First off: no criticism is intended toward the many extremely talented TF fan artists whose work I have had the privilege of enjoying. But to date, I have only seen one person achieve a fan-drawn picture of Soundwave that gets him exactly right, namely Dan Khanna (who no longer seems to have a web page up, or I would link to it). A few others have been close - a few have been very close - but there always seems to be something slightly off, some indefinable element missing or out of place.

My biggest disappointment - and I realize this is simply a matter of personal preference - is that so many of the pictures have so obviously taken the toy as a model. There's a great deal of difference between the look of the toy, which is merely an "okay" image, and the look of the cartoon version, which to me represents the "real" essence of Soundwave. The toy is more dorso-ventrally flattened, giving it a somewhat spindly and awkward look, while the cartoon is more solid, cubical, and well-proportioned. The toy has unsightly joints and hinges joining the limbs, while the cartoon has simpler, cleaner joints. The toy's head is utterly different in that the audial sensors on the sides are almost non-existent, the optic band is the wrong color and shape, and the face is entirely expressionless ("And the cartoon version has an expressive face?" you might be thinking. Well, yeah, actually it does....), or the expression is one of squinty-eyed suspicion and hostility, which is certainly not in keeping with Soundwave's nature. I guess if I were to pick out my major complaint that makes a picture of Soundwave, IMO, "not quite perfect," it would be: "The head is wrong."

There are more subtle factors. In order for a pic of Soundwave to be "perfect", in my admittedly very critical assessment, it has to strongly convey a sense of his personality. That is, there has to be some element of his serenity and self-composure that shows through. It's that element that I see in his face when I look at the cartoon image, which gets utterly lost when elements of the toy design creep in. I'll say here that I also dislike the box art picture of the G1 toy, precisely for that reason - it's supposed to look like the toy, of course, but in addition the whole stance in which the character is drawn, comes across as an overwhelmingly arrogant pose - and I don't think there's an arrogant circuit in Soundwave's body. :) Unfortunately that same picture is the one that made its way onto all the artifacts that featured Soundwave - which I eagerly snapped up, of course, seeing as they were Soundwave items - some of which count among the favorite pieces of my collection - but that doesn't change the fact that I'm not especially fond of that particular picture.

If you think about it, Soundwave really is a very easy character to draw. He's mostly squared-off lines, except the face which is more rounded, but still without much detail. I'm surprised that it should be so hard to capture him on paper. Could be that artists simply prefer the more complex design of the toy, which showcases their skills a little better. Could be that it's a lot easier to reach for one's Soundwave toy when a reference is needed, than to plop a tape into the VCR, find just the right shot, and pause the screen. Could be that there's just some element about Soundwave that's blasted difficult to capture. Or it could be that my standards are simply impossibly high. However, having seen the impossible achieved once, I now have hope that I might see another perfect artistic rendition of Soundwave from another source in the future. Perfection, of course, like good and evil, is in the eye of the beholder....