- Broken Base: Was Furman's run good?
- Some argue that after the Slow-Paced Beginning the story picks up immensely while others feel like the series was entirely a Slow-Paced Beginning for the IDW continuity at large, especially as much of the information established here gets reinterpreted by future writers.
- Furman's writing quality on the whole is subject to this. Many praise it, and with the following two writers both delivering divisive storylines, many fans appreciated Furman's subtle writing, slower pace, and complex plot lines and world building. Others feel like after a few decades Furman's writing flaws show themselves more and more, especially with the three-writer relaunch post-Costa.
- Complete Monster: See here.
- Once Original, Now Common: The series kicked off the IDW continuity and was a pretty good attempt at putting the G1 cast in modern times. The story was Darker and Edgier than the cartoon, but didn't devolve into pointless grim darkness ala G2. The plots were complex and the stories tried to intersperse politics in with the updated setting. Nowadays the run shows its age with the more colorful and lively Scott/Roberts/Barber runs, which incorporate similar ideas but expand on them considerably with more dynamic characters and more realized sci-fi elements. Furman's run is less controversial than McCarthy's and Costa's, but can be seen as playing it too safe with the setting. Regardless, this is where it all started and many of the future plots for better or worse, built themselves on Furman's design. In addition, the final issue of Optimus Prime has Optimus's final words be "It never ends" in a tribute to Furman.
- Salvaged Story:
- Simon Furman reimagined the Autobot tactician Prowl as being a Combat Pragmatist willing to do dirty things for the sake of winning the war against the Decepticons. After Furman's departure, the aftermath of soft reboot The Transformers: All Hail Megatron had Prowl narrate his deep love for his comrades and all Cybertronians, willing to risk his life to save even a Decepticon. This change didn't go down well, partially because All Hail Megatron as a whole wasn't well received and partially because the darker take on Prowl actually appealed to many people. Later material such as in Lost Light and Sins of the Wreckers would reveal that Prowl went through such cycles of grim cynicism and optimism every so often throughout his life, retconning his "kinder and gentler" thought processes in All Hail Megatron into one of his bouts of optimism.
- IDW's version of Arcee went through some unfortunate bouts of
Unfortunate Implications. When she was first introduced, Simon Furman presented her as being a crazed berserker, with a big part of her instability caused by how she was a "she". Her creator, Jhiaxus, modified "her" into a female to "introduce gender" to Cybertron, simply to see what would happen. A later writer took offense to this, claiming that Furman was suggesting that "being female was an anomaly" and introduced a retcon that there were other female Transformers on other worlds, and it was simply on Cybertron that "female" as a gender simply fizzled out due to various factors. note
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A lot of people felt this ways about Nightbeat's sudden and unceremonious execution in Spotlight: Hardhead. Nightbeat has always been a developed character with lots of plot potential, being an Autobot detective, but his grand role in the series was just to be a Manchurian Agent and then to die. Future writers had the same idea and he was brought Back from the Dead later on and utilized a lot better.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Dead Universe Plotline was cut down severely due to Executive Meddling, and many of the ideas that were in play since IDW's inception go nowhere. Nemesis Prime's grand ambitions are abridged considerably, and much of the returning ideas (reactivated Sixshot and Thunderwing) go nowhere.
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