As always the
official Transformers facebook page has posted their Creator Commentary for this week's new Transformers comic release,
Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #16. Series writer James Roberts gives us his thoughts on the first five page, which we've mirrored below for those without facebook access.
Click
here to read the Seibertron.com review of this issue and join the ongoing discussion.
PAGE 1: Kicking off with a very large fight in the Battle for Hell’s Point. This is a battle that has been mentioned a few times during other issues of TRANSFORMERS: MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE. Why start here for this issue?
JAMES ROBERTS: I’m a fan of Stephen Moffat’s Doctor Who (I’m a bigger fan of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who, but that’s another story), and I remember being thrilled at the openings to two of his grand finale-type episodes, “The Pandorica Opens” and “When A Good Man Goes To War.” In both cases you get this frenetic pre-credit sequence that tears through about a dozen mini-scenes, all of them in different times and different places, all of them vaguely (but not obviously) connected, and it really felt EPIC.
“The Gloaming” (issue 16’s story) is essentially the prologue to “Remain In Light,” and with the four Magnus-centric mini-scenes, hopping across time and space, I wanted to emulate that vertiginous rush of those Doctor Who episodes. Also, Moffat has talked about “The Pandorica Opens” being a sequel to every episode in Series 5 of Doctor Who, and I’ve always intended for “Remain in Light” to have a similar feel–lots of threads from the last 16 issues finally being tied together.
Also, all of the battles that we witness in this “teaser” are already embedded in MTMTE/LAST STAND OF THE WRECKERS lore: Hell’s Point, Simanzi and the fight for the Nightmare Engine. To date, they’ve all been referenced in passing but we haven’t actually seen them. Until now.
Finally, issue #16 is quite a contemplative, emotional issue, so I wanted to kick things off with some action. Don’t get me wrong, there are some big, big character beats and plot developments in the rest of the issue, but for those who like proper TF battle scenes–and who doesn’t–then there they are up front.
PAGE 2: We learn that Hell’s Point is a ship, and Ultra Magnus wasn’t always the character that he’s been shown to be during MTMTE. Here, he’s just a warrior like his fellow Autobots. Is this a part of his history that you’ve been wanting to show for a while? Was writing the scenes more fun than a Magnus scene on the Lost Light?
JAMES ROBERTS: I’ve treated Magnus in a very particular way since issue #1, playing up the stiff, rules-obsessed, “can’t-have-fun” side of his character. As we saw in issue #4, in his conversation with Rodimus, he’s struggling to cope with postwar life. His peculiarities – purging ostensibly unimportant words from his vocabulary (like “fun” and “relax”), insisting that badges are straight, arresting people for minor infractions – are his response to conditions that he’s simply not capable of coping with.
What I’m saying is, he wasn’t always the “joke” (to borrow Overlord’s insult) that he seems to be now. There’s a reason why he’s regarded by some as the Autobots’ greatest warrior; there’s a reason why he’s such an effective enforcer of the Tyrest Accord. In these first few pages, we see Magnus the Warrior, unencumbered by the personality traits that have come to the fore since the war ended. It seemed appropriate to remember him as he was, given what’s going to happen over the next few issues…
PAGE 3: Magnus (note the crooked badge), the Duobots and the Powerdashers (yes, you heard me right!) are getting ready to battle when yet again Magnus is taken down. Powerdashers haven’t had much done with them in almost 30 years of the franchise. Had you always wanted to get them in somewhere and show them as more than toys?
JAMES ROBERTS: Truthfully? I saw that Simon Furman was playing the super-obscure character card well in TRANSFORMERS: REGENERATION ONE and I thought “I’ll have me some of that.” Also, we’d seen Zetar in issue #9 (in an advert for bodygloving), so – much like Rotorstorm’s appearance on Page 4 – it was another opportunity to mix in some callbacks and continuity nods. Shock and Ore are there for the same reason.
Of course, the biggest link to a previous issue – and a deliberate one – is the reappearance of Torque, the Decepticon k-class officer seen in the opening and closing scenes of #8. Although it’s literally just occurred to me that no-one will realize that the Decepticon bomb with “Ultra Magnus” written on it is Torque’s alt mode, because I edited out that part of his conversation with Fulcrum in issue #8. Oh well.
PAGE 4: Another flashback where Ultra Magus suffers at the end. What’s your thinking with these flashbacks? Is it to demonstrate that we might not know the character quite as well as what we thought?
JAMES ROBERTS: The Autobots and Decepticons have been fighting for millions of years, which means there’s scope for change in how they approach the world. But the purpose of the flashbacks, aside from what I said earlier, was to show that Magnus has been through the wars and usually finds a way to make a comeback. Is that going to happen this time round…?
PAGE 5: The badly injured Magnus is being looked after by Ratchet, Swerve and Tailgate. We’re dealing with the fallout from issue #15. Having done so much with Ultra Magnus so far during the series, was it hard for you to mortally wound the character as you did?
JAMES ROBERTS: Not as hard as it was to kill Rewind in issue #15! What I find interesting about Magnus being on his deathbed, out of commission, is what it does to Rodimus. How does Rodimus cope without the voice of reason by his side? The rest of the issue, and much of “Remain in Light,” focuses on that. Yeah, that and a billion other things…
