Dominic wrote: 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.
You have had consistently bad luck with comic shops. I started going to the one in State College and the guys there are seriously cool about everything. IDW put out a Raphael one-shot this week (yes, as a tribute to the old TMNT series. Yes, really. Yes, I was pissed.) I didn't mention it at all to the clerk when I picked up my books the other day, simply figuring I'd pick it up off the shelf or just move on without it/read it online later. When he sent me an email on Wednesday, I figured it was just to tell me about Mega Man, but he actually told me that this TMNT Raph one-shot came in and asked if I'd like a copy in my box. Dude's on top of things.
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....
This is what TFW's page said: "You can find the PodCast in question on iTunes by searching for “The Underbase”. We’ve listened to the PodCast, and we’ve written a summary of some of his statements (as well as quotes) for you to read."
I googled "underbase podcast" and got Moonbase2's stuff.
This is the most recent one (besides an outright review of #31) but it's two and a half hours long and I
cannot be fucked listening to it to find what I actually want.
Damn, that is a shame. Figueroa may not have been able to make "Chaos" great. But, it would have been pretty to look at.
As much as I dislike Don's drawing, he at least has an understanding of movement and page setup. You can understand what's going on.
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.
I can understand it, too, if TF hadn't already had 25+ years of history to draw on and 'examples' of TFs doing the very things he claims to not understand. That, and I really am starting to wonder if "No Females" is an editorial mandate that someone else told him.
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.)
This line did the same for me--I seriously think that, if we were to encounter alien robots, Costa would be on the side of, "They should all be wiped out because they aren't human."
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.)
Fiction is mainstream entertainment. You seem to have this strange notion that Adult Reading is Non Fiction, and frankly I can't be fucked educating myself on the ins and outs of pseudopolitical bullshit to stroke my ego when I can be writing fictional music about video games.
That said, I do agree--most people who buy TF comics don't seem to buy many other comics, and those who do generally don't have much understanding of them beyond "batman is kewl," which is something one should grow out of in college at best.
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....)
I'm reading from context clues that this is more about comics, Costa seems to believe DW has irrepairably damaged TFs as a brand inside comics. If anything's damaging it, it's the movie crap. (Which has disappeared entirely with DOTM. We didn't even get sequels.)
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.)
Word. I posted this on /co/ and /toy/ for fun, and most people's responses are along the lines of, "Wow, what a dick. Good luck getting work." (Some others are basically going, "Transformers fans suck anyway, who cares.")
Dominic wrote: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
The books surely have *potential* but I think the chances of the general comics public buying Transformers frequently enough to make it sell as well as, say, the new 52...yeah. (DC had to do new printings of almost all #1s of the new books. IDW has had to do that with...what, Wreckers? The first ongoing issue? TMNT #1?)
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.
HissTank recently frontpaged the new Cobra Commander reveal (under spoiler tags, of course) and most people's reactions were along the lines of, "Who's that?" "I don't read this, is it some shitty new character IDW made? Why isn't it [x]? Man it's so gay that they killed Cobra Commander in the first place."
Also, I don't know why I'm bringing this up, but GI Joe fans are more prone to putting nearly-naked girls in their avatars and signatures. I will never understand this, it just makes the place look low-rent and uncomfortable to browse at work. (No offense, Prowl.)
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.
This.
andersonh1 wrote: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.
I'm not beating down Costa's door to threaten him but I do think he comes off as a dick in this--although all I'm seeing is part of it. (TFW might be willing to obscufate their sources in a way that makes it easier to use their own reading as a "canonical" one, thus most people will base their opinion off their summary rather than seek the original.) I also wasn't all that fond of his run in general (various things contribute to this) and the new direction looks far, far more interesting to me.
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.
Dom's point about the "ongoing" having different nature than "limited series" irks me because, at this point, I think we all know that an ongoing is only ongoing until it's cancelled and replaced by a limited series or another ongoing. It's not as if IDW ever stopped publishing books, like Atomic Robo's model. (Robo will put out a 4-6 issue series for however many months it takes, and then take a break for a few months to write and draw the next one, and work on other projects for Marvel/DC/etc.)
Sounds like some of the more vocal and nasty fans got to him. He should compare notes with Shane McCarthy.
Definitely. McCarthy took fan backlash in stride, a sort of "Well, 'I' liked it, so those guys suck," whereas Costa seems to be lashing out and trying to shift the blame. ("The books were received that way because fans are dicks and Transformers are hard to write.")
