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Stuartmaximus wrote:BTW anyone know if that Optimus Prime figure can transform?
coz I couldn't see anything in the article as to whether it could or not

Ironhidensh wrote:

Stuartmaximus wrote:BTW anyone know if that Optimus Prime figure can transform?
coz I couldn't see anything in the article as to whether it could or not

........... That's just a comic book cover.

Kurona wrote:Is there a reason Scarlet's being pushed so much beyond the likes of even Snake-Eyes; as if she's the main representative of GI Joe on equal footing as Optimus? Does she have her own series in IDW's Joe books or something?

Doctor McGrath wrote:

Kurona wrote:Is there a reason Scarlet's being pushed so much beyond the likes of even Snake-Eyes; as if she's the main representative of GI Joe on equal footing as Optimus? Does she have her own series in IDW's Joe books or something?

I know little to nothing about GI Joe but I'd assume she will be the new Windblade/Arcee for that property. Gotta have a strong female lead..

Also, I know Barber said Hasbro had nothing to do with this but man...IDW just happened to brainstorm this "fresh" idea of combining properties mere months after Hasbro announces they are doing it with the movie stuff. Now that's what I call coincidence!

Kurona wrote:

Doctor McGrath wrote:

Kurona wrote:Is there a reason Scarlet's being pushed so much beyond the likes of even Snake-Eyes; as if she's the main representative of GI Joe on equal footing as Optimus? Does she have her own series in IDW's Joe books or something?

I know little to nothing about GI Joe but I'd assume she will be the new Windblade/Arcee for that property. Gotta have a strong female lead..

Also, I know Barber said Hasbro had nothing to do with this but man...IDW just happened to brainstorm this "fresh" idea of combining properties mere months after Hasbro announces they are doing it with the movie stuff. Now that's what I call coincidence!

To be fair, it's not exactly something unique happening with Hasbro. Comics have a long history of creating shared universes, and ever since Marvel's movies managed to pull it off and make it popular a ton of companies have been trying to do it regardless.

ScottyP wrote:

Counterpunch wrote:I feel like this is one of those things, were if I truly express my feelings on the matter, the annoyance, the frustration, the disappointment; I'll get taken to task for being short-sighted.

These were some of my gut feelings. Distilled into just one word, it was "dread", more specifically, it was really the fear of loss.

Counterpunch wrote:I suppose I'll just wait for the material and make up my own mind. If I'm wrong, I'll happily admit it. If the fears come to pass, someone should really be held to the fire for spoiling something great.

I think in a year's time we're going to mark down January 2012 - Sometime in the second half of 2016 as that One Perfect Summer for Transformers comics that just won't be recaptured anytime soon, and will never be duplicated. That said, I'm also going to try and keep an open mind here, and hope that the good stewardship of the brand that we've seen to date will continue. History isn't kind to Transformers in these types of situations though, so we'll have to see if this can buck the trend.

Onto some other things that are not replies to Counterpunch's excellent post. First, It'll be interesting to see how "Team MTMTE" gets shaken up (if at all), because exRID hasn't really been great for a year and Scott's stories just don't interest me. If they break up that band, there better be a damn good reason. Or hell, add Nick Roche to the team as a writer and sometimes artist and wait and see if I complain (I won't.)

A second point I wanted to bring up is my feelings towards bringing other brands in to a (currently) flourishing licensed comics property. I can't say I mind the stuff that's just really started up again like Micronauts, ROM, and even MASK being involved. A lot of circumstantial evidence in both the toyline, corporate press releases, and exRID have been pointing to that and these could be logical fits into this universe with only minimal backtracking from John "Continuity" Barber required. These could be neat if done right (stuff like Circuit Breaker or Death's Head in G1) and not as a one-off crossover brand circle jerk (Transformers vs The Avengers, most of Infestation).

Those franchises really don't bother me, not at all. I'm annoyed as hell that we have to bring GI Joe into this universe. It's like Hasbro dumped the rotting corpse of that franchise onto IDW.

I know that sounds harsh, but as someone that's never been able to admit to being much of a Joe fan, that's exactly what it looks like. I don't care about the characters, I don't care about the fiction, and I don't want them in what's been the "main" Transformers continuity for me for years. A lot of those characters are freaking attention magnets. Hope you're ready for four pages per twenty page book of Duke, Cobra Commander, Zartan, Baroness, Scarlet, Snake Eyes, and Roadblock and Destro and others if they're going to be any kind of fixture in this overall universe, because that's what you're gonna get. Gotta get Bumblebee back in to hang out with POOP GI Joe Paratrooper Steve or whoever other boring military guy character is even though he's super dead so we can have our A-Listers interacting and Protect the Brands

I don't blame IDW for that, it's just a shortsighted Hasbro mandate. If you're into GI Joe and excited for that, I think that's wonderful. That franchise just isn't for me and I think it would have been better left out to it's own pasture to survive or advance on its own.

Blegh, I got going on a rant and that probably mostly came out with a tone I didn't intend. Screw it, here's another way of putting it a bit shorter and wittier:

Dr Va'al wrote:

Cyberpath wrote:

Dr Va'al wrote:

They used the knock-off. :\

StarfireDelta wrote:Everybody wants to be Marvel. We shouldn't be surprised, but the success rate of other companies that have tried to jump on that particular bandwagon has not been terribly impressive so far. Similarly, every games company wants its World of Warcraft, but there's only one World of Warcraft. Lightning doesn't tend to strike twice. So we'll see how well this does. I just hope it doesn't spoil the good thing we've had going with Transformers comics for the last few years.

Which reminds me, I seriously need to get caught up...

ADDENDUM: I echo the sentiments of Insurgent, personally. I have no interest in Hasbro's other properties, with the exception of My Little Pony. And I really don't want to see a Transformers/MLP crossover. Not a serious one, with lasting repercussions for both franchises, anyways. Fortunately, MLP is set in a completely fictional fantasy world, rather than a fictional version of the real world, so that doesn't seem likely. Still the prospect of another giant crossover with titles that don't interest me is what cooled my interest in the Sonic the Hedgehog comics last year in the run up to their second MegaMan crossover and I haven't read them now for over a year now. I'm rather worried about the same happening with Transformers.

Windsweeper wrote:I always thought Rom was a Marvel character

Windsweeper wrote:I always thought Rom was a Marvel character

RevTibe wrote:

Windsweeper wrote:I always thought Rom was a Marvel character

Last time I checked, the situation was that the rights to Rom the character are owned by Hasbro (although they took a winding road to reach them!), but the rights to the villains and setting remain with Marvel. It's comparable to how the Transformers featured in Marvel comics while the rights remained with Hasbro, but some of the Marvel comics characters, like Circuit Breaker, wound up being Marvel's property.

Not sure if IDW have mentioned how that situation's being handled.

Kurona wrote:Basically the way it works is the rights to ROM's character itself was owned by the company that created them; then eventually Hasbro got ahold of them. However... as there was nothing to ROM itself, not even a back-of-the-box blurb, when Marvel came around to creating their series around him, they basically made everything up. So it's less accurate to say Marvel owns ROM's villains, and more to say that Marvel owns literally everything about ROM rather than ROM himself. So... yeah. Pretty funny situation with the rights.

1984forever wrote:Transformers has this rich history with characters and places that have never been fully explored, but yet IDW feels that somehow it's not enough. So now it's another crossover with GI Joe, this time with Mask and Rom and etc thrown in. Maybe if the IDW writers stop using the same characters all the time they wouldn't be so bored with Transformers.

At this point I am hoping that readership on these titles drops low enough so it's no longer profitable for Idw to put out Transformers. Let some other company get a crack at it.

But Autobots and M.A.S.K. both have transforming technology—is there already a connection there? Ryall responds, “That’s an excellent question that I’m going to say will be answered within the pages of the Revolution event series.”

Naturally I had to ask if they were aware of my theory, as seen on Nerdist News, that the marketing for the new Transformers movie is hinting at ROM. The answers were…interesting.

“I got a lot of e-mails after that article got out there,” says Gage. “I think it’s pretty close to the original ROM logo.”

“It worried me,” says Ryall. “I want there to be a ROM movie, but I would like it to just sort of be a new continuity, not something that’s tacked on.”