Tom Scioli Interview - Transformers / G.I. Joe Crossover

Details on the book are hush-hush and Scioli is finalizing the artwork on everything, but we got him on the line to talk about his love of these characters, from the classic toys to the classic cartoons to the classic comics.

Here now are excerpts from our long, long geek-out session with Scioli on these great characters and how they warped our childhoods, and a look at some of the behind-the-scenes drawing for the upcoming series. If anything, we did learn this: Scioli is bringing a real passion and love for the characters to this book, and you can get a glimpse of it here.

Newsarama Note: The art shown here is not final, and only represents Scioli’s initial doodles and experiments with the characters’ looks. It does not represent what will appear in the actual series.

Newsarama: Tom, how did this come about?

Tom Scioli: Pretty organically – I sent some samples of my work to IDW, and then I was contacted by John Barber about doing a cover for Black Dynamite, and then I started pitching ideas around the image I’d come up with, and it was a bit too much all at once, but after a while he contacted me with an idea for a Transformers/G.I. Joe comic, this one-sentence pitch. So those were all the steps.

Nrama: This can get confusing, but what continuity does this take place in?

Scioli: My thoughts are that this is its own continuity – they can be similar to other books except for how these worlds interact, or they can be completely different, I hate to change anything without a good reason, but I do like to feel like everything is up for grabs.

There’s no unified continuity for either of these properties – they’ve both existed for a long time, and had their own worlds, but there is no one “right” version.

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Nrama: To kind of give this reminiscing a point – these were characters explicitly designed to sell toys. And yet here you and I are, nearly three decades later, we’re talking about them, fans are still going to see the movies, watching the cartoons, buying the toys – why are they so powerful?

Scioli: I think the designs are really strong, that whatever the initial impetus for creating these things was, people still invested the full weight of their imaginations and creativity on them, and so they transcended whatever initial decision-making brought them into being.

Someone like Larry Hama offered whatever he had in terms of life experience and imagination into G.I. Joe, and it’s something that transcends generations, something kids and adults can enjoy years later. Comics are something designed to sell themselves, and I’ve spent might adult life reading and making comics.

The commercial aspect is almost invisible. I think it’s almost beside the point.