IDW Transformers vs G.I. Joe - Tom Scioli's January Notes

jgilkinson wrote:So snake eyes talks and doesnt wear a mask...

Seibertron wrote:Hey everyone ... these will help

Seibertron wrote:Hey everyone ... these will help

Sabrblade wrote:Guys, this is not supposed to look like a 1980s comics style.

It's supposed to look like a 1960s comics style drawn by Jack "The King" Kirby.

Burn wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:Guys, this is not supposed to look like a 1980s comics style.

It's supposed to look like a 1960s comics style drawn by Jack "The King" Kirby.

And this is suppose to make us happy? Annoy us even more? Failing to see your point here.

Sabrblade wrote:Guys, this is not supposed to look like a 1980s comics style.

It's supposed to look like a 1960s comics style drawn by Jack "The King" Kirby.

Dead Metal wrote:This is even more insulting than Rob Liefeld's Jack Kirby "tribute".

Burn wrote:

Dead Metal wrote:This is even more insulting than Rob Liefeld's Jack Kirby "tribute".

You shut your mouth! How dare you criticise the great Liefeld!

Burn wrote:I'd love to see his take on TF's.

Dead Metal wrote:

Burn wrote:I'd love to see his take on TF's.

They would look way better than this piece of crap.

Va'al wrote:

Dead Metal wrote:

Burn wrote:I'd love to see his take on TF's.

They would look way better than this piece of crap.

Dead Metal wrote:

Va'al wrote:

Dead Metal wrote:

Burn wrote:I'd love to see his take on TF's.

They would look way better than this piece of crap.

I never thought I would say this, but Liefeld is clearly the superior artist here.

FCBD: For those who might be new to your comic book, give a quick rundown. What can we expect to see in terms of story and art?

Tom Scioli (writer/artist/colorist/letterer): "It’s the first chapter of TRANSFORMERS VS. G.I. JOE. It tells the story of the first encounter between the G.I. JOE team and the TRANSFORMERS of CYBERTRON. It’s got the scale and action of a summer superhero blockbuster, but with the unlimited budget that only the comics medium can provide. There’s a space battle. There’s an assault on an underground COBRA base built on the ruins of the ancient city of Koh-Buru-Lah. There are cool science fiction ideas, like the Doomsday Seed. The story culminates in a massive aerial battle between planes, helicopters, jet packs, and giant killer machines from space. We also establish the relationships between the characters in a compelling, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes tragic manner. There are character origins, deaths and lasting consequences. It’s a story that readers will never forget."

John Barber (co-writer/hanger-on): "Yeah, Tom hit it right on the head. This is such a unique and different take on the characters—really honoring the past but pushing the comics aspect out there further than ever… there’s stuff you can literally only do in comics, and Tom’s pulled off a lot of storytelling bits that I’ve never seen before. But the story is really non-stop, relentless action. Funny, touching, thrilling… usually in the same panel."

FCBD: What has been your favorite part of book or character to tackle?

Tom: "I really enjoyed the research process. Having grown up in the eighties, I had a certain level of familiarity with the characters, but in preparation for this series I dived headfirst into it. I read piles of comics, watched hours of cartoons and movies. It was intoxicating. The character of SNAKE EYES is the breakout character of G.I. JOE, so I had a lot of fun writing for him. He’s fun to draw, too. In a way he’s the original template for the ’90s Image-style characters—all pouches, straps, guns, grenades, mystery and attitude. I like STARSCREAM, too. It took a lot of practice to figure out his visual representation. He’s the one from the original cartoon that had the most interesting story. He’s the second banana, living and plotting in MEGATRON’s shadow. How did this envious, jealous, scheming social climber get to be the right hand man to somebody he hates? The one character that really made an impression on me above all in the old G.I. JOE comics is DR. VENOM. He’s kind of an obscure character. He’s profoundly evil, genuinely frightening, but darkly funny. He’s the representation of the banality of evil. He’s very ordinary looking in the operatically-costumed world of G.I. JOE. He is a lot of fun to write."

John: "For me, already get to play in the G.I. JOE and TRANSFORMERS sandboxes every day, editing G.I. JOE and a couple TRANSFORMERS comics and writing TRANSFORMERS: ROBOTS IN DISGUISE. What’s been fun for me is coming at the characters from a totally different perspective… really coming at them from a unique point of view. I love this idea of approaching them in a grand, operatic tradition—the sense of scale is huge, and I the whole sense of story and of the construction of this world is so amazing and so wild, it’s a lot of fun to be a part of."

[...]

FCBD: Looking to the future of the book, is there anything you can tease about what's upcoming?

Tom: "We’re building toward a massive confrontation between the people of Earth and the people of CYBERTRON, a planet full of living, thinking, feeling, killer war-’bots."

John: "I can promise you this story doesn’t go the direction you think it’s going to go. There have been clashes between the TRANSFORMERS and G.I. JOE in comics before, but there has never been anything like TRANSFORMERS VS. G.I. JOE."

Transformers vs. G.I. Joe is a crossover that sells it self, but the downside of that is that it’s been done often enough that it can be difficult to get excited about the next version. Unless, of course, you tell me that it’s going to be co-written, drawn, and lettered by Tom Scioli, the man who wrote the line “Robot Dracula is an efficient torturer” and rendered all other comics obsolete. If you do that, you have my attention, and that’s exactly what they did when they announced that Scioli and John Barber were kicking off an ongoing series about the two teams, set to launch with #0 on Free Comic Book Day.

To find out more about how the project came together, I spoke to Scioli and Barber about how the project came together, Scioli’s massive pitch document, and how their life-long and relatively recent love of the comics influenced their storytelling. Believe it or not, I don’t think we talk about Destro at all.

ComicsAlliance: We’ve seen Transformers vs. G.I. Joe stories before, going all the way back to Marvel.

Tom Scioli: Right, once or twice.

CA: What made you each want to tackle the project in a new form, aside from just the idea that people love the Transformers and love G.I. Joe?

John Barber: At IDW, I think we wanted to do this for a long time, institutionally, just for that very reason — but we’d always sort of resisted it. Without anything interesting to do with it, there was no reason to do it. We have some G.I. Joe comics, we have the Transformers comics, I think they’re both pretty good… but if you’re going to combine them, you have to do something really different and really special. Knowing this year was going to be the 30th anniversary of Transformers and the 50th anniversary of the original G.I. Joe, we really wanted to do something with the two. We weren’t going to waste the opportunity, but if there wasn’t anything good to do, we didn’t want to do it. And then, enter Tom. [Laughs]

Tom Scioli: For me, I’m such a backseat driver with every movie I see. You almost can’t help it, once you get involved with writing, drawing or whatever. You start viewing the whole world that way. From day one of the Transformers movies, for me, it was like “okay, if I was doing the Transformers story, I’d do this, I’d do that,” and when John suggested doing a Transformers vs. G.I. Joe story, that was perfect. That’s exactly what Transformers kind of needs. The Transformers themselves were cool, but the humans never held up their end of the bargain, so having G.I. Joe be the humans, that’s perfect. They’re iconic, comics-y, sci-fi characters in their own right, so you finally have that missing ingredient.

[...]

CA: So how did you guys get together? Did you have to convince Tom that he should be drawing Transformers vs. G.I. Joe?

TS: It took no convincing at all. In fact, if I recall, John was vaguely apologetic about it, like “I don’t know if you’d like to do this or not, but…” and to me, of course, that sounds awesome. That’s right up my alley. Giant robots and quasi-superhero sci-fi army men. That’s perfect.

JB: The whole dirty secret of this is that Tom had emailed into IDW, and I was a big fan of his from Myth of 8-Opus and Godland. I was sitting there, and I don’t know how this train of thought got to me, but I was reading East of West, and looking at Nick Dragotta’s art, and thinking about how when he and Jonathan Hickman had done Fantastic Four, he was doing a little more of a Kirby thing. I’d emailed Tom that day about something else, and I thought, “you know what would be absolutely bananas? Doing this comic with Tom.”

TS: John had this elevator pitch of what he wanted this comic to be, and it sounded great. It was the sort of thing I could run with, and the ideas just kept coming. At that point, it was just sort of a “maybe.” Even though it wasn’t a thing yet, even though it was just a notion, I started thinking about things we could do. I’ve had that happen a couple of times, and I’d gotten to a point where I’d fight that impulse, but in recent years, I just let my imagination go where it’s going to go. I can do something with it. Even at that point, I was thinking “okay, if this ends up not happening, I can use some of this energy and some of these ideas somewhere else.” I’ve been working on a creator-owned sci-fi thing in the background, so if worse comes to worse, I can repurpose some of these ideas.

So I just kept going, and basically from the day John said it was something we could do, I’ve been working on it. So when it was finally something we were going to do, I had this huge thick stack of story that I dropped on John.

JB: You came in gangbusters, and it was all cool stuff. The floodgates opened, and I think it really helped that you were coming in as a fresh set of eyes.

TS: I think you’re right. To have this enthusiasm for the material. You’re a longtime fan and you’ve been working on it, and you still have an enthusiasm, but it’s probably not as white-hot as it was when you were a kid first discovering it. It’s nice to have a balance of someone who has the experience and knowledge of this stuff, and then someone whose head is currently exploding with how great it is.

CaptainMagic wrote:I have to admit, Scioli's enthusiasm could be contagious enough to make me give this series a shot. Plus, the first issue's free, so what the heck? I am really confused why he chose to draw this thing in a 60s style, though. Why not go for the 80s and double up on nostalgia for the right time period, rather than jumping back twenty years to a time many fans probably won't care about? Oh well, it looks bad in some place and cool in others, so I guess we'll call it art.