...If it's going to be a jumbled mess than how is the war and the characters being reintroduced again? We've had zero indication that's what's going to happen. IDW are pretty good about that.Mako Crab wrote:As much as I like Roberts (Barber I'm less familiar with), I don't feel any desire to pick up anything set in IDW's universe. And sadly, at this point, I'm so sick of the constant rebooting of the G1 universe, that I'd be unlikely to pick up yet another #1 issue, where all the characters and their war have to be reintroduced again. I'm sure Roberts will do fine in the head writer position, but he's stuck writing in the post-ongoing setting where everything is a jumbled mess.
Really, it's actually becoming rather obvious that, with IDW, we get about two years of consistant tone across the board. Furman's run lasted from about '06 to '08 when AHM came to dethrone it. AHM lasted about a year and a half and then the ongoing happened. The ongoing's lasted a little over two years and now we're getting things changed around a little bit again. To me, this is okay. Maybe if you were a fan of how a certain writer was going with things (McCarthy for me) you might be disappointed he's not writing it anymore...but you'll get over it.
Remember, though, these are reporters working for regular newspapers. Know your audience. Joe Blow Transformers Movie Fan isn't going to really know that these particular comic books don't have anything to do with the movies. I tried to explain the notion of "canon" to my father one time and he had a really hard time understanding it. (What finally did it was the Batman films. "Look, The Dark Knight isn't in the same canon as Batman 1989. The two don't fit together--Joker's dead at the end of Batman '89 for one thing, and two, Joker didn't kill Batman's parents this time around." He finally started to kind of maybe understand it a little bit.)BWprowl wrote:Side note: The people asking the questions at that thing sound like a bunch of fucking idiots. They seriously asked if these were in the same continuity as the live-action movies? And acted surprised at the notion of killing off Optimus Prime, despite the fact that he dies every other Tuesday? And don't give me that "They're just regular reporters" excuse; when you're a reporter, you're goddamn job is to do a little research before you go to something like this, so you can ask questions anyone might actually care about, as opposed to something you could've found in three seconds with a Google search.
I tried to find where I read it, but one description Roberts gave of it highly pointed to it being metaphorical rather than literal...Mako Crab wrote:I can forgive the reporters for not knowing the long history of Transformers and that Prime dying is a common event, but the whole world saw RotF in theaters just a couple years ago. Prime died pretty dramatically in that. And if they thought that the ongoing was set in the movie universe, one of their questions should've been, "Why are you killing Optimus again?" I seriously do hope that his death is a metaphorical one. That's the only way this could possibly escape being a gimmick. One of the running themes throughout the ongoing (also mentioned in AHM) was how the Autobots were losing their way and becoming more and more like Decepticons. So a metaphorical death of Prime and all his ideals and values could work.
EDIT: Not exactly what I was looking for but:
Celebrating 125 issues of IDW’s Transformers! After Chaos, Optimus Prime's fate was shrouded in mystery. Was he truly gone or could there be a way he had emerged unscathed? Now, Optimus sits in contemplation, in a place he does not recognize as home. And with the cost of the battle finally taking its brutal toll, does Optimus Prime even have the will to carry on? CHAOS changed everything, and Transformers #125 sets a new direction for the Autobot leader…
This happens to comics all the time.BWprowl wrote:I'm with O6 in hoping that "The Death of Optimus Prime" is a more metaphorical title, but considering IDW seemed content to spoil the shit out of the rest of the 'event' at this Q&A (Seriously, do they want people to actually read these comics, or did they always plan to tell us how everything ends with only like three issues out?), I'm not holding my breath.