You can read some extracts below, and the whole piece directly on the website Women Write About
Comics, and enjoy the lineart for Brendan Cahill's variant cover (and colours by Lauren Bennett) for issue #4 of the series, too!
Firstly, how long have you been a fan of Transformers? Was it always your dream to write a comic for them?
I’ve been a Transformers fan to varying degrees since I was very little; they’ve always been around, and G2 was airing when I was eight or nine years old. But Transformers was never a passion of mine, nor was writing it a lifelong dream; when I was pitched this book, IDW EIC David Hedgecock asked me if I wanted to write Visionaries; the Transformers came in later. What got me excited was the idea of reviving and reinventing a largely forgotten franchise; the Transformers were the object they’d be acting against, but the actors would be the Visionaries.
The Visionaries have been silent for 30 years, did you have any say in any changes made to any characters?
Fico and I got basically all the say. Reinventing the Visionaries was very much done internally between me and Fico, and we presented what we wanted to do to IDW and then to Hasbro, and got the sign-off. We looked seriously at the characters and their situation, and then had to think, well, how do we integrate this into the IDW Hasbroverse, which is very sci-fi heavy, and have it still feel organic? We played a lot with more overtly sci-fi angles—at one point, the Visionaries, which are aliens, I might add, were much more obviously so. We decided to move away from the high fantasy aesthetic and worked to develop one that might make sense for a society forcibly removed from its technological origins. We had a very free hand.
[..]
Like I said, I haven’t been up to date on Transformers. But I knew and loved Kup from the 1986 movie, and so when they told me he was going to die, I was just shocked. Utterly, utterly shocked that the responsibility for taking out friggin’ Kup was going to be landing in my hands. Kup has always been one of my favorites (Kup, Springer, Ultra Magnus, Arcee, and yes, even Hot Rod are my TF dream team), so I immediately understood this wasn’t going to be a small thing. So I never took this lightly.
That’s why I structured the first issue the way I did; Kup takes a lot of the spotlight, and I showed him as the one pushing for something better; the old seen-it-all got to play idealist at the end, and I loved being able to do that for him.
