggressively cool new guy originally introduced in Transformers: The Movie) is bored with peacetime and decides to go on a space-quest to find some potentially nonexistent heroes from Cybertronian mythology.

On a ship called The Lost Light, he assembles a crew of 200 or so loser Transformers characters who wouldn’t be missed in the “main” ongoing series — Robots In Disguise, starring Bumblebee and Starscream back on Cybertron — and they go off on their adventure… which immediately goes wrong. It’s like Community meets Star Trek meets, well, The Transformers. The reason we’re talking about MTMTE today doesn’t really have anything to do with that, though. We’re talking about it because it features one of the all-time great ships (in the fanfiction sense, not the space travel sense).

The first issue introduces a ton of characters, but two of the most notable are Tailgate and Cyclonus. Tailgate is a little guy who missed the whole war because he fell in a hole and ran out of power for six million years (i.e., he was asleep). Cyclonus is an ancient Cybertronian warrior who fought alongside the Decepticons but turned on them and helped the Autobots in the end. He turns into a badass purple jet and he has a badass skull face with big horns. Everybody hates him, because it would be like Boba Fett suddenly joining the good guys, except for Tailgate, who remembers him as a celebrity hero from before he got stuck in a hole.

In issue 3 of MTMTE, Tailgate and Cyclonus get paired together as roommates, and you start to see the beginnings of their relationship and how it plays into a classic “opposites attract” shipping dynamic. One is small and funny! The other is big and scary! One likes the movies and one likes TV! They shouldn’t work together, but they’re also the only two who can really relate to each other since they’re both very old (even by Cybertronian standards) and can remember what their world was like before it was destroyed by war.

The best scene in this issue involves Tailgate and Cyclonus having a conversation about the war, with Tailgate trying to piece together what the hell everyone could’ve been fighting about for millions of years. Cyclonus’ response is an interesting breakdown of the idea that history is written by the victors, explaining that the government of Cybertron was deeply corrupt.

One side wanted to burn it to the ground in a full-scale revolution, so that no tendrils of its evil could ever crawl back to the light again. The other side wanted gradual, respectful change through non-violent means. Back before they devolved into the good guys and the bad guys, they were just opposing philosophical views that both wanted what was best for Cybertron. By the end of the war, though, they were all just killing for the sake of killing, and nobody really believed in anything other than winning. It’s that kind of nuanced read on The Transformers that makes MTME so great.

Over the course of the series, Cyclonus warms up to Tailgate and begins to appreciate his inner strength and optimism, while Tailgate affection for Cyclonus grows as he begins to recognize him as a real person and not just as a cool guy he heard stories about. It’s also worth underlining, in case it wasn’t obvious from the pronouns, that they both identify as male. There are actually a bunch of same-sex relationships in MTMTE, though, of course, everyone involved is a robot, so… take it how you will. Either way, it is presented completely effortlessly, as simply a matter of existence, and nobody ever really suggests that there’s any way to live other than loving whoever it is you love. It’s sweet. And eventually it becomes heartbreaking and sad, but you’ll have to read MTMTE for that.

It’s another exciting mystery! That means I just don’t know yet. I have some stuff in mind, don’t worry. Just tell your friends to subscribe.