We again caught up with James Roberts at TFcon Toronto 2015 for another interview discussing his comic series More Than Meets The Eye! Below is a full transcript of this interview for your reading pleasure.
Once again we wish to express our utmost thanks and appreciation for the time and effort put in by Marian Hilditch (@MMortAH) in transcribing the interview!
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TransMissions (Charles): So we’re live from TFCon Toronto and we’re proud to welcome Mr. James Roberts back on the show, writer of the excellent More than Meets the Eye [MTMTE] comic. We’ve had the pleasure of talking to him last year at BotCon 2014 and at TFCon Chicago. To steal a line from The Simpsons, “It won’t be long before this yearly pastime becomes an annual tradition.” Thank you for joining us again, James.
James Roberts: Thank you. This is like the end of the trilogy isn’t it? It’s the inevitably disappointing third installment.
TM (Charles): (laughs)
JR: This is Back to the Future 3, it’s Godfather 3, it’s Matrix… Reloaded was it?
TM (Charles): Ah, yeah, no Revolutions. Reloaded was the second one.
JR: They just kept getting better and better didn’t they. So in the grand tradition of things climaxing… So, yeah, if we do this in the traditional sense you’re going to ask me a question and we’re going to go with that. I can monologue?
TM (Charles): (laughs) Actually, why don’t we start off with the road to issue #50? When we talked back at TFCon in Chicago, we talked about how your vision was to make it to issue #100 and looks like we’re about to hit the halfway point there.
JR: Yeah, it’s going really fast. Because these things are all staggered on the production side. So you’ve got issue #43 at the end of the month. I’ve just written issue #47. The solicits to issue #48 – I’m about to write those. And then, actually, the issues are written slightly out of sequence this time around so issue #50 is the next one I’m going to start on. So yeah, it seems really close to me in terms of time. And that’s going to be a six part story.
TM (Charles): Six part! Wow.
JR: It’s the biggest we’ve done so far.
TM (Charles): And that starts with #50?
JR: Starts with #50 and then onto to Season 3. So really #56 at this stage looks like the start of Season 3. So suddenly #100 doesn’t seem too far away.
TM (Charles): Right!
JR: But no, in terms of the big #50, the storyline around that, it’s obviously all been building to this. And Season 2 more than Season 1 actually I think, in terms of the various plot threads that are brought together. When I was talking up Season 2 and maybe even when we spoke last year when it was already underway, I think I said that it’s connected in lots of different ways and nearly every issue has something to contribute towards the finale. So hopefully there are big payoffs.
TM (Charles): Cool! Just to start off, our friend of the show Marian who does the transcripts for us [hi! :D], she sent me a message reminding me of a tweet you put out – I think it was in March or April or so.
JR: Oh, yeah! (laughs)
TM (Charles): I’m going to quote you here: “If you see me at any cons after #41 comes out, ask me about the sequence at the end which we cut for space. It’s the best/worst thing ever.”
JR: Yes! OK. So, I may well tell this anecdote if asked tomorrow. I don’t know when this is going out?
TM (Charles): It’ll probably be this week at some point.
JR: Right, OK, so I said it was the best/worse thing ever, OK? Well, the emphasis is definitely on the latter of these two words. And you will readily agree with me. But, nonetheless. So, at the end of the last issue, the one that’s just come out [#42], there is a… it’s one of those things that’s hard to describe without it sounding really odd, but, yeah, basically it’s a dance off style thing. They all get down on the Lost Light in Swerve’s. And it crossed my mind in the early stages of writing it that the best/worse thing ever would be to have Ultra Magnus in a Saturday Night Fever style pastiche to arrive and to sort of shed his armor as he does this.
TM (all): (laughing)
JR: Which, of course, would be awful. And yet…! Part of me wants to see that, you know? So I had an image of him sort of and it’s completely out of character and obviously that’s the main reason we didn’t do it. But in every other respect it’s fantastic. But yeah, he would have just burst on into the scene with the music kicking in and his arms would have come off and then you know, until it was just Minimus Ambus at the end.
TM (Charles): Wow.
JR: Yeah.
TM (Darryl): Did it get drawn?
JR: (laughs) It didn’t get from my brain onto the page. No, it barely hatched.
TM (Charles): Well, Josh Burcham – you’ve been doing some deleted scenes!
JR: Josh can make it work actually, yeah. Perhaps in a way in which other people would struggle. So there you go, it’s out there. I’m sure there’ll be a clamor. Perhaps when we do the Season 2 collected hardcover edition, maybe we’ll get Geoff Senior to draw it or something like that.
TM (Charles): Well, speaking of Ultra Magnus and Minimus Ambus, one of the things I did notice in the last two issue arc [#41-42] is you had Minimus Ambus basically walking around without his armor and interacting with everyone and just being comfortable outside of his Magnus armor. Do you see him as kind of testing things out?
JR: Yeah, it followed on from issue #40 where he’d misplaced his datapad with the poetry on and made a friend in Ten. And as the issue sort of explores, it ultimately leaves him feeling more comfortable without the armor. That particular thread climaxes with him entering Swerve’s as he really is with Ten next to him. So it was doing two things, the next issue two-parter – it was building on that, but also when he’s armored up, he’s more charismatic than he is without it. So would he have been a target for the parasites, for the Personality Ticks? So it was useful actually. Principally because of his character development, but I thought, actually it also solves that other problem because, I’m not saying charisma comes down to how physically imposing you are, but certainly one of the whole reasons he likes to stay in the armor is because he’s a different character and part of that is down to the respect that he gets and the charisma that he exudes. So having him strip back helped me simplify the story.
TM (Charles): I was thinking when I reading, well I bet he’d like to have his armor on at the moment when all the things are attacking him (laughs).
JR: Yeah, I think he’s suited up again for the next couple of issues.
TM (Charles): If we can focus in on the last two-parter for a little bit. In the Personality Ticks storyline, there’s a part where they mention that they have this nondescript medic who came and repaired Thunderclash and at the end they surmised that it was one of the Personality Ticks. Did you envision that since they’re naturally able to deflect attention, they can even project a persona that just makes everyone ignore that they weren’t actually Transformers or…
JR: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s all very high concept isn’t it? They’re sort of like an abstract villain really. The rules are bendable. But yeah the idea was that they’re so difficult to place in terms of calling them to mind that your natural inclination is to assume they were similar to you. They’re vaguely chameleonic I suppose. I think this is a line used to describe Rung, but they leave such a shallow footprint in your consciousness that you sort of fill in the gaps yourself. I think one’s inclination is to project, as you say.
TM (Charles): Yeah, actually, my spectacularly wrong theory was…
JR: (laughs) If it’s better than what I’ve just said then you’re right.
TM (Charles): (laughs) Well, my wrong theory was that actually since they’d mentioned that the medic was female my theory was that it was actually Nickel.
JR: Oh, right yeah!
TM (Charles): And that she had smuggled aboard the Vis Vitalis in order to assassinate Thunderclash, by saying she was repairing him, but then releasing those spores or whatever into him.
JR: Ah, yeah, OK. Yeah, that would have been better (laughs).
TM (Charles): (laughing)
JR: Thanks Charles.
TM (Yoshi): Why are you such a dick?
JR: Yeah. Any other stories you want to improve upon? No, we’re keeping the DJD and the crew separate.
TM (Charles): Oh, OK. So I guess at the end of that issue is Thunderclash now joining the Lost Light?
JR: Yeah, he’s still in the medibay, but on the Lost Light and Firestar and the others have sort of nicked his ship, which is nice. Yeah, he’ll come round soon enough.
TM (Charles): I imagine that’s going to cause some tension in the leadership structure of the Lost Light? (laughs)
JR: Yeah, it’ll get a little crowded! The dynamic will get a bit complicated, yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how Thunderclash and Megatron will rub along. Poor old Rodimus is just going to be pissed off. He’s got Megatron here, he’s got Thunderclash here. Poor old Rodimus. It hasn’t really worked out for him since, you know. It was going alright.
TM (Charles): Yeah, he turned a corner at the end of Dark Cybertron.
JR: Yeah, in Remain in Light he turned over a new leaf and as you say in Dark Cybertron he had the heart to heart with Prime and he helped Orion become Prime again. So he’s thinking, yeah it’s going pretty good. And then there was this brilliant idea to make Megatron captain-slash-co-captain.
TM (Charles): I don’t know if you listen to the Underbase podcast when they review your comics?
JR: I do sometimes.
TM (Charles): OK, so I’ve listened to the most recent review and I wonder if I can ask you a couple of…
JR: You’re not cannibalizing another podcast!?
TM (Charles): (laughs) Chris McFeely has had a little bit of criticism for the last couple of issues.
JR: That’s good to know (laughs). Thanks.
TM (Charles): (laughs) I believe he used the term that they are ‘wallowing in their More-Than-Meets-The-Eye-ness’.
JR: Well, I’d say, Chris, I wouldn’t read the next issue if I were you. I’d skip straight to issue #44 (laughs).
TM (Charles): (laughing) Also, I’m not familiar with Red Dwarf, but they mention that it seemed very close to a Red Dwarf episode.
TM (Yoshi): Such a great show.
JR: That’s a compliment. Thanks guys. Thanks Underbase.
TM (Charles): I’ve heard a little bit of criticism that the second season has been a little bit more dialing up the things that the fans have responded to from the first season and maybe exaggerating things more than is good for the story. That’s I guess the main criticism. I don’t know how you’d respond to it.
JR: Um.
TM (Yoshi): Well, he’s doing our show and not theirs. That’s how he responded to it.
All: (laughing)
JR: Yeah, I said I didn’t listen to the Underbase. Well, there’s a reason for that.
All: (laughing)
JR: What do I say? Is it the case that I’m writing or that I’ve started writing specifically to…? Am I writing out of a sense of what I think fans will like in particular? No. No more than I did in Season 1. Has it become more MTMTE? Probably yes, because we’re over 40 issues into it. It’s found its voice and that voice is getting louder; for better or worse depending on where you’re coming from as a reader. I’ve tried to do different things with Season 2. I’ve tried to dial up in terms of some of the high concept stuff; tried to make it a bit different to – again for better or worse – your average Transformers comic in exploring different things. I’m really proud of Season 2 and I wouldn’t do it any differently if I was back in #28.
I know the cast has grown so I know that some people would prefer to see certain characters more often. I try and give the spotlight to different characters so they each get their turn. It’s not for me to say whether it’s worked, but I’ve tried to strike a balance between the deeper more socio-political stuff, mostly around Megatron, the usual world-building and the type of back and forth bantery, vaguely or pointedly silly or humorous stuff. Those are the usual MTMTE ingredients. If you look back at Season 1 they’re probably still there. There was the weird stuff and there were the deaths and probably the same constituent ingredients that are in Season 2.
I’m glad you asked that. I’m not oblivious to currents of thinking and fan reactions and none of what you said was a surprise. But I guess MTMTE to me now in Season 2 has found the rhythm it’s probably going to stick with. What you’ve got now is probably the essence of MTMTE so you’re going to get some deliberately ludicrous or outlandish or unusual episodes like the Personality Ticks. Where you have got an abstract villain which, yeah it’s Red Dwarfian, it’s a bit Hitchhiker’s. I’ve heard it said it sort of taps into what could be a particularly British style of science fiction which doesn’t take itself too seriously. Maybe Doctor Who-esque as well where you can riff on the more abstract things.
So you have that type of episode or story where the climax revolves around two people walking into a room and that appealed to me because it is something other than the villains being beaten by a punch or a shot or an explosion or whatever. So it was trying to do something different there. So you get the silly episodes, you’ve had the mythos-heavy ones, which would be Elegant Chaos which was very continuity heavy – it sort of eats itself really in terms of self-reference, but at the same time it was trying to be sort of a bit of a romp as well. We’ve built on the supporting cast from Season 1; we’ve had the DJD [Decepticon Justice Division] focused issue, we’ve got a two-part Scavengers story coming up round the corner so we try to enhance elements of Season 1. It’s gone as I wanted it to go in nearly all respects. We’ll see how reactions carry on from this point forth.
TM (Darryl): I have a follow up. As the writer I know you’re very biased as to the writing of the book, but would you say that MTMTE can be too heavy for its own good sometimes?
JR: I’ll tell you what’s interesting about that question. You’ll get people who say it’s too heavy for its own good and you’ll get people who say it’s too silly and you’ll get people who say it’s lightweight and throwaway, mainly because of the banter between the characters or the jokes. Which one of those is it? Or is it a mixture? And I think it’s a mixture – sometimes it’s a mixture within the same issue.
Someone before, actually, was talking about how it can explore quite dark things, but it does so or can do so in quite a lighthearted way. There’s rug pulls, there’s mood whiplash and the rest of it. I suppose that’s a long winded way of saying you can’t please everybody or your mileage may vary. There are some people that like the knottier, grittier, more intellectual things in terms of exploring Megatron’s political leanings and there are those that prefer the more action oriented stories and so on. I try and mix and match it up a bit so you get a flavor of all those things in most issues, I hope.
What do you think? (laughs)
TM (Darryl): (laughs) Me, I’m a lightweight when it comes to these things. Charles is the heavy; he loves the mysteries and whatnot. Without the show, I would be lost, without having access to Charles, because when I say I’m confused by what just happened here, he says ‘Well, remember back in issue #3, when this happened? And then that affected issue #27 and then this is now happening here.’ And I say, ‘No! I don’t!’.
All: (laughing)
JR: It can be pretty unforgiving. I’m not saying you’re someone who dips into it, but it’s not a book you can graze. It is dense. Each issue is dense, informationally, and it does expect a certain level of commitment in terms of familiarity with the back issues and stuff. But I quite like that. It may be doing some damage, actually, in that it is, perhaps, new reader resistant, but I suppose the flip side of that is, if you are a longer term reader, two things really – I hope it bears multiple re-readings, I hope because you’d want to do it anyway, but also because you can pick up different things.
Speaking personally as a comic book reader, I always liked it when a story forced you to call to mind something which happened a long time ago and gave you the impression that everything was interconnected and that there was a bigger story being told. There certainly is a bigger story being told in MTMTE. Imagine if you’re in a train and depending on the distance from your carriage, things are moving in different speeds. That’s sort of where we are in MTMTE. What’s immediately in front of you is the A story in that issue and then there are various arcs that are moving at different speeds. And the ultimate one, which will climax with the last issue is on the horizon.
So I suppose one has to be prepared to either go to the [TF]wiki or be in a position where you have re-familiarized yourself with old issues to the point where you can pick up on some of the nods and the call-backs and stuff.
TM (Charles): That is what I love about MTMTE. I really enjoy having a book that feels completely internally consistent to me and makes you work for picking up on those little clues and it’s like a puzzle you can unlock and there’s even a chance you can get ahead of the writer if you pick up enough of the clues (laughs).
JR: Which has happened! With Slaughterhouse. And I think we talked about that last year.
TM (Charles): Yeah. So how are you dealing with the loss of two pages per comic?
JR: Yeah, that’s… it’s one of those things. I mean two pages is nearly 10% of the issue. It happened that the stories for the season had already been mapped out when that decision was made. To all extents, approaching Series [Season] 3, with that in mind, will change the shape of the stories. I think there’ll be more two-parters or three-parters in Season 3. We all know that MTMTE even at 22 pages was pretty tightly packed, so doing with 20 is tough. But I found a couple of ways to give the readers longer issues, through reframing or recycling or whatever. It happens again next issue, which is 24 pages actually, and happens again in #45 I think. So there are ways around it without having new artwork.
TM (Charles): So you can have extra pages as long as there is no new artwork?
JR: Yeah, which sounds odd, I mean, there are only very limited situations you can do that, but it so happens that there are a couple of issues coming up where it’s been possible to do that. But yeah, 20 pages – there’s no plans to make it less than that, don’t get me wrong, but 20 or more is great, thanks!
TM (Charles): One of the things I noticed in the last two issues was there was a lot of reaction to seeing a lot of the new female characters introduced, but they were all off-screen in the issue. Was that due to losing that page count that they didn’t get a chance to get in?
JR: No, it wasn’t that. What happened was, when the issue was solicited they were on the front cover, because it’s cover worthy. And because Alex is really good at putting a lot of thought into character designs and things and he’s a big fembot/female transformers fan, so when the issue was being planned he went all out to give them very accomplished, well considered designs. He came up with the names as well and the altmodes and so on. And so when the issue was announced, understandably he shared his designs with the world and I think that gave the impression that they had more prominent roles than they were ever going to have.
The reason they didn’t have prominent roles is because, all told, it’s a 40 page story. It is just not possible to do justice to 5, 6, 7 new characters in that space when you’ve already got the return of Thunderclash, you’ve got a murder mystery, you’ve got a character arc for Nautica who needed some more time spent on her background and all the rest of it. And seeing the reaction to the drawings when they came out, it was lovely to see the excitement around it, I almost more than once was going to say something like let’s manage expectations because these aren’t front and center in the two-parter.
I mean they’re still out there. There’s only one fatality and it wasn’t one of the female Transformers and I’m sure we’ll see them again. Those designs are too good to waste and I know people want to see more, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they come back, but it was never the intention to have them as the main focus in those two issues.
TM (Charles): Continuing on the theme with the female Transformers, we got introduced to Firestar, who is Nautica’s amica endura. One question I had and I talked a little bit about this on twitter and I think people didn’t agree with me so I’ll ask you directly (laughs). I got the sense that the amica endura relationship was supposed to be similar to a sibling relationship – like a brother/sister or sister/sister relationship, as compared to the conjunx endura which is more like a spouse or partner relationship. In the comic both relationships have been called ‘best friends’ at one time or another, but in one issue Nightbeat mentions that it’s a form of ‘elective kinship’ so that’s where I got the sense that it’s more of a familial relationship.
JR: Oh yeah, OK. The blurring of the lines in terms of best friends – the conjunx endura was presented as being analogous to best friends while we were building up to the Rewind and Chromedome relationship reveal, if you like, although it wasn’t so much that – the point where it was established that they were in a relationship analogous to husband and wife. Or marriage rather than husband and wife. Two–
TM (Charles): Partners, spouses?
JR: Partners, yeah. All very loaded terms aren’t they. So it was other characters – Prowl in #1 even or somebody – that warmed the readers up to that by using the best friend comparison. But that really isn’t what conjunx endura is about. Those aren’t best friends; those are two people in a marriage.
Amica endura – I can see with Nightbeat’s comment I can see where you’re coming up with the sibling thing. But with siblings – and it’s always dangerous to draw too precise an analogy between Cybertronian cultural features or norms and human ones, which I know I say that as someone that does anthropomorphize a lot – but with the sibling thing it’s that you can’t choose who your brother or your sister is and so that’s often what makes for awkward relationships when you don’t always get on with your brother or your sister, but you’re family so you’ve got to stick together. That shouldn’t be the case with amica endura and it was unique to Nautica’s society that there were circumstances where you could sort of be almost forced to take on a best friend, if you were without a best friend – as you know because it was in the issue – it was frowned upon, it was a source of embarrassment. So in those circumstances you sort of make a panicked choice and you may end up with somebody that isn’t a good match for you. But in its true sense, in it’s most positive sense, it’s a proper best friend.
TM (Charles): OK, OK.
TM (Darryl): Is that correction acceptable to you?
TM (Charles): I have to accept it – he writes the comic! (laughs)
JR: (laughs) ‘Oh, James, you’ve diminished that concept to me’.
TM (Charles): I guess that also leads to – These relationships have been a new concept that you’ve introduced in MTMTE, but of course when you’ve got a large cast of characters, the question is, why aren’t there more of these relationships between different characters? Or maybe that’s something that you might build up on in future issues, that maybe there are other characters that are forming relationships. We actually see that in Windblade. There are a couple of characters who are starting to form those relationships so I was curious if you had any plans or thoughts about that.
JR: I’m glad it’s taken route as a concept and that we’re seeing examples of it in other titles, that’s good. There are a couple of explanations. One is that a huge percentage of that race is dead, so you could have a race of widows and widowers. Another explanation is actually it is rare to find a conjunx endura. Chromedome’s an exception to that perhaps. And we’ve looked at that, we’ve said that he’s one of those people that really does sort of fall into these things, more than most. So it could just be a rare occurrence to be married. And the third explanation is actually there are lots of other conjunx endurae, but we just don’t… how would you know? Unless they’re main characters. There are 200+ members of the Lost Light we’ve not seen before. There could be a mixture of various combinations of conjunx endurae there. So it could be all that. There may be more conjunx endura relationships in the spotlight in MTMTE as we go forward. It’s just how you frame it, how you present it. I was almost going to say it would need to further the plot, but it wouldn’t – it’d be quite the opposite, it’d be one of those things.
TM (Charles): We did have Brainstorm who had an unrequited… Well, it never became a relationship.
JR: That’s right. I’m torn between wanting to make it so natural that it’s unremarkable and wanting to normalize it by actually having more recognized conjunx endurae relationships. I’m going to have to think about that.
TM (Charles): Alright. We did leave a lot of plot threads at the end of Season 1 with the whole Remain in Light storyline. Do you see some of those coming back as we go towards the end of Season 2?
JR: Yeah, we’ve already nodded towards one of those things already, with Thunderclash’s etchings. So we’ve seen the return of the symbol that Skids saw in the portal. There is going to be a ramping up of that as we reach the season finale. It’s a bit like the X-Files used to be really in the sense that you’d have a lot of standalones. There’d be a sort of mid-season myth arc heavy episode or story and then inevitably at the end of the season there’d be something which took things forward a step. So, yeah, there’s something big that’s just around the corner. And I’m tempted to take this conversation down the road which talks about the progress they’re making on their quest or not.
TM (Charles): We’ve achieved something!
JR: Exactly, yeah! It’s always going to be a series which is about the things they get up to along the way. Because there are certain quests where structurally you need to find things out in order to achieve it and with the Knights of Cybertron they’ve got a map, you know? The Knights are there, it’s just taking us time to get there and so in some respects it creates less scope for more episodic quest based stories, where OK, today, unless we can do that, we’re not going to get any further on our quest. It doesn’t really have room for that. But clearly there is an arc and there are things twisting and turning in the background, but expect the focus principally to be about them having misadventures along the way.
TM (Yoshi): Is there a draft or a table napkin or something written, because that’s like the dessert before dinner. The Knights of Cybertron is the dessert – the dinner is all these mini [adventures]. So being a person who wants to taste the dessert first, is there something that exists on that meeting between the Knights? It may or may not see the light of day, but is there something that exists?
JR: Yeah, it’s all mapped out. So I know what happens in the last issue, I know what needs to happen in terms of the myth arc before we get there, I know the Season 2 finale, the Season 3 finale and, what could be the last, Season 4. And if Season 4 doesn’t happen then bring it all on to, I guess issue #75 will be the Season 3 climax. But yeah so rest assured it’s not a Lost type situation or indeed an X-Files type situation where we sort of suddenly realized halfway through Season 3 ‘we better work out where this is going.’ So I do know where it’s going and I’m parceling out the information that people need. The dessert’s been made – it’s just chilled.
TM (Charles): I guess, I wanted to ask you about the start of the whole MTMTE/Robots In Disguise [RID, now ex-RID] era. We started with the end of Chaos where we’d been told, though it hasn’t been show in the comic proper, that Vector Sigma sent out this signal that told all the Transformers to come home. But we’re seeing as the Lost Light goes through its adventures that lots of Cybertronians just ignored it or didn’t put much mind into that. But we don’t really hear anybody really commenting on that. So like, for example with the DJD episode, we had a whole ship full of Deathsaurus’s Decepticons and the DJD themselves of course. I’m wondering if there’s going to be any kind of mention of what this signal was and how people reacted to it who didn’t decide to go back to Cybertron?
JR: Yeah, the closest we’ve come is in the Scavengers two-parter where Krok explained to Fulcrum who was unconscious when that happened that the signal, which basically said ‘come home’. The implication is it’s resistible. You’re not compelled to stop what you’re doing and run back and therefore, by and large, the people who have heeded it are those that actually want to go home. And those tend to be neutrals or Autobots and it tends to be the Decepticons [that don’t want to], for reasons that we will get to. I mean there’s the Scavengers two-parter which is just 100% Decepticon world building really, that doesn’t explicitly address that, but it’ll certainly give you an insight into the motivations of various scattered Decepticon cohorts. It’s a good question. I think the bottom line is it was basically a message which said ‘hey, if you want to come back, you should come back; it’s fine, things are fixed’, but like I say it wasn’t like Pied Piper or anything, they weren’t drawn inexorably towards Cybertron again.
TM (Charles): Did the colonies also receive that signal?
JR: I guess not. I mean, this is the thing isn’t it. There’s the in-universe explanation and then there’s the real world explanation. People who are more continuity focused than I am can probably create a very interesting explanation for why the signal was scrambled or never reached them or maybe it it did, but… Maybe it’s about to be explained in the Windblade ongoing or somewhere or in Till All Are One!
TM (Darryl): The question that I’ve got over that issue with the DJD and the Deathsaurus ship was there’s a chance that kind of popped into my head, that the Lost Light could come across an entirely ransacked planet and taken over by the Decepticons and, similar to the DJD at the time, they would have no idea that anything had happened. But they had conquered this planet. And for you as a writer it would give you a chance to bring back a lot of characters. I was thinking of, what’s his nuts, from the G1 issues–
JR: Whatshisnuts, yes, the special team member.
All: (laughing)
TM (Darryl): Whatshisnutsatron.
TM (Charles): I need a little bit more description to give you a name (laughing).
TM (Darryl): He was running Cybertron for Megatron in G1.
TM (Charles): Oh, oh Straxus!
TM (Darryl): Yeah, Straxus! You could bring Straxus back because he would be a really good leader character.
JR: He was on the Ark wasn’t he?
TM (Charles): Yeah, he was on the Ark-1.
JR: But yeah, I see that. Actually it’s funny you said that, it’s amazing how many G1 characters have been accounted for now. But I hear what you’re saying, actually, and that thought had already occurred to me. So yeah, we’ll see. There may be things around the corner which play on that.
TM (Darryl): Did I get ahead of the writer?
JR: That’s why I answered very quickly to say, yes, I’d already thought of that (laughs). But yeah, there’s every possibility that that’s the case.
TM (Darryl): That one issue got me thinking about how much other really crazy stuff could be out there. That the Decepticons as an organization were massive. And, sure, Megatron had this change of heart and he’s trying to do different things, but his organization is still running and the word has not spread as the DJD found out.
JR: Well, it’s reached different people at different times certainly. Deathsaurus knew about it by that point. But the Scavengers two-parter is really about if you’re a Decepticon, what do you do when it all stops? That’s what drives the two-parter. I said on twitter a while ago I had real fun writing those two issues. I really like the characters and you’re going to see more of them in Series [Season] 3, definitely. And it was just really refreshing to explore, for them. If your whole life has been – it’s like conscription in a sense or it’s like any heavily militarized, organized situation; your life, your days are mapped out for you. You’ve got your energon rations or you’ve got your money; you don’t have to think much. And you’ll see in the Scavengers story what happens when that discipline disappears and it’s not pretty. There are going to be little offshoots, little Decepticon communities that decide that actually there were elements of that that we needed and we’re going to strive to retain, notwithstanding Megatron’s order to stand down.
I think it’s great that we managed to… Death of Optimus Prime was December 2011 and we’re talking about the [MTMTE and ex-RID] issue #50’s which is going to be spring 2016 and I know if you squint the conflicts are still there, but fundamentally the war is still over. And I imagine that lots of people when we went in that direction, that thought in comic book world this is typically going to be a six issue thing, maybe we’ll stretch it out for a year, and then the status quo will kick back in. But, no. More power to both Hasbro and IDW for letting the creative teams stick with it and develop it further.
TM (Charles): Yeah, and it looks like with Megatron, I think there’s still a question as to whether or not he’s completely had a change of heart.
JR: Yes, absolutely.
TM (Charles): You’ve dropped little crumbs that make the reader question if Megatron is really sincere or if he’s biding his time. Or if Ravage is working on him and maybe trying to convince him that no, the course you’ve chosen is not the correct one, come back to the dark side!
JR: Yeah, Megatron spends, as you will have seen, a lot of his time deep in thought; he’s very contemplative. And things are rarely as straightforward as we’d like them to be, both in ourselves as readers trying to make sense of someone’s character arc–
TM (Yoshi): I’m sorry and show me up if I’m being ignorant; Megatron is also dessert for everybody.
JR: He’s Season’s 2 dessert, yeah.
TM (Yoshi): This is a guy who has had people trying to throw him out of power and all of the sudden the wussiest Autobot on the planet [Bumblebee during the Dark Cybertron event] saves his life and that changes him at the core. As somebody who doesn’t buy these books, but wants a reason to buy them, who wants to enjoy these stories, but doesn’t–
All: (laughing)
JR: Is this question going to end with, “Write something better!”? (laughs)
TM (Yoshi): No, literally, on the plane from Alaska I read Last Stand of the Wreckers [LSOTW]. Phenomenal writing. I enjoyed the story. For me the weak part of LSOTW is these are B-squad characters, I have no heart attachment to them. That’s the problem in my view.
So Megatron is the ice cream; he is wrestling with the fact that an Autobot who didn’t care for him saved his life. This changes him at the core, but the question is, is he actually an Autobot? Transformers is good versus evil. If you’ve got 3 or 4, 5 Autobots on the Lost Light who are brooding the fact that Megatron has such seniority and they just catch him in the hallway and beat the living sh*t out of him, as people who understand the difference of good versus evil, are the readers going to cry or be scared or be upset? Are they going to have feelings for this guy that we’re still not sure what side he’s on. And who’s going to pick him up and dust him off after that’s over?
JR: Well, if that were to happen and readers were to side with Megatron in that scenario, then I’ve done my job then really.
TM (Yoshi): Right!
JR: You’re supposed to sympathize with him, to a degree. You’re supposed to be skeptical about his motives, to a degree. The telling of story is as much about what you don’t say than what you do say. It’s about the selective withholding of information. And that’s where we are with Megatron’s still. Your observation is sound; can we trust him? We’re not there yet, one way or another. If as a reader you have doubts, then those are sound doubts, those are understandable doubts.
And then if we step outside of this, if we step into the real world for a bit, you’re talking about an iconic pop culture villain. For a lot of people Megatron with an Autobot badge on is just so dissonant, it’s just so wrongheaded.
TM (Charles): Blasphemy.
JR: Yeah, exactly! It’s blasphemous, it’s too big a leap. And when Season 2 was shaping up to be about this, that was my concern. I am very, very happy, if I can steer the majority of readers to a position where, ‘OK I get that Megatron is trying to turn over a new leaf, but I don’t know if I trust him’, that’s a win really. That is preferable to, ‘This really doesn’t stack up on any level’, that Megatron could be here. So if you go beyond LSOTW and you read MTMTE and [ex-]RID then we’ll talk again if you get to the point when you’re in Season 2.
TM (Yoshi): Fair enough.
TM (Charles): Actually, Yoshi, that scene that you described already happened in issue #28. It wasn’t five guys, it was one guy that jumped Megatron in the hallway. It was Whirl who’s kind of a crazy Autobot and actually the Autobot that’s responsible for making Megatron a Decepticon. He was goading Megatron to attack him in order to show the rest of the crew that he’s still evil.
TM (Yoshi): Right! It just feels like there are a bunch of little desserts to be had and they are far off. We’re stoked to see what happens when these things happen–
JR: The only way you’re going to get a dessert in this context with Megatron is if he shows his true colors and becomes a bad guy again. That might happen. But if it doesn’t happen, what’s the equivalent dessert? I guess he’ll have to do something, he’ll have to act in such a way that makes me think, OK, this guy’s on the level now. He really has changed.
TM (Charles): So, I’m going to speculate that we’re going to have an upcoming confrontation between Tarn – Megatron’s biggest, most devoted disciple or most hardcore disciple – and with issue #39 where he’s basically turned on Megatron and declared Megatron the ultimate apostate and is now gunning for Megatron. So we have Megatron the original Decepticon confronting Tarn, the original convert who is now–
JR: –The de facto leader of the space based Decepticons. A lot of them anyway.
TM (Charles): So that confrontation I think is coming. Maybe that’s the dessert you’re looking for.
TM (Yoshi): I love the writing process and I can take this a long ways because I’m curious as to how you would educate me into why my thinking is retarded. But I’ll stop derailing. I shouldn’t say retarded, I should say smegged up.
TM (Darryl): We can talk about the DJD a little bit, as well. The issue that focused on them gave an entirely new aspect to their characters. Some loved it, some didn’t. Myself was the latter in the fact that I had expected the DJD to be bad guys, always and forever.
JR: Ok, but tell me then how is that going to play out over 20 pages or 22 pages back then. Because this was the issue for me. The banality of evil really. OK, they’re as badass as they seem. So we’ve got 20 pages of them being awful – both awful to each other and… You’re looking behind the scenes when they’re not on duty, they’re not projecting this image that they’ve got. Because don’t forget, so much of the DJD, the myth of the DJD, is reputational isn’t it? They create a terror around themselves, they trade on that. They perpetrate the most deliberately exaggerated crimes in order to foment this myth that they are just the worst thing that you can encounter. So they rule by fear. How are they going to act, given that they’re a team, when they’re among each other? When they’re not on the stage, in a way which preserves that extreme evil. I just didn’t think that they were going to do that.
I’m not trying to dissuade you from what you thought – what you think is what you think – but from my perspective, they were very one dimensional. Deliberately until to that point we’d only ever seen them though the eyes of others really or we’d seen them when they’re performing. So we knew of them through reputation, we were encouraged to infer how awful they were through the fear that they inspired in others and when we saw them kill somebody, it was performance. So I thought if we’re going to make them more than just one-dimensional bogey men, we need to get under their skin and issue #39 was the result. I hope that the threat that they pose isn’t diminished and some people feel it is because they seem more human. But they’re just as dangerous, in that their physicality and their threat level is the same.
But what you’ve seen in issue #39 is that, much like elements of World War II, there is administration behind it; Tarn is exceptionally officious. Again I suppose it’s the banality of evil in different ways, it’s sort of saying that beyond the theatrics they’ve got a job to do. They’ve always been very professional in how they go about killing people one by one. So in order to imbue that sort of professionalism and keep the show running, Tarn has had to become almost managerial in how he approaches things. So you get the appraisals, you get the performance targets and things. And, in addition to what I’ve said I like the contrast between his sort of exaggerated villainy when he’s killing somebody and the behind the scenes where it’s paper work and it’s health and safety and stuff. So that was the riff which powered a lot of that story.
The Nickel thing – you haven’t mentioned Nickel, but I’m sure she was in your thoughts as well – that was that I liked the idea of there being someone that cared for them and that someone wasn’t afraid of them. And she hasn’t had the benefit or the disbenefit of the DJD terror story. She was picked up by them, saved by them in some respects. Yes, a bit like Tailgate in a sense, she’s been given an exceptionally biased account of the Autobot-Deception war. She’s bought into that, definitely, and maybe her character is such that she’s found it easy to buy into that, but the point is that she’s been taken in by them. She’s got a unique place among the team; she can talk – she can boss them around, she can give as good as she gets. And again it was about introducing an unexpected dynamic which allowed me to show different reactions and showed how they played off each other and explore their characters like that.
So that was my thinking in going there with issue #39.
TM (Yoshi): When you sit down to write issue #39, how do you make the decision from [a] you can write a book that’s scary, keeping it one-dimensional and then when everybody flips to the last page they’re like ‘damn!’, to [b] these characters need to have a background? How and why do you make that decision?
JR: The DJD have got places still to go. They’re not minor characters and so I guess I thought there was a need to invest in them in terms of giving them some more motivation, to make them individualistic, actually. And that’s often a problem I think; you need something that sets them apart other than what they look like, you know?
TM (Yoshi): Why?
JR: Because if everyone I wrote about was fundamentally the same character, but differentiated purely by their design, then we wouldn’t have got past issue #6. There’d be no dessert because you’d have no hunger for it.
TM (Yoshi): But you’re talking about one elite squadron that… Have you seen Firefly?
JR: I’ve seen the first episode actually of Firefly, yeah.
TM (Yoshi): There are 13 episodes and a movie.
JR: Oh, I’ve seen Serenity! So TWO things!
All: (laughing)
TM (Yoshi): OK, so it’s like in X-Files where they have a villain of the week more or less, but the Reavers are underlined through everything. I mean just their name on the show strikes fear in the viewer. Would the writers of that show be upset that they haven’t given–
TM (Darryl): They only had 13 episodes.
JR: It depends what function you want these characters to perform. I think as well the faceless, relentless, super powerful adversaries work best on a large scale. If it is an army, I think that works. We’re talking about five characters that exist as a unit. As far as I know the Reavers are a multitude aren’t they? If it was analogous to the Firefly… what’s the name of the ship? It’s a firefly class ship.
TM (Yoshi): Serenity.
JR: Oh, OK. (laughs)
TM (Charles): (laughing)
JR: So that movie really went in my head didn’t it? Really soaked in. So if there was another Serenity type ship with the five Reavers in, I would expect to get some insight into what motivates them. Like I say, [the DJD] have got their own arc and by the end of issue #39 they’ve formed an alliance with Deathsaurus and his team and collectively they’ve declared war on Megatron. So it’s going places with that particular plot.
TM (Charles): I guess it depends on what you want out of your villain. If the villain is there to motivate your protagonist then having just the unstoppable villain that you don’t see any insight into their character, they’re just a force to be reckoned with, that’s one way to go. But if you want to explore they villain’s motivation and personality then–
TM (Yoshi): Sure, and part of this is your guys’ fault.
TM (Charles): (laughs)
TM (Yoshi): It is! Because as this issue was coming out you were like ‘the DJD are f**king badass man, I can’t wait to review this!’ You guys set the bar really high and I didn’t get over the bar. And the writer of Hush– Joseph [Jeph] Loeb, he came in to write Batman. As I understand it he hadn’t written any previous Batman stories, but he came in and he just figured, OK, what does the reader want to read? The reader wants to read Batman fighting everybody including Superman. So he wrote the Hush miniseries. Phenomenal. It’s what it is – it’s Batman fighting everybody, because he hadn’t been fighting anybody for a long time.
TM (Darryl): Spoilers.
TM (Yoshi): That’s an old book!
TM (Charles): (laughing)
TM (Darryl): I was trying to collect it, but OK.
JR: All I’ve heard so far is that Batman fights people so I think you’re safe on that one.
TM (Yoshi): Exactly. It’s not for anybody to say, but as a writer he had his own approach on how to address a character.
JR: OK, two things there. Firstly, you’ve given me an example of a good writer who gave the fans what he thought they wanted, and earlier on that was presented to me in a pejorative sense. So where’s the answer? I don’t know. The second thing is, there were a lot of people that felt, and maybe still feel, that the DJD were too powerful. There was criticism because they were these uber badass characters and they were unrealistic and so on and so forth. So my point is only that it is impossible to deliver to every facet of the readership what they want. Now maybe the majority are unhappy that the DJD were presented as they were in #39 – I don’t know. But what fascinates me is, define badass. Why are they less badass? Were they defeated in #39? They were presented as being dependent on nucleon. They’re no less a threat than they were. So what diminished them?
TM (Yoshi): By giving them deeper personalities than they had, you have removed the mystery of who they are.
JR: So is presenting a villain as badass then dependent on them being unknowable?
TM (Yoshi): No. I feel, in this scenario – where I was presented the DJD are f**king badass and every time they get in it’s like, oh god, we got to turn the page – I don’t see anything wrong with that, because you have a cavalcade of other villains that don’t have to be one-dimensional at all. You’ve got an entire Decepticon catalogue that doesn’t have to be one-dimensional. But here was an elite fighting squad that comes in annihilates and leaves. Just the thought of them strikes fear– Voldemort! You know what I mean?
JR: Yeah. That’s still the case. For every Autobot and for every Decepticon out there, they are still terrifying. We’ve seen early on in season 2 they annihilated the entire Lost Light [ed – the alternative LL, see Slaughterhouse] and that’s their threat level. That threat level hasn’t changed. What you got out of #39 was a look behind the scenes, an insight into why they do what they do. I get the argument that by granting access to their inner thoughts or their characters or by adding a dimension to their characters it’s taken the edge off their almost existential threat, this relentlessly implacable death wave. So, like I said, I can’t argue against that. If that’s the net result, that’s a shame.
TM (Darryl): I still like them.
All: (laughing)
JR: You’re not supposed to like them! (laughs)
TM (Darryl): I still like the characters and the only thing that caught me off guard was the amount of comedy that was written into the issue. And I think we made mention on the podcast that it was like an episode of The Office. And it was just not what I was expecting from the DJD. Maybe, yes, elite and organized and like a military thing was all good–
JR: You’re talking about a comedic issue where the main character attempts suicide, you know?
All: (laughing)
JR: It’s not froth. I’m not surprised to hear you say that because it’s been said more than once, but I mean, I think if you looked at the issue, you’re really talking about Nickel. Outside of that you’ve got a character at the beginning who’s tortured to death for their religious beliefs, you’ve got a character, in Tarn, who is so devastated by the betrayal of his mentor that he tries to kill himself through an overdose, and then you’ve got at the end a fight and an alliance. In amongst that, you’ve got the introduction of a new character, who, not being the frontline kill crazy DJD, treats the others in a less respectful way. It’s certainly not as comedic as you get on the Lost Light – they’re not killers. But I would say if you break the issue down, the so-called comedy is confined to her interactions with the others.
TM (Darryl): You’re probably right. As the writer.
All: (laughing)
JR: I can’t play that card! It’s not my right. Once the issue is out there it’s yours. But that’s my response anyway.
TM (Charles): Well, I have to say, maybe I’m the odd man out here, but I actually really enjoyed that because as a reader I like to be surprised, where my expectations are kind of turned on their head. I got that out of that issue and I work in a corporate environment so I’m quite familiar with balance score cards, so when that term came out of the book as I was like, oh, OK!
JR: Well that was the point as well, I mean what’s the most incongruous thing you can have behind the scenes? And it’s to find that they’re just preoccupied with the minutiae of officedom.
TM (Charles): Of course the real criticism is how are there two Blips? There is this Blip here and there’s one back in issue #12 I think.
JR: If you’re being chased by the DJD, you’re going to try and disguise yourself – is my explanation for today. (laughs)
TM (Charles): One thing also about Nickel, I guess we can say she’s probably suffered a pretty traumatic event–
JR: Oh, yes, that’s another comedy moment. You’ve got a holocaust survivor or a genocide survivor that they pick up, that’s so traumatized she’ll fall in with you. It’s just gag after gag that issue!
TM (Charles): (laughing) So she survived the annihilation of her world essentially. And she’s picked up by these Decepticons and indoctrinated in a sense. I mean, you can be indoctrinated but also they don’t lie to her about what they do. She says it herself, you’re going around torturing people to death. And I just wonder how– even in the face of say, OK my civilization has been annihilated by evil organics and the DJD has rescued me and they tell me, well, it’s not just the organics, basically everybody who doesn’t conform to our cause is a threat to us and in order to deal with that we must go and torture everybody to death. I’m curious to see how Nickel’s psyche accepted that and has become a part of that team.
JR: You’ve given a good explanation, I don’t know if I can add much. It comes down to belief in the cause. As in real life, if the ends justify the means in your mind then you’ll go along with the means. That’s where we are with Nickel. But yeah, the extent to which she’s doing that because of what’s she’s experienced, we’ve got more things to explore.
TM (Charles): I guess one other thing, when we’re building this whole universe where Cybertron has been cut off from these colonies that have been however far away from that planet for eons. But it seems that at least some information has been leaking from the edges in and outward because we did have a mention when Rung acquired the copy of Megatron’s Manifesto [Towards Peace] from Nautica. So Nautica found this out on another world somewhere so it seems like information is spreading, but I guess all the Autobots and Decepticons were so wrapped up in their war they never noticed that these other worlds and other Cybertronians existed, but they at least are peripherally getting this knowledge.
JR: Yeah, it’s seeping out at different speeds and different rates. And, again, not to segue too much into real life versus in-universe stuff, but the universe is being built outwards, narratively, as well, so you have to retroactively sort of, fill in some blanks and add some details. In-universe then, yeah, the principle you’ve outlined is sound. It’s a civil war on a galactic scale. God knows how many planets have been subjugated and plated and stuff, so the Galactic Council may have been formed in response to the Ammonites’ war, but we’ve established that the Transformers’ race, the Cybertronians, are recognized as a Class 1 threat. There’s reputational damage rippling outwards from Cybertron.
TM (Charles): In issue #39 you also explore how Megatron’s ideology of freedom and equality turned into one of subjugating all organic races which I thought was interesting and also I think it mirrored a lot what happens with ideologies in the real world, where things get perverted.
JR: Absolutely, it’s very easy to happen. It’s this whole idea of your motivation for acquiring power in some cases starts off as being entirely moral and pure. But then when power is acquired the desire to hold on to it and consolidate it increases, as you say, in the real world. And Megatron is no different really. He’d essentially won, as we said in issue #39. There was still some resistance, but the planet had essentially fallen to him. The Functionists were gone. And then he looked outwards. And sometimes, you need to invent a threat in order to justify the retention of the power structures which support you in power. And there is a lot of that in what Megatron did.
TM (Charles): Maybe this is touching on future stories, but we’ve seen the Functionist society and then the post-Functionist society and we’ve seen a little bit of the transition in Megatron Origin and later he overthrows the Senate, he kills all the Senators. We don’t really see what happens to the actual Functionist Council. Do you plan to explore that a little bit?
JR: There are vague plans. When I wrote Elegant Chaos, there were a lot of stuff which I took out for space around the fate of the Functionists and also Nominus Prime and Sentinel Prime and all that stuff and Zeta Prime in particular. I wouldn’t be surprised if we go back there. I don’t know what the pretext will be, but yeah, there is probably going to be another story.
TM (Charles): We’ve gone on for a little while, so maybe we’ll wrap it up a little. I know you’re not on this book, but recently at SDCC [San Diego Comic Con] they announced the Sins of the Wreckers miniseries written by Nick Roche. And of course you co-wrote LSOTW with him and people have been clamoring for picking up some of those plot threads so looks like they will. So I’m wondering, do you have any involvement with him, is he bouncing ideas off of you or is it all completely you’re going to be surprised with everyone else?
JR: He’s not bouncing ideas off me. I know what happens in it because we talk, but at the same time I’m going to be as close to an old school Transformers fan as is possible to be and I’m really excited about it. It will not disappoint. It’s going to be huge.
TM (Charles): OK! And does it have repercussions on any of the running MTMTE story lines?
JR: To reuse what I’ve said earlier, there are ripples, things ripple outwards. Maybe not on MTMTE at first, maybe, you know… It’s an important book and you’ll know the characters in it – they’re big characters. And Prowl I think is involved in it. It’ll be impossible for those events to happen without there being repercussions. I can’t say anymore, because it’s not mine!
TM (Charles): (laughs) Yeah, we’ve already asked Nick for an interview coming up, so that’s in the works.
TM (Darryl): We have been hearing a lot of news and there were press releases throughout a couple of months ago regarding the [Transformers] live action movies Writers Room that they were building. Many famous movie writers, some comic writers, Robert Kirkman of name, and funnily enough no existing Transformers writers were on the list. Did they happen to contact you at all? Would you be surprised if they bounced any ideas off you through that? What do you know about that?
JR: Apparently they were going to pick up the phone to me and then issue #39 came out and they just said–
All: (laughing)
JR: –you’ve really ballsed that up. Uh, no. I don’t know. I wasn’t and as far as I know John [Barber] and Mairghread [Scott] and others weren’t approached, but maybe one day, we will see. They’ve got a pretty respectable team of writers they put together there, so.
TM (Charles): We talked about this on the show a few weeks ago, because when they released the announcement, the press release, they talked about the rich history of the Transformers – the toys, the cartoons, the movies. And conspicuously absent was the comics. And I’m sure they’re aware of the comics, but I’ve been banging the drum that, at least in my opinion, the best Transformers story telling is in the comics. Both the G1 stuff in the 80s and the modern stuff today. That’s where you get the best story telling.
JR: I think they’ve mined the comics more than any of the other mediums for a lot of ideas in the live action films so far. A lot of the characters and the concepts there. And not just the comics, but the TV series too, but the comics have punched above their weight in terms of contributing scenarios and characters. Sorry, I interrupted you–
TM (Charles): We’re interviewing you! (laughs)
JR: So what do you think…? (laughs) Yeah, I’m glad that they’re branching out, exploring other aspects of the universe and as I say, it’s a good bunch of writers they’ve got in the sort of brain trust. But, yeah, I’d love to have the opportunity to contribute.
TM (Charles): One other plot issue – you’ve kind of lost First Aid, I guess, to Combiner Wars. Is there any chance of him coming back? It seemed like his arc got cut short a little bit.
JR: No comment. You’ll see. I’m trying to be good this weekend actually and I’ve seen quite a few questions and having to say right, what’s on the page is what you’ve got to go on! First Aid is a central character to MTMTE, so yeah, that’s what I’ll say.
TM (Darryl): Can you comment at all on the sales numbers for MTMTE. We don’t monitor them as far as the paper copies that we can get access to on the internet, but from what we gathered it basically kind of stuck around 15,000 copies and didn’t really go anywhere. That obviously doesn’t take into consideration the digital downloads at all, which could be that doubled or whatnot. We talk about on the show that MTMTE is – it was even referenced in an article – that it’s the best book nobody’s reading. Which is very unfortunate. I’m part of a subreddit that’s basically trying to push it on everybody. And, it’s getting read, right?
JR: There are two parts to the answer really. I wish more people read it and in a strange way I like to think that the reason they don’t, is not because they’ve sampled it and rejected it, but because it’s freighted with a certain… It’s not just Transformers, there is a licensed properties thing, it seems to me, which for some people – and it shouldn’t be – is a barrier to something.
In terms of sales, 15,000 probably was the peak for the first issue, because it was a first issue. There was a big launch and there were like five covers to it. For physical copies, in North America at least, it’s been around the 10,000 mark for both books actually. There is very little [difference] between [ex-]RID and MTMTE. But we’re now, in January it’s going to be the beginning of the fourth year of the book. While the numbers are modest relative to the big two, it’s incredibly rare for a book to consistently be solid on those numbers, which says a lot about fan loyalty I guess and hopefully about the quality of the books. So we’re really happy that it’s holding really steady.
Digitally, it’s doing really well, MTMTE. In recent months we’ve hit new records in terms of Comixology sales. It reached #8 in the charts for issue #41, I think, and got to #9 last issue. It reached #3 in the UK Comixology charts. So that’s really encouraging as well. And the trades apparently do really well. I think it’s one of those books actually where, and maybe that takes us right back to the questions about the MTMTE-ness of it, but it seems to us that there’s a group of readers that maybe don’t pick up other Transformers books, that consume MTMTE digitally and will probably pick up the trades, but not the floppies. And they’re an important and distinct part of the readership. That seems to be partly what accounts for its chart placements on Comixology and the high trade sales.
TM (Charles): I’ve noticed that Chris Sims at Comics Alliance has taken the task of going through–
JR: He’s going through very fast! I’m very impressed by that. I mean, he’s up to Dark Cybertron now.
TM (Charles): Yeah. So I think that’s a really positive encouragement. He even starts every article ‘I was never into Transformers, I’ve never liked Transformers, I took advantage of the Humble Bundle now we’re going to see if reading these comics can turn me from someone who didn’t know anything to someone who uses energon in every conversation.’
JR: Yes (laughs)
TM (Charles): And now in the latest articles he says ‘And Primus help me, it’s working’ (laughs). So I think there’s a chance of converting people and his articles have been cheerleading the book.
JR: Yeah and I’m really pleased he’s doing that. There are some high profile cheerleaders for the books. I like to think it just needs people to give it a chance – the same for [ex-]RID – and sort of put your preconceptions aside. The way comics are distributed digitally these days and the way such things are consumed, you get single panels being put out there and it’s nice when you see a MTMTE panel which tends to encapsulate what the series is about. It’s usually a joke or something a bit off beam. And it gets passed around, it gets sent out, and that tends to bring people in to give it a go.
But yeah, I suppose I’m just really pleased that we’re coming up to issue #50 now and it’s both MTMTE and ex-RID are now the second longest running Transformers books of all time so just need to get past issue #100. You know, Simon cheated a bit.
TM (Charles): (laughing)
JR: He put it down and then he came back to it after about 20 years. So that’s added 20 to the total to beat. Thanks Simon. But it’ll be nice to get there.
TM (Charles): Well, parents are always happy when their children surpass them, so I’m sure Simon will be happy if you guys were to pass that milestone.
JR: Thanks, Dad.
TM (Charles): Alright, thanks so much for joining us. Actually, in the order of our episodes we skipped over Episode 113 so this interview is filling in that hole of Episode 113 in honor of your favorite number there.
JR: Yes, how fitting. 332 is the other big number for me so OK, I’ll be back here in five years time.
TM (Charles): If the podcast makes it to 332 we will definitely have you on for that episode. Thank you so much for joining us–
JR: Thank you guys.
TM (Charles): –and taking the time out of your busy TFcon weekend.
JR: –my busy alcohol consumption. Thanks!
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