Transformers - ongoing series

[Dominic]

I am calling it now, one of the 3 is getting cancelled by the end of mid-2013, when IDW starts publishing movie comics again in preparatin for TF4.

I am guessing it will be the lower selling of the two ongoings. But, they might just dump the Furman book, so as to have one less continuity.


Dom
-calling it now.

[andersonh1]

I am calling it now, one of the 3 is getting cancelled by the end of mid-2013, when IDW starts publishing movie comics again in preparatin for TF4.

I am guessing it will be the lower selling of the two ongoings. But, they might just dump the Furman book, so as to have one less continuity.


Dom
-calling it now.

Didn't I read somewhere that the Furman book has been planned with a limited number of issues anyway? Maybe I misread, but I thought it was only supposed to run through #100.

[Dominic]

Just under two years, which means it will run up in to the next movie push.

Dom
-still doubts the wisdom of 2 ongoings.....

[Onslaught Six]

-still doubts the wisdom of 2 ongoings.....

GI Joe is doing it, and apparently doing well enough to support it.

And I still stand by my assertation that this isn't anything new. IDW would have two books going at once--Infiltration and Stormbringer? AHM and Maximum Dinobots? The ongoing and Wreckers, Bumblebee, Drift, Ironhide? The Spotlight issues? IDW's been publishing multiple "ongoing" series since the start; this isn't anything new.

[Mako Crab]

Mike Costa speaks!! And he. . . blames the fans.

http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-new ... rs-173922/

Couple highlights:

- “Transformers fans read Transformers comics, and only Transformers comics. They are isolated from the rest of the comic book world.”

- “Most Transformers fans don’t read comics.”

“There’s probably about a total of 100 active posters across ALL the Transformers message forums on the Internet.”

“Why aren’t we listening to the fans? It means we’re not listening to you and the other 20 people that post on message boards.”

[Onslaught Six]

I was just about to post this!

Reading it, Costa seems kind of like a dick (although maybe that summary is colouring his words; I haven't listened to the original interview) and also that he doesn't...understand Transformers. I sort of agree partially on a lot of the things he says about the fandom ("Most of them don't read regular comics,") but then he says shit that's just completely out of left field ("There's like a hundred Transformers fans across all message boards." Um...what? Then who the hell is buying your books? No, seriously?), and that's not even getting into some of the other things he says ("There’s no reason a robot would turn in to a car, they’re toys. I guess you could come up with reasons for it – a lot of writers have – it’s just so strange.” What?!) which really changes my opinion on everything. That, and he seems a little...I don't know, full of himself?

I'd also like to point out that I didn't feel this conflicted when McCarthy gave that interview in a similar tone--he seemed like a guy who legitimately loved Transformers *and* totally understood what they were all about.

[Gomess]

Haha wow. As if I needed more reasons not to read these comics. I've never been able to separate the art from the artist, and this guy seems a bit classless. Lots of sweeping generalisations and insults to his own audience.

Gotta love how, instead of being reflective and admitting, "I struggled to reconcile my writing style with the Transformers concept," he basically calls Transformers a stupid concept. People have lost sight of the true meaning of "arrogance", but there's a good example.

It's unfortunate, because if not for his wittering manchild tone (how many times can you patronisingly say "They're toys"?) he might've almost had a point about the franchise's restrictive nature. It's like a stoner writing an essay on an interesting subject and never getting anywhere because his imagination isn't as big as he thinks it is, and he doesn't really care anyway. How sad.

[Dominic]

GI Joe is doing it, and apparently doing well enough to support it.

Bull-hockey. The "Cobra" series is doing well...the main book is limping along on brand recogniztion.

I take your point about "-ation" and "Spotlight" or AHM and LSotW, But, there is a critical difference that you are missing.

"Spotlight" or the various miniseries are inherently limited. Most people do not know/care that the "Spotlight" issues are sequentially numbered. They are sold as one-shots. A limited series is, by definition, limited. There is much less of an assumed commitment when buying those.

An ongoing series is, in theory, a long run commitment. A five issue miniseries is a complete run. Five issues of an ongoing series is just this side of being a pile of shit.

There is also the fact that the numbering on both books will be damn near identical while the titles will be both similar and awkward. That is asking for people to be pissed off. I can guarantee that if I only want to read one of the two modern TF books, Newbury would fuck it up and I would miss the issue of the one I wanted and get the one I did not. (This kept happening with "Cobra", despite the names of the two books being more different and less awkward than the "Transformers" books.)

I am likely going to keep both no matter what, even if I dislike one, just to make sure I get the one that I *do* want.

Couple highlights:

And that is all I am getting because I cannot find the original source of the damned quotes. TFW did not post an actual link, and searching got cumbersome.

If somebody has something more concrete and wants to correct me on one point or another, feel free to post a link. I am going by what is on TFW's page....

as he goes on to say, "Don is drawing at his best when he's drawing Transformers. I thought it would be awesome - a bunch of Transformers on the Transformers home world of Cybertron drawn by Don. Unfortunately, Don left and it didn't work out."

Damn, that is a shame. Figueroa may not have been able to make "Chaos" great. But, it would have been pretty to look at.

Okay, here are my nuanced thoughts on Costa's statements as presented at TFW. And, I will go on record as saying that I substantially agree with him.

"The characters are so difficult to understand." He compares a human coming back after serving only 2 years in a war and their entire psyche is destroyed, their life changed. But these characters are robots that are millions of years old fighting a war that's a million years old. He goes on to state: "They don’t get hungry, they don’t get tired, they don’t have women, they don’t have relationships that they value, because they don’t have females that they can love, maybe brotherly love but how, they don’t have parents?”

This is a common problem in soft sci-fi. It is difficult to write aliens as aliens, rather than writing them as "funny looking people with species-wide personalities". (This is one of the more irksome things about "Star Trek".) Games Workshop uses to circumvent this in their fiction by generally restricting stories from the aliens' point of view. They have gotten away from it, with mixed results. The idea of an alien is that it is just that, an alien. It is hard to understand that they would be thinking about.

The line about how TFs "...don't have women...parents" is interesting. It sounds like he is saying that TFs would not have "relationships that they value" purely because they do not have naturally occurring females. He is not making the idiotic blunder that guys like Card do in assuming that all aliens are basically nice and love their children. But, he is arguably guilty of a variant of the same insularity that he (rightly) called out a large part of the fandom on.

I can see where Costa is coming from though.

“All the basic things that motivate a person in any kind of adventure story that motivate them, these characters do not have them. You have to manufacture them. Why would a robot that’s millions of years old have a personality like a human? That’s insane.”

This is a huge problem in TFs. Costa, and for that matter Furman, have reconciled it (Costa much more explicitly) by saying that TFs are mentally inhibited or outright retarded in some way. And, that really is the best possible reasoning at this point in the franchise's history.

- “My job as a writer is to understand why characters are doing certain things – beyond why they are doing things in a certain moment – to who they are as people, but that’s where questions start getting really confusing, because these ‘things’ aren’t people.”

I am not one for blaming a writer for what their characters say, but damn if Costa does not sound like Spike here. (It would be nice if I had the original fucking transcripts to work from, so I could see if he had anything else to say about Spike.)

And no, I am not saying that Costa would be a kleptocrat like Spike.

- “Transformers fans read Transformers comics, and only Transformers comics. They are isolated from the rest of the comic book world.”

- “Most Transformers fans don’t read comics.”

Idiomatically, I agree. In real terms, I would have phrased it a bit differently, but.... Most TF fans, (or fans of similar properties), are incredibly insular, if not borderline retarded. That is why they are resistant to change, and in many cases why they never dropped that old hobby from their childhood and why they need it to be the way it was back then.

(And, if anybody is going to respond with a "but I also like", try to avoid other examples from soft sci-fi, or fiction in general.)

GI Joe is taken seriously. “GI Joe still has respectability, while Transformers does not.”

I want to hear/read this in context. But, taken as it is, I am calling bullshit. And, really, there is no other response to that. If the general "comic community", (and my god, that sounds retarded), makes a distinction between Joe and TF, I would wager that TF would have more favourability. The franchise is healthier over-all, which indicates higher acceptance. (And, I say this as somebody who personally likes Joe a bit more at the moment. But, I am not going to say that Joe is more respected than TF....)

- Mike Costa blames the fall of popularity with Transformers comics not on himself or anyone with IDW Publishing, but with Dreamwave Comics, and the implosion that company had that effected the creators, the retailers, and of course, the fans. He goes on to state: “Some of those stories weren’t all that great.”

I almost agreed with that when I read the first sentence. Then, I read the rest of it.

Dreamwave did hurt the brand. I know for the fact, based on a conversation with a guy who worked there, that Newbury (and by extension other stores) was very resistant to ordering IDW "Transformers" after all the trouble that those other guys who hawked TF comics caused. (Stores also got screwed at the end.)

But, damn, Costa is talking shit about his predecessors. That is just rude. I am not going to defend all of DW, (though I look back fondly on much ot it). But, if we control for IDW having more longevity at this point, their percentages are probably not much better than DW's. (And, I am not going to blame IDW for that statement.)



Dom
-to be continued..... (I have to go cover a lunch, and get set up at another desk....)

[Dominic]

And, okay..... (It is a slow day, but just busy enough that I cannot find something else to do....)

“I don’t think these books will be number 1 again. They target their market, and their market is shrinking, and there’s a lot of people in that market that are unpleasant.”

I *really* want to argue this point.

But, between people dropping the book because it is being pitched too high, and enough fans delivering on the worse stereotypes about fandoms in general....

TF as a franchise might be able to resecure its support base, but that base may end up being a hobble

He goes on to add that this happens with most properties, but Transformers fans are more vocal. He does add that it's this same attitude and desire to be heard that kept the franchise alive in the 90's all the way to the 2007 movie.

TF fans are really not much worse than fans of most other properties. Granted, we have less excuse than some fans, but....

Joe fans are worse. There, I said it. And, different fandoms have different specific problems. Comparing them and monetizing them exactly would be difficult.

And, no, it is not that attitude that kept the franchise alive. The franchise being viable beyond the fandom kept it alive over the last 20+ years.

- “The most harsh fans suffer from tunnel vision and lack perspective." At first this statement was applied only to Transformers comics, but he continues on and ends up referencing "in their world", or their life, so to speak.

Agree completely.

- Mike briefly touches upon the cry from fans on message boards regarding "Why don't they listen to the fans!?". “There’s probably about a total of 100 active posters across ALL the Transformers message forums on the Internet.”

I take the point about the fandom being relatively small and insulated. But, dammit, the phrasing is stupid, especially when the obvious rebuttals will come from people with the ability to refute it with hard numbers.


Dom
-now, to respond to the responses.....

[andersonh1]

I'll say what I said over at TFW: the writers who have made Transformers work have done so by writing them as if they were people. And that's the way to approach the characters. They aren't aliens deep down inside, not really. They're just people, even if they are 20' tall robots that turn into cars and planes.

To make this franchise work, a writer has to have a lack of cynicism and a playful imagination, in my view. Costa couldn't get past the fact that it's a toyline-based comic from what I can see. He's an adult, toys are for kids, ergo the book is just flawed from the get-go. That's fine, but it does make him a poor fit as a writer.

I don't have any ill-will towards the guy. He's entitled to his opinion, and I"ve generally enjoyed the book for the past two and a half years, but if it's that much of a problem for him to relate to and write the characters, then it's time for some new writers. And we're getting them, so everything's fine.

And I still stand by my assertation that this isn't anything new. IDW would have two books going at once--Infiltration and Stormbringer? AHM and Maximum Dinobots? The ongoing and Wreckers, Bumblebee, Drift, Ironhide? The Spotlight issues? IDW's been publishing multiple "ongoing" series since the start; this isn't anything new.

That's true. There have almost always been two Transformers books in any given month, or more often than not. That publishing model must be working for IDW since they're keeping it going.