There is no preview as such for this week's IDW Publishing release - the first collected trade volume of Transformers vs G.I. Joe - but you can still get to find out more about it by reading an interview with creators John Barber and Tom Scioli, courtesy of
. Find some snippets below, and click on the link to read the full story - and maybe come back to Seibertron.com, so we may finish reviewing the two issues we've left behind!
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.
