In December, we brought you news of the special Transformers: Unicron The Darkest Hour #0 IDW offering for May 5th’s Free Comic Book Day. Today, we are pleased to share an interview with creators John Barber and Alex Milne in which they discuss #0 and their individual experiences with comics. An excerpt:
When Unicron arrives, that means the end of a universe! Tell us what makes this story the biggest in the history of the Transformers?
John Barber: This is the end of the story we’ve been telling for over a decade. The IDW Transformers comics are the longest-lasting iteration Transformers characters ever—there’s more fiction in this universe than anywhere else in the history of the brand—and it all comes crashing down with Transformers: Unicron.
Alex Milne: I feel it’s the biggest story due to the stake being so high. It’s not just the Transformers and Cybertron that have to worry about Unicron, but the Earth and the other colony worlds as well. It really is something that affects this shared universe that IDW has created. Unicron is the destroyer of worlds, and not everyone will survive this encounter. Will out heroes even be able to stop him? I guess you’ll have to read to find out.
Check out the entire interview here, then join the discussion on the 2005 boards!
NominusDP
A man could dream…
kaijuguy19
If there's one thing I'm not too happy about the reboot becoming real it's that we're likely never going to see the concept of Primal leading Cybertron after getting the Matrix of Leadership happen at all so the idea of things going right at the beginning to the classic great war feels not only a giant step backward but also missing out a great potential to go into a different direction.
ProtectronPrime
One of the odd things about Transformers is how monolithic it's usually approached as opposed to how fragmented it could be. IDW touches on it a little with the colony worlds, as did the Unicron Trilogy stuff, but millions of years of conflict could be interesting if they really got into the fact that while there seem like a lot of them, there really aren't a ton of Transformers.
As a result, a series of long term tribal conflicts might be a fresher approach. The "Barbarian" Galvatron backdrop made it seem like an old Conan comic, for example. Till All Are One was very Cyberpunky, with street fights and a lot of high tech backdrops and investigations in crappy old bars.
It'd be cool to see someone take that to the extreme with different concepts, maybe do different anthology sets with different art styles, storytelling etc. across the different segments of Cybertonian life.
Grimlock528
I could take a Simon Furman/Don Figueroa comic and a James Roberts/Alex Milne comic.
None of which will happen of course.
Thelonicon
If we are getting a complete reboot, there is one thing I would love to see although I doubt it will happen. They should get rid of the "millions of years of war" concept.
I get that it is a longstanding tradition in the series since the beginning, but it is just an awkward and unwieldy choice that forces awkward things like information creep (even if Cybertronians forget things, we have characters who are literally archivists who should be able to set things straight.) The current books lampshade it a bit with things like centuries in the war with no shots fired and the relative difficulty to kill a Cybertronian but millions of years is a stupidly long time even for a robotic race who mostly still act like people. Since we know any reboot will eventually end up on Earth, just have the war start closer to the "present day" so we don't have to fudge timescales so much.
That said, I would love it if we could just get one book that maybe keeps the current continuity alive and focuses on the post-war character stories that so many of us love. Character driven stories are much more interesting to me than just "robot punches another robot" for 20 pages a month.
ProtectronPrime
I think I might be one of the people that agree with you. Not that I haven't enjoyed IDW in the past, but something about it lost it's sheen for me around when MTMTE became Lost Light and TAAO got cancelled.
I love character driven stories, but everything just started to get too bulky and unwieldy for me. Everything was everywhere, and I feel a lot of fun concepts that were brought out ended up fizzling rather than flashing. The Lost Light in particular started getting a little too metaphysical and while I like the idea of lovable losers getting put through insane situations, something about it just felt done to death for me when I finally gave up trying to figure out who did what with who and when and what WACKY THING caused the problem this week for the Lost Light, or what internal deep rooted personality issue is bothering one of Optimus's allies.
If the IDW-verse is ending/rebooting/whatevering, I'll agree that Unicron is a bit of a cop out. He's sort of the Monty Python foot of the Transformers universe, ready to squash everything with an unceremonious "Thpppt" sound. I'd have liked to see the subplots properly wrap up and a farewell with grace. However, it if means having to wait another 2-5 years while the current writers, loveable as they are, faff about and try to end it with an assassination plot during Onslaught and Blast Off's 21st wedding anniversary, then I'm happy to deal with the Monty Python foot.
GoLion
See that's one thing i'm not sure I want to see (the one thing I agree with my current crop of detractors and privatized profiles). I think a reset in that regard would be really boring. When I say I want a reset, I mean I want all the current crop of stories being told right now to stop. They've become too bogged down. A fresh start (hell, keep the same writers – I'd prefer new ones as well) would mean taking the stories/characters in an entirely new direction. Do something different and unique. I think a company wide reset is the best option, but I don't want an 'in-universe' reset. I think a more appropriate term would be that I want a reshuffling of the deck. The deck we have is good. It's a solid deck. I'm just tired of being dealt the same hand over and over and over….
And I know that's a hard pill to swallow for the people that are happy with things as they are; The problem is those people who are happy are an ever shrinking audience. A reshuffle is necessary at this point, and that's why they're doing it with Unicron.
SonicGX98
Nonono, it wouldn't be a reset. It'd still be in the current continuity, but we'd just go back to the war era.
GoLion
Why not? If there is a reset and the writers decide to start from square one I could see Galvatron making a return. Plus his death wasn't at all satisfying.
power3921
While I like the idea, it'd remove a lot of tension from stories, with the majority of characters being guaranteed to survive to appear later. There would't be much risk of anything bad happening
MistaTee
Depends on which war
Probe
If we go back to the war, we definitely aren't seeing Galvatron…
SonicGX98
Okay, so it definitely seems like IDW is wrapping up something with Unicron. I mean…Yes, they said that it'll wrap up nearly a decade's worth of story telling, but what if they're just saying that it'll be kind of like this phase's equivalent of Death of Optimus Prime? So maybe while the -ations and Costa series were the typical "Autobots VS Decepticons" story, and RiD/OP and MTMTE/LL along with WB/TAAO were about Cybertron in a post-war era, maybe they're just going for a soft reboot? We know that the War for Cybetron trilogy toyline is coming soon, so maybe we'll take a break from the main timeline and flashback to various stories throughout the war? This way we could see long dead characters like Scrapper, Ironfist, Mirage, Skids, Horribull, Galvatron, Kup, etc.
I'm totally not in denial of a hard reboot. Yep…totallllly not….