Spotlight: Doubledealer doesn't really spotlight Doubledealer at all. He's pretty much inconsequential to the story. That was always the risk of having a major arc play out in Spotlight, but the last couple issues managed to make it work all right. This one doesn't -- ironically, it would have probably worked better if they'd switched the titles between this one and Hot Rod.
And hoo boy Furman sure does love him some stupidly-named MacGuffins. How many were introduced this issue? The Darkness, the Magnificence, and three different strategically-placed objects that the Autobots are going to have to split up and destroy, which presumably also have stupid names.
Spotlight's still the best Transformers series. But this wasn't one of the better issues.
Tangentially: what the fuck is wrong with numbers? The first two issues were numbered -- Shockwave was #1, Nightbeat was #2. Then they abandoned the numbers, and EVERY issue is #1.
I understand the psychology -- long-running series are daunting, and #1 implies "you can pick this up without knowing anything about what's going on".
Well, the first problem is, that's no longer true. With the Revelations arc, you absolutely fucking DO have to read the issues in order, they are NOT self-contained, and they DO rely heavily on events that have occurred throughout the series to date.
The second problem is sorting the fuckers. My comic inventory list contains the following:
Transformers Spotlight: Shockwave, Nightbeat, Hot Rod, Sixshot, Ultra Magnus, Soundwave, Kup, Galvatron, Optimus Prime, Ramjet, Arcee, Mirage, Blaster, Grimlock, Wheelie, Cyclonus, Hardhead, Doubledealer
That's no fucking way to sort comics. You know what's a GOOD way to sort comics? "Transformers: Spotlight #1-#18", God dammit.
Not only is it much more concise on my inventory sheet, but it's more convenient for actually pulling the books out to reread -- if I'm thumbing through the stack and I want to find Optimus Prime and I pull up Ultra Magnus, I don't know if I should be going forward or back in the stack, or by how much, without looking at a fucking decoder sheet. If I want to know where #9 is and I pull up #5, on the other hand, I've got a pretty fucking good idea of the relative positions of those issues. (What makes it worse is that the covers generally put the character's name at the BOTTOM. Fortunately, I can recognize most of them, so this isn't quite as bad as the brief 1990's trend of putting issue numbers on the bottom of the cover instead of the top -- or, in TMNT's case, the thoroughly obnoxious trend for much of the series to put the issue numbers on the BACK.)
And of course I can't just sort them alphabetically, because their order IS important.