IDW Transformers vs. G.I. Joe #2 Review

Transformers VS G.I. JOE #3
Tom Scioli & John Barber (w) • Scioli (a & c)
CYBERTRON INFESTED! The Transformers’ homeworld is crawling with tiny green invaders from the planet Earth—the G.I. JOE team! Also this issue—Funeral for a Friend. Many AUTOBOTS and G.I. JOE soldiers have fallen in the line of duty—but you've never seen a send-off like this!
FC • 32 pages • $3.99

Bullet points:
WAKE THE DEAD!!! In 3-D!!!
Not actually in 3-D—but you will not believe your eyes! Guaranteed!
The biggest thing ever gets bigger!
Interconnected Variant Cover by Tom Scioli!

Optimizzy wrote:oh man. I just cant like this art. sorry.

I'm sure there are people who do...for whatever reason, but it is, in a word, ugly.

I guess it has nostalgic value...it reminds me of the pictures I drew in 5th grade.

Flashwave wrote:For that matter, why is the purple cyclops calling himself SOUNDwave

Siger wrote:What the hell is up with the size? If Starscream transformed, he'd be 20x bigger than those jets falling into the sea. Same goes for Soundwave, they are all Godzilla sized?

THE WAR AT HOME! But whose home—and whose war?! Interstellar war has never been so cosmic! The G.I. JOE team faces the TRANSFORMERS—on Earth and Cybertron. Plus—just in time for Halloween… meet the OCTOBER GUARD!

Transformers VS G.I. JOE #4
Tom Scioli & John Barber (w) • Scioli (a & c)
THE WAR AT HOME! But whose home—and whose war?! Interstellar war has never been so cosmic! The G.I. JOE team faces the TRANSFORMERS—on Earth and Cybertron. Plus—just in time for Halloween… meet the OCTOBER GUARD!
FC • 32 pages • $3.99

Bullet points:
The biggest crossover the cosmos has ever faced JUST KEEPS GETTING BIGGER!!!
Ask your retailer about the Tom Scioli connecting variant cover! Connects with the variants for #2 & #3 creating one big piece!

ComicsAlliance: The amazing thing about Transformers vs. G.I. Joe for me as a reader is that it doesn’t feel like it should exist, and I mean that in the best way possible. It has this feeling that there’s no way this book should’ve been approved, because it’s so wild, raw and energetic. How did you get that feeling to come across in this comic?

Tom Scioli: I don’t know how you would get to that point with any kind of comic. Just from my perspective, I’ve been doing comics for such a long time and in such a way that’s very different from the normal career path for comics, so I don’t know how you replicate that. I don’t know how many other people are out there that would be able to have that mix of discipline and self-destructive chaotic impulse to get that. I don’t know, John? Do you have any perspective?

John Barber: To one degree or another, when you’re working on something that’s company-owned, you have to forget about that when you’re working on it, and I think that degree varies. The whole idea was to make something kind of weird, that went out the window at some point. There was probably a minute early on where Michael Kelly, the guy we work with at Hasbro as their Director of Global Publishing, called and he was like, “This isn’t exactly what we talked about.” He loves the book, but at some point, the idea was going to be safer. It’s not like there’s anything unsafe about this, either, but you want to be able to point at it and say “here are these two things that we put together to make one thing,” and I don’t think you can do that with our book. I think that’s what makes it interesting.

TS: I didn’t really know how it was going to turn out either. It’s a project where it’s like “yeah, what would this thing be?” I know that when we first talked about in the beginning, we had that very basic idea of a Jack Kirby take on this sort of thing, but when you sit down to actually make it, all these other opportunities open up. All these other creative things take over, and it outgrows that initial idea. But then it sort of comes back to it. Early on, I thought I wanted to do something more serious than just a straight Jack Kirby rip-roaring adventure, but then it turned into that kind of rip-roaring adventure.

[...]

CA: Along those same lines, I’m a much bigger fan of Joe than Transformers, so most of the Transformers comics that I’ve read have been crossovers with G.I. Joe, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that was structured like this, with the Joes going to Cybertron. Was that just an obvious thing that you’d never seen?

JB: That was there from the beginning. 100% of this comic is Tom at this point, and I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I expect that one day, Tom will just stop emailing me.

TS: [Laughs] I’ll just send you the finish comic.

JB: Right. But every other Transformers/G.I. Joe comic, at least every one that I read, tried to drag Transformers to a realistic level and throw that into the G.I. Joe world. I thought the idea of blowing up G.I. Joe and making them science-fiction, having them live in the Transformers’ world, was there. If anything, Cybertron was the one thing I really wanted to do. But it obviously came out much cooler in the comic than I would’ve thought of.

Transformers vs G.I. JOE #5
Tom Scioli & John Barber (w) • Scioli (a & c)
IT GETS CRAZIER! The biggest space battle ever grows to universal proportions! Will the G.I. JOE team and the AUTOBOTS make peace—before COBRA and the DECEPTICONS end the war… the bad way?!
FC • 32 pages • $3.99

Rated X wrote:I just don't understand why people like this stuff. You don't see any "He-Man vs. Thundercats" or "Powerpuff Girls vs. My Little Pony" comics ?

Lord Manhammer '74 wrote:

Rated X wrote:I just don't understand why people like this stuff. You don't see any "He-Man vs. Thundercats" or "Powerpuff Girls vs. My Little Pony" comics ?

And the fact you don't see any is a crime in and of itself.

dragons wrote:

Lord Manhammer '74 wrote:

Rated X wrote:I just don't understand why people like this stuff. You don't see any "He-Man vs. Thundercats" or "Powerpuff Girls vs. My Little Pony" comics ?

And the fact you don't see any is a crime in and of itself.

[img][IMG]http://i1270.photobucket.com/albums/jj615/Silverager1969/436.jpg[/img]

morphobots wrote:I believe he's saying one thing that really bugs him is the human/robot scale in the art.

Darth Jumpy wrote:I thought this issue could have used some more focus. I get that it is this series' style to have an entire story encapsulated on one or two pages, but it seems like they kept on skipping the climaxes to the stories. Like the stories that were presented in this issue shows the set up, and then skips right to the aftermath. The Joes fight Blackarachnia, and then it skips to Fort Max being fine. The Joes have to fight their mind controlled pets, but then it is later said in the issue that everyone is fine. Grimlock and Hot Rod fight, and the next scene Grimlock is somewhere else entirely. There are a ton of moments like that in this chapter. I usually enjoy this series, but this was by far the weakest issue. There are even some events that I did not get even after reading the commentary.

Transformers vs G.I. JOE #6

Tom Scioli & John Barber (w) • Scioli (a & c)

THE SMASH HIT OF 2014 BECOMES THE GREATEST COMIC OF 2015! If you thought the war between G.I. JOE and the TRANSFORMERS was out of control before… well, brothers and sisters—wait’ll you get a load of issue 6!

FC • 32 pages • $3.99

Bullet points:
Heroes fall, but heroism triumphs!
One small step for the G.I. JOE team—one giant fall for the TRANSFORMERS!
Variant Cover by Antonio Fusso!

ComicsAlliance: The first thing I want to talk about is pacing. Jumping into Transformers vs. GI Joe #5, which is the start of the second paperback if people are reading it that way, they’re getting a comic that moves so fast that it is often hard for me to keep up.

Tom Scioli: Well, issue #5 would be the one, because issue #5 is where it really accelerates. I just find that so many comics have a lot of redundancy, a lot of over-explaining, a lot of images of basically the same thing, so part of the approach is to just eliminate redundancy and just give you the things you need to move the narrative forward. I sort of crossed a point of no return with it, I think, and where that came from is that I wrote a script for a Transformers vs. GI Joe movie adaptation.

You know, the movie doesn’t exist yet, but I made a comic as though I was adapting a movie, and how movie adaptations are. There are chunks missing, and jumps because of the time it takes to take an hour and a half movie and put it into a comic, you’re going to have to cut some things out. I wrote something with that sort of style in mind, and after I did that, I realized that’s a tool I could use any time. It doesn’t have to be restricted to this particular conceit, it’s just a tool in my arsenal now. It was really effective in that script, which hasn’t come out yet, but it was just a really intense reading experience.

[...]

CA: The interesting thing about that to me is that, like you said, there have been Transformers and GI Joe team-up books before, and now you’re doing it as an ongoing series and using the entire cast of both books, as they have existed for thirty years. There’s not a whole lot left on the table.

TS: That’s one thing I noticed. I was sort of going through all these characters and throwing them in, and now I’ve sort of reached the point where it’s like, “Oh, what Decepticon villain can show up?” and most of them are there already, pretty much. There’s an endless number of jets that I can go to, but most of the really resonant ones have shown up, so now it’s just getting weird, which is actually interesting. Now we’re getting into the Pretenders and the Predacons, all the weirder corners of the mythology.

CA: That’s something I wanted to bring up, because you’re at the point now where you’re creating new stuff.

TS: I want to go more in that direction. I thought doing a comic like this, that’s an established thing, would be easier — having a universe that’s already established that I’m just building up. But I’m seeing the limitations of it. I really do want to just create more and add more to it. It’s not so complete a cosmology that there’s a character for every season. I thought there would be a character for every occasion, and in a lot of cases there are. I needed a character who was a chef, and, okay, Roadblock is a chef, I can use him. But there are a lot of holes in the mythology that I’m trying to fill in.

That last Transformers movie… they went nuts. It almost wasn’t even Transformers anymore, it was this infinite universe of every kind of creature you can imagine, and that freed me up too, realizing that I could make this universe whatever I wanted it to be. It doesn’t have to just be giant robots that turn into cars or dinosaurs, it can be a universe.

To say that Tom Scioli and John Barber‘s Transformers vs. GI Joe is an unusual comic is underselling things quite a bit. On paper, it’s a natural fit, an ongoing series that follows in the footsteps of earlier books that have combined the two toy lines into one massive interplanetary battle. In practice, though, it’s something a lot bigger, a comic that almost assaults the reader by cramming in as much big, wild stuff as it possibly can — a toy comic so weird, and so great, that it almost feels like it shouldn’t exist.

With the book’s second storyline well under way, throwing in everything from Vikings to old gods to Dinobots (and a new printing of his amazing American Barbarian on the way this summer), I talked to cowriter, artist and occasional ComicsAlliance guest contributor Tom Scioli about the series. Today, he talks about building a history for a universe that’s even more important than our own, the two-page Free Comic Book Day story, and why his book isn’t a paean to Snake Eyes. You can read the first part of this interview here.

[...]

CA: The next specific scene that I wanted to talk about was the first page of #6. Every time I think this comic can’t get any wilder, it gets bigger and weirder in a way that I find really enjoyable. This comic opens with Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden by floating Transformers with laser swords.

TS: Yeah.

TS: It’s a universe. It’s a whole universe. My thought is that the Transformers vs. GI Joe universe is the most important universe there is, and while you’re reading it, it’s even more important than our universe. There’s an Alpha to that universe and there’s an Omega to that universe, and what you were witnessing was Roadblock’s reading of the Cobra Bible, the Decepticobranomicon, so what you’re reading may well be an actual accounting of what happened. It might be mythology. It might be disinformation. It could be any number of things. There’s a deep history to this world.

CA: I’ve said this before, and I mean it in the best way possible, but I’m always surprised this book exists.

TS: Right. [Laughs]

Transformers vs G.I. JOE #7
Tom Scioli & John Barber (w) • Scioli (a & c)
THE WORLD AS THEY MAKE IT! Alliance are forged! Enemies are enraged! The war burns on Earth and Cybertron! And now… now the real battle begins.
FC • 32 pages • $3.99

Bullet points:
If you’ve ever liked anything, you’ll love this!
If you’ve never liked anything—this will be the first thing you love!
Variant Cover by Kody Chamerlain!

MegaDump wrote:Good God, these are hideous. Honestly, the worst thing about old comics, in my opinion at least, was the crummy artwork and the cheap paper they were printed on. Trying to emulate that look in this day and age makes no sense to me, other than appealing to a sense of nostalgia in older fans. I can't imagine any kids flipping through this on a comic book store shelf and being impressed. It's like using a broom to clean your floor when you have a vacuum cleaner handy... The vacuum does the job faster, more efficiently and you get a better result, so why stick to "old technology?" But hey, whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Two points

- You clearly don't do much housework or have pets. A broom gets things out of wool rugs that a vacuum cleaner simply can't. Different tools. Different jobs. In the case of art - pencils and pens for sketches and inks can be a much more efficient tool. Depends on the style and the artist.

- Its not just nostalgia notes the art hits - it has quirky details and is dynamic in a way that the current pseudo-anime style used in the mainline can't accommodate. It is art and its quality is purely subjective. Whats in vogue now could suddenly look very tired and 'bad' in a few short years and Tom Scioli might look like a progressive genius. Besides which I'd hardly dare call old comic artists like Ditko or Kirby 'crummy' simply because of age or an art-fashion change.

Still gutted I can't easily get my hands on these. I'll have to trawl eBay next month and catch up, if money allows.

In the interplanetary war between the TRANSFORMERS and G.I. JOE, anything can happen... and does.

o.supreme wrote:Yes I got it at my local shop yesterday.