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The Beat had the opportunity to sit down with the newly appointed Editor-In-Chief of IDW publishing and continuity master extraordinaire John Barber to talk about the upcoming Transformers: Unicron series, which saw it's issue #0 released this past Saturday at Free Comic Book Day. You can find a review of that issue
HERE.
Over the course of the interview, Barber talks about his upcoming role in the IDW Transformers comics following the end of the current continuity, where he states that he will have a guiding hand involved with whatever new series is set to start. This is a comforting piece of news, seeing as how Barber has proven to be one of the best, if not the master of continuity. So while he may not be writing the new stories, he will be responsible for overseeing them.
You can check out the full interview by following the link above, and you can catch some of the content quoted below!
Alexander Jones: How do your new responsibilities as Editor-in-Chief effect your contributions to the Transformers franchise?
John Barber: My recent return to IDW as Editor-in-Chief won’t impact Unicron—I’m still writing the event (along with the Optimus Prime series) through to the end, and my excitement and commitment to this story could not be higher. But I’m also incredibly honored and excited to have the opportunity to take a guiding hand on where the Transformers comics from IDW and Hasbro go next—and on where we take all of IDW’s amazing comics. I’ve been at this job for about a week, and it’s been thrilling working with our partners. The future of IDW—and of comics—looks very, very bright. Unless a big metal planet eats the whole universe, but we’ll have to see how that goes.
.....
Jones: Why was Unicron chosen as the story to close out the current Transformers Universe?
Barber: Unicron is a really iconic piece of the Transformers mythos. If you’re old enough to have lived through the original Transformers cartoon in the 1980s, you remember what a massive, disruptive thing Unicron was in the movie. That movie was one of the most apocalyptic cartoons you were going to see as a kid in the 1980s—it was devastating watching those familiar characters die. And that’s intrinsically linked with Unicron—in my mind, at least—even though, as editor David Mariotte likes pointing out, Unicron didn’t really kill very many Transformers. He still ate whole planets!
Unicron is something we’ve thought about doing in the IDW universe for a long time but always held off. The time never felt right, and I think the chance to do something really big—something where genuinely anything can happen, and will—was a chance, really the first chance we’ve had, to do Unicron right.
