Wondercon Report: IDW Hasbro Comics

[andersonh1]

Sometimes I should just wait and see what's going to happen, but sometimes I can't resist me some spoilers.

http://www.craveonline.com/comics/artic ... bro-comics

I've copied most of the Transformers-relevant info here, though of course there's GI Joe and, uh, My Little Pony for those who are into that as well.



IDW HASBRO PANEL – EASTER SUNDAY

TRANSFORMERS, suckers: Regeneration One continues by Simon Furman and Andrew Wildman. Picking up from the 80s Transformers series. Wildman will be leaving the book for a while, and Guido Guidi will take over with #93 – and that's really good. He's talented. Wildman will return for #100. Everything's cool with him, but he just got a very good other job.

Transformers Prime: Beast Hunters launches in May. Mairghread Scott with Mike Johnson, Augustin Padilla. The Dinobots from the first Prime series will push forward and in line with the TV series. The Dinobots have gone underground, trying to run a city. But they are Dinobots, so they are not good at that.

TF: More Than Meets The Eye! BEST EVER. The internet will be torn in half by #16. Not necessarily more characters being killed, but it made an intern cry. #17 starts "Remaining Light" that's been building since #1, will go through #22. Non-stop mindblowing event after mindblowing event.

TF: RID: Barber writes it. Devastator on a rampage with Megatron's return. The gestalt is mindless and crushing everything – Cybertron's only city of Iacon. Livio will bring the origin of Shockwave on RID, starting with #17, following up the amazing stuff Roberts did with the "Shadowplay" arc. Barber and Roberts worked closely together on Shockwave's stunning reveal and his secret history.

TF: Monstrosity, Chris Metzen, Flint Dille and Ramondelli, following up Autocracy, which was the origin of Optimus Prime. Monstrosity shows us why the war started, and Megatron fights a lot of monsters and has a terrible time in exile on Junkion. Digital-first. Print version coming afterwards – three chapters of digital per collection.

TF: Spotlight – James Roberts doing a Trailcutter issue and then Hoist ends the story with Matt Frank and Agustin Padilla art. They stand alone but are building towards something new.

Image of Cybertron fading out. "DARK CYBERTRON. THE PURPLE REIGN BEGINS." Shockwave is in control. THE BIGGEST EVENT IN TRANSFORMERS COMICS HISTORY. MOTHER-F-ING SHOCKWAVE.

Q: Is Dark Cybertron a stand-alone or is it an arc? It's not brief. We'll reveal more later, but it involves all of the Transformers comics that aren't Prime or Regen One and "seems to involve Shockwave."

Q: Any consideration to having Geoff Senior step into Regen One instead of Guidi? Barber shows off a Senior cover, and says he's very busy and hasn't done a lot of TF stuff in a long time. He may do some in the future, but they did talk to him for this, but it didn't work out. Wildman is also continuing on covers as well.

[Dominic]

TF:
I am intrigured by the "Beast Hunters" book. I plan to get the first "Rage of the Dinobots" compilation. Depending on how I like that, I may well start picking up "Prime" books.

TF: RID: Barber writes it. Devastator on a rampage with Megatron's return. The gestalt is mindless and crushing everything – Cybertron's only city of Iacon. Livio will bring the origin of Shockwave on RID, starting with #17, following up the amazing stuff Roberts did with the "Shadowplay" arc. Barber and Roberts worked closely together on Shockwave's stunning reveal and his secret history.

Am I the only one who was not really impressed by the Shockwave reveal in "More than Meets the Eye"? So far, I am still in for this book though. (But, it seems a bit odd that IDW is only announcing books mayber a quarter-year in advance at a convention.)

"Autocracy" was passable. And, I am a fan of Ramondelli's art. Colour me interested enough to buy the compilations. (I will *never* go digital.)


MLP:
And, why is IDW announcing a one shot that is already out? Um....

Anyway, I am not a fan of the reveal of the reveal about Luna being posessed by "My LIttle Parallax" in the second arc.


GI Joe:
"Cobra" is a damned good book. Everyone should be reading it.

Barber admits that the Avengers/Transformers crossover "was maybe not the best comic we'd ever put out."

Finally, a confession....


Dom
-would like to see IDW do a good Joe/TF crossover. (Dreamwave and DDP had the concept, but blew the execution.)

[Onslaught Six]

"Dark Cybertron" worries me. This is the kind of talk that makes me dislike the big two.

[JediTricks]

Rats, stupid Wondercon sells out for the first time ever, and they put this on Easter when I had family obligations, for the first time ever I wanted to see this panel. Oh well, sounds like a decent panel, seems like a lot of directions at once. I'll try to stay light on spoiler material for RID and MTMTE since I'm still into MTMTE and I'm catching up slowly on RID.

Hopefully they can connect better with MTMTE's Shadowplay Senatorwave, that was a BIG REVEAL that felt like "A THING IS HAPPENING TO HAVE A THING HAPPEN!" because I hadn't read Chaos Theory, it was a compelling idea if a bit hacky to have yet another mysterious interconnection but not a total waste of my time (although 3 fucking issues of MTMTE, really?!?).

I also would love to see a good GI Joe/TF crossover from IDW, and not a short one, maybe an ongoing title that takes a couple years and gets deep into these things unlike previous attempts.

[Dominic]

DDP tried that. They really did have the concept down. But, the dropped the ball on the execution so badly that I am afraid to reread volume 3 which I liked back in '04 or so.


Dom
-would like to see such a title, maybe written by a "neutral" writer like Van Lente.

[Onslaught Six]

Hopefully they can connect better with MTMTE's Shadowplay Senatorwave, that was a BIG REVEAL that felt like "A THING IS HAPPENING TO HAVE A THING HAPPEN!" because I hadn't read Chaos Theory, it was a compelling idea if a bit hacky to have yet another mysterious interconnection but not a total waste of my time (although 3 fucking issues of MTMTE, really?!?).

Well, Shadowplay wasn't *just* setting that up. In fact, I read the entire thing the first time mostly ignoring the senator and his bullshit. "Oh, background pre-war stuff I don't care about that will never be important again." It was only after reading the last page that I had to go back and reread it and pay attention to him.

I also would love to see a good GI Joe/TF crossover from IDW, and not a short one, maybe an ongoing title that takes a couple years and gets deep into these things unlike previous attempts.

I'd prefer any new Joe/TF crossovers (barring any possible movie sequels, for obvious reasons) to start kind of in media res and skip all the bullshit--partially because...well, with a Joe/TF crossover not happening in an existing continuity, you don't JUST have the introduction of the two franchises working together (Joe with Bots/Cons with Cobra), but you ALSO have to deal with, basically, introducing and establishing the entire cast. You have to deal with shit like Snake Eyes' backstory, Cobra Commander, Destro, why the Joe team exists, if Duke is the head leader or Hawk is, etc. etc. and that's not EVEN delving into the multitude of TF story bullshit that has to go on too.

[Dominic]

DDP got the "mixed origin" angle down pretty well.

A new continuity would mean that they would not have any baggage, and that the origins could be inter-mixed.


Dom

[Shockwave]

I'd like to see them just jump into assuming we already know everything and just tell a damn story. Then, they could have a supplemental "Spolight"ish book that could tell the backstories if we really need them.

[JediTricks]

DDP tried that. They really did have the concept down. But, the dropped the ball on the execution so badly that I am afraid to reread volume 3 which I liked back in '04 or so.

I remember. It hurt I think because they didn't hold the main comic license.

Hopefully they can connect better with MTMTE's Shadowplay Senatorwave, that was a BIG REVEAL that felt like "A THING IS HAPPENING TO HAVE A THING HAPPEN!" because I hadn't read Chaos Theory, it was a compelling idea if a bit hacky to have yet another mysterious interconnection but not a total waste of my time (although 3 fucking issues of MTMTE, really?!?).

Well, Shadowplay wasn't *just* setting that up. In fact, I read the entire thing the first time mostly ignoring the senator and his bullshit. "Oh, background pre-war stuff I don't care about that will never be important again." It was only after reading the last page that I had to go back and reread it and pay attention to him.

I didn't say it was THE big reveal, just A big reveal. I was stopped in my tracks in part 2 when they changed Senatorwave's colors so significantly, I couldn't figure out who this character was and how he fit into the story, it utterly shut me down for a long time as I went back and tried to do research to figure it out - his form wasn't specific enough to sell the character in entirely new colors from part 1. So once it became clear this was Orion's senator pal, the color-change attracted me to the fact that they were trying to be coy with the character and that meant that character meant something special to the author.

As for the other parts of Shadowplay, having Senatorwave be the Professor X of the X-Bots (or should that be X-Men-bots?) was interesting but otherwise it really didn't feel much differently to me than you're describing.

I'd prefer any new Joe/TF crossovers (barring any possible movie sequels, for obvious reasons) to start kind of in media res and skip all the bullshit--partially because...well, with a Joe/TF crossover not happening in an existing continuity, you don't JUST have the introduction of the two franchises working together (Joe with Bots/Cons with Cobra), but you ALSO have to deal with, basically, introducing and establishing the entire cast. You have to deal with shit like Snake Eyes' backstory, Cobra Commander, Destro, why the Joe team exists, if Duke is the head leader or Hawk is, etc. etc. and that's not EVEN delving into the multitude of TF story bullshit that has to go on too.

What do you mean? GI Joe movie style is basically in the TF movies - Josh Duhamel = Duke, and Dylan = Dr. Arkeville.

I abso-fucking-lutely agree that they can just jump right in without all the bullshit origin/introduction garbage, in media res plus a quick blurb inside the issue 1 cover explaining autobots vs. decepticons and gi joe vs. cobra for the ultra-uninitiated that somehow got lost and picked up the book. Anybody buying a GI Joe/Transformers crossover doesn't need to be told who these characters are, and any outsiders just need the basics of which factions = which symbols and what that means vs the other guys, everything else will sell itself via narration. The only reason all these characters have all that backstory is because they originally started without it and built it up, there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

A new continuity would mean that they would not have any baggage, and that the origins could be inter-mixed.

Definitely a new continuity, no doubt, but not a thin one full of compromises to allow the other brand in, I think that's another part of what I didn't like about the DDP series, why CHANGE Transformers and GI Joe so much just to include the other when even little children can intermingle those characters with ease during playtime?

I'd like to see them just jump into assuming we already know everything and just tell a damn story. Then, they could have a supplemental "Spolight"ish book that could tell the backstories if we really need them.

That "Spotlight" idea is a really good one. I might go with a different series name, "TFvsJoe - Filecard: Optimus Prime", "TFvsJoe - Filecard: Mindbender", seems like a perfect fit.

[Dominic]

I remember. It hurt I think because they didn't hold the main comic license.

No, it hurt because DDP (and Dreamwave on their project) did a yeoman's job on every level.

DDP started off with a competent, if formulaic, origin that quickly degenerated in to a bad episode of both cartoons with the good guys getting really good "dumb luck" rolls of the proverbial dice and the bad guys getting the bad rolls. It falls apart hard in issue 5 and issue 6 has little to offer by the faint hope of a better sequel....which the second volume fails at even worse.

A book liks this *could* be carried by art. But, it was not. The art failed on basics such as perspective and scale. (I sent this to you, right JT?)

Definitely a new continuity, no doubt, but not a thin one full of compromises to allow the other brand in, I think that's another part of what I didn't like about the DDP series, why CHANGE Transformers and GI Joe so much just to include the other when even little children can intermingle those characters with ease during playtime?

A series like this would warrant an origin arc. DDP had the right idea on this. The TFs were discovered by Cobra and the Joe regiment was raised to fight the new threat. (We know the characters because we are familiar with both properties. But, something like this would at least need to start open to people who only knew one or the other.)


Dom
-of course, it would come down to the writer.