The Energon Pub

kinda proves my point though.

they made the books you'd like and ya didnt turn up.

ive been buying since g1, when dreamwave fecked up their international licence agreement i got the books posted to me from the UK from a third party (oneshallstand.com, good aul steve bax) so i could keep collecting.

i went trade with IDW circa lost light and stopped completely after the hatcht job that was optimus prime. who's only redeeming element was the EXCELLENT kei zama art.

transformers is the LAST book i want to see gender or identity politics in. its simply IMO not that genre.

i'll keep an eye ont the new book but TBH i probably wont buy it till at LEAST a trade is out to get a grasp on what their doing as with the absolute state the industry is in theyll have to convince me they have good intentions.

its what i did with the IDW reboot and thank god for that. saved meself a fortune.

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:IDW did a lot good, including the longest-running continuity ever, the breakthroughs so many creators were given, and truly allowing for some awesome new and original stuff to come out. I will forever appreciate a lot of that material.

18 odd years. Not a bad run! They did do a lot of good stuff. The initial "-ation" mini-series did G1 in an interesting way. After "All Hail Megatron" it was MTMTE and Lost Light for me, primarily. I had zero issues with some of the so-called retconning of sexuality in characters as, by and large, none of them had a sexuality. They were all written as robot buddies in the old days.

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:I hope that the new license holder goes a whole new direction. G1 redone will not fly again after the latest continuity run. I want to see something truly new and original. That is my dream, as far fetched as it might be.

I wonder what that would be like. Could we go dark and gritty? War is not a pretty business after all.

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:Also, if Skybound gets the license, please for the love of all things good keep NFTs away from Transformers. That trend just needs to go away.

I admit the only things I know about Skybound is that it's Robert Kirkman' publishing company, right? Part of Image Comics? Having read "The Walking Dead" and "Invincible", something by Kirkman could be interesting.

~ Grim

Big Grim wrote:I wonder what that would be like. Could we go dark and gritty? War is not a pretty business after all.~ Grim

That's certainly proven a sticking point in the franchise. Post-Furman IDW seemingly didn't want to write 'war'. So a couple of poorly executed narrative leaps later and war was largely removed from the series. Replaced by talking heads and guffaws.

Then again, G1 only did full on war properly once, in The Movie. The fans at the time didn't like when their favourite suddenly started dying to actual soldiers in combat.

The larger question being would Hasbro allow Transformers to be depicted as such? As a war-based comic?? It is still a "kids brand", after all. Although I think the topic could be used to broach and allegory real world attitudes and events. In a more meaningful way than the individual humanising of MTMTE/LL. But again, fans might complain when wise-cracking but ineffective fighters die en masse.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:

Big Grim wrote:I wonder what that would be like. Could we go dark and gritty? War is not a pretty business after all.~ Grim

That's certainly proven a sticking point in the franchise. Post-Furman IDW seemingly didn't want to write 'war'. So a couple of poorly executed narrative leaps later and war was largely removed from the series. Replaced by talking heads and guffaws.

Then again, G1 only did full on war properly once, in The Movie. The fans at the time didn't like when their favourite suddenly started dying to actual soldiers in combat.

The larger question being would Hasbro allow Transformers to be depicted as such? As a war-based comic?? It is still a "kids brand", after all. Although I think the topic could be used to broach and allegory real world attitudes and events. In a more meaningful way than the individual humanising of MTMTE/LL. But again, fans might complain when wise-cracking but ineffective fighters die en masse.

I don't necessarily disagree with your summary, but I would point out that while IDW did move past war with the unified Cybertron and NAILs storylines, that was very much a kind of war narrative: post-war nation building. You have themes like refugee resettlement, war crimes trials, factional governments, and so on. So in one sense they stopped writing war, but in another they were still completely in stories of war.

Maybe another way to state this is that it stopped being a warfare or combat narrative, even as it's still a war story.

The issue I had wasn't the shift to a post-combat narrative. It was the way the combat narrative was ended. Which was almost as mishandled as their depiction of Unicron.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:The issue I had wasn't the shift to a post-combat narrative. It was the way the combat narrative was ended. Which was almost as mishandled as their depiction of Unicron.

Sure, and in this context I'm not speaking to the quality of that writing at all, just pointing out that nearly all Transformers stories tend to be war stories, even the ones where there isn't a war.

Yeah, that's true.

Personally, if LSoTW had been the new tone of IDWverse going forward from that point. That would have been the ideal to me.

-Kanrabat- wrote:Western comics have been in a downward spiral ever since the woke cancer started seeping through. IDW was no exception.

My hope is for the Transformers comics to become a manga instead. A manga written and drawn by Japanese artists that have only good stories in mind without any message.

Hey guys ... none of this should be argued here. I also can't have staff members making statements like that. Please get this topic back on track without all of the negative comments from those on both sides.

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:Cyberverse to me is the definitive G1 redone story, it did it right with the originality. Now that we have that, we need to move beyond G1 redone and just try something new.

I remember saying it then and I will say it here again, Cyberverse is the G1 reboot fans asked for but probably didn't know was fulfilled. It is as much a G1 reboot as possible without simply being the copy of the G1 show with modern animation.

Big Grim wrote:I admit the only things I know about Skybound is that it's Robert Kirkman' publishing company, right? Part of Image Comics? Having read "The Walking Dead" and "Invincible", something by Kirkman could be interesting.

~ Grim

Kirkman would not be writing the books, from what I read. He (well, the company he owns) would simply be the publisher, owning the rights. He or an other editor under him would pick a writer to do the book(s).

william-james88 wrote:

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:Cyberverse to me is the definitive G1 redone story, it did it right with the originality. Now that we have that, we need to move beyond G1 redone and just try something new.

I remember saying it then and I will say it here again, Cyberverse is the G1 reboot fans asked for but probably didn't know was fulfilled. It is as much a G1 reboot as possible without simply being the copy of the G1 show with modern animation.

totally agreed. I love that show so so so much. That was the definition of how to redo it right.

william-james88 wrote:

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:Cyberverse to me is the definitive G1 redone story, it did it right with the originality. Now that we have that, we need to move beyond G1 redone and just try something new.

I remember saying it then and I will say it here again, Cyberverse is the G1 reboot fans asked for but probably didn't know was fulfilled. It is as much a G1 reboot as possible without simply being the copy of the G1 show with modern animation.

Yeah Cyberverse is a lot of fun. I gave it a shot out of boredom 1 day and ended up watching the episodes on Netflix in 3 days. I also think the art style would translate well to the comic page.

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:

william-james88 wrote:

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:Cyberverse to me is the definitive G1 redone story, it did it right with the originality. Now that we have that, we need to move beyond G1 redone and just try something new.

I remember saying it then and I will say it here again, Cyberverse is the G1 reboot fans asked for but probably didn't know was fulfilled. It is as much a G1 reboot as possible without simply being the copy of the G1 show with modern animation.

totally agreed. I love that show so so so much. That was the definition of how to redo it right.

I liked that show too. Even though they had some gender-bender (is that term ok these days?) choices for some of the established TF characters, even those changes weren't bad per sec. I lived the "new" female version of Lugnut. Didn't actual Lugnut appear in this show too?

Simon Furman's stories (too many to list) are the best! (But that's just my opinion.)

Ratbat wrote:Simon Furman's stories (too many to list) are the best! (But that's just my opinion.)

This.

Aside from LSotW, Furman's run was the most interesting part of IDWverse too.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:Aside from LSotW, Furman's run was the most interesting part of IDWverse too.

Hard disagree. I love the Marvel Furman stuff and enjoyed some of his IDW run, but "interesting?" The most interesting stuff to me was the stuff that most deviated from what we had before: weird out-of-continuity stuff like the Scioli books and the MLP crossover, Roberts's Lost Light stories, the big universal and lore expansions like Caminus, even IDW2 is more interesting to me than Furman's work which has a lot more consistency with his earlier work.

Then again, I'm the kind of fan who is more supportive of interesting failures than boring and safe successes.

To each their own, that stuff was interesting to only a minute part of the fandom, which is why it failed.

Then again, I've never been a fan of the wreckers so to me both Last Stand and Sins was dumb and boring.

What are your thoughts of Regeneration 1 then?

Myself, I thought it paled compared to his older works.

Scioli's work has been the biggest highlight of IDW.

As for the Marvel stuff. I read it in more recent years. As such I have no nostalgia for it. Barring one or two stories, I don't rate it as a result. Similarly never experienced DW until the part work. The -Ations and Megatron Origin, got me into Transformers comics. Between that and the Spotlights, Furman's work was the most enjoyment I'd had with Transformers since Beast Wars ended.

Even now I've read it all. I was not engaged by anything beyond DoOP. RiD/MTMTE/LL/OP... any of it. I found nothing of value to me. Same with IDW2.0. That was worse, since I was outright bored by it.

Rodimus Prime wrote:To each their own, that stuff was interesting to only a minute part of the fandom, which is why it failed.

Then again, I've never been a fan of the wreckers so to me both Last Stand and Sins was dumb and boring.

I don't want to get into a whole debate on it, I think it's ultimately an opinion statement more than something that can be definitely proven, but I do often see people in threads like this declare that certain stories or creative choices were niche or failures, and I fundamentally don't think that's true. There were definitely more people buying IDW comics issues at the early stages of Furman's run, but there's been more stability than not over the last decade or so. I should probably just say, I don't agree that the part of the fandom that likes the stuff I mentioned is "minute" or that it failed, but that's not directly challenging your opinion.

AcademyofDrX wrote:

Rodimus Prime wrote:To each their own, that stuff was interesting to only a minute part of the fandom, which is why it failed.

Then again, I've never been a fan of the wreckers so to me both Last Stand and Sins was dumb and boring.

I don't want to get into a whole debate on it, I think it's ultimately an opinion statement more than something that can be definitely proven, but I do often see people in threads like this declare that certain stories or creative choices were niche or failures, and I fundamentally don't think that's true. There were definitely more people buying IDW comics issues at the early stages of Furman's run, but there's been more stability than not over the last decade or so. I should probably just say, I don't agree that the part of the fandom that likes the stuff I mentioned is "minute" or that it failed, but that's not directly challenging your opinion.

I was just going off of what you posted, it seemed that you called the MLP crossover and the other stuff that you liked an interesting failure.

I never read the MLP stuff so I won't comment on it, and personally I don't think Lost Light was a failure in itself, but IDW did drop the ball with both Unicron and the Optimus Prime titles with how they ended.

And ZeroWolf, I am overall a fan of Regeneration One, even if it did have some cringeworthy parts. Furman got some things right and some things wrong, and I believe I stated even back then that I believed he has lost a step or 2 creatively from his earlier work. TF'84 was somewhat better, but still not great. I would still rather re-read those works than anything being printed now.

Me: I like interesting failures
Also me: how dare you say the thing I like are failures

So point taken

On balance I think IDW generally succeeded at what it set out to do. What worked and didn't, what was popular and wasn't, and what was good and bad were all different standards that can be conflated. As the year winds down, I'll need to think about the best of IDW through that perspective.

IDW did well with the Transformers title overall in my opinion. Considering that they were somewhat hamstrung by Hasbro's requirements regarding some characters I don't blame them for not getting everything right. I would have loved to see what a talented group of artists, a high quality writer (not James roberts) and a competent editor could have done if they were unrestricted by corporate clowns, even if their meddling was minimal. Again, just my take.

It is just a shame we missed out on some official physical representation of their more original redesigns. I'd have preferred Headmaster Sunstreaker, Stormbringer Thunderwing or even Infiltration Starscream over Rung, Drift or Victorion.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:It is just a shame we missed out on some official physical representation of their more original redesigns. I'd have preferred Headmaster Sunstreaker, Stormbringer Thunderwing or even Infiltration Starscream over Rung, Drift or Victorion.

Just to point out Victorion isn't like the two you mentioned for the sole reason that she was created through Hasbros Create a Combiner promotion (which a year or two prior gave us Windblade), thus IDW didn't create her.

Also those designs you mentioned didn't have much chance with the design team of that time. In fact it was in Wardens time frame that Stormbringer Astrotrain and the centurion drone got some love.