All Hail Megatron

[Andy Turnbull]

It's going to start taking hits soon enough, as creators start bypassing it entirely.

Andy

[charlesrocketboy]

May 8, 2009 15:49:55 GMT blueshift said:

Doesn't excuse the Transformers numbers though. It reeks of brand fatigue.

Sadly, it does seem that they should've reduced G1 and pushed a Movie ongoing/miniseries cycle. It should've been an All Hail Movie Megatron, with a "name" writer.

[Andy Turnbull]

To be honest I always thought they should have done that. Was blethering with G last night and we both thought that Movie and Animated should have been pushed with the iDW verse being part of a rotating set of Evolutions minis.

Andy

[Deleted]

It's not just IDW who are suffering though to be honest. Titan's figures have halves since they launched despite almost doubling in size, and adding more strips so is there just a general apathy towards Transformers as a comic art form right now from the general public?

[Andy Turnbull]

I think there are three things that hurt Titan.

1 - the launching of Animated as a separate comic, probably bled off readers, with any luck most of those should come back.
2 - the demise of Woolworths, that's a huge retail outlet presence gone. Difficult to weather that.
3 - WH Smith. I could go on at length about the general level of contempt I have for WH Smith and it's handling of comics over the years. Stuff not being stocked regularly or tucked out of the way. I really detest them.

Andy

[The Doctor]

A cursory glance at newsstands in the last few months will reveal that magazines are dying off left right and centre, partly as a result of the advertising market crashing as a result of the recession. Add to that the loss of Woolies and it's a grim time for UK magazines and newspapers in general.

I wonder if the frequency of Transformers comic hurts it. One issue every four weeks may be too slow for attention span of kiddies. I know I had a low tolerance of monthlies compared to weeklies and fortnightly titles until I was over 10. When kids can get Transformer cartoons daily, do they have the patience for 11 pages a month?

-Ralph

[charlesrocketboy]

It's odd, no new comic seems to go for weekly or fortnightly schedules with the brief exception of The DFC. Is it a cost thing? Because as you say, it certainly could affect sales if young, attention-lacking kiddywinks forget it exists.

[Andy Turnbull]

Yeah I imagine costs. Given that I'd say six weeks worth of issues would have to be printed prior to the book hitting the streets. You need deep pockets for that.

Andy

[The Doctor]

IIRC Panini's UK Spectacular Spider-Man comes out every 3 weeks.

-Ralph

[blueshift]

I couldn't imagine being a kid and having to wait a month for a new issue of a comic

[legios]

I'd agree that costs are an issue if you go with a fortnightly or weekly schedule. Specificially there is a long lead time where you are paying out expenses - paying writers and artists, printing, warehousing, distribution etc - before you start taking in any income to pay for these. That might be a bit of a hurdle for something to jump in terms of financial viability. Companies are less prepared to gamble an initial losses against possible future gains so that kind of scheduled probably makes them (and their accountants) more than a little bit antsy.

In terms of All Hail Megatron's performance, I would agree that IDW have found an absolutely rock-solid core audience. Namely the people who buy things that have Transformers on them whether or not they actually like the product. It isn't a mindset that I can easily understand - if I don't like what someone is doing with something I stop buying it, in order to encourage them to stop doing what I don't like. If I keep buying it then I would argue I am voting for them to continue along their current path, whatever my expressed opinions. (Short version - folk who don't like All Hail Megatron should stop buying it).

In the longer term we are likely to see more in the same vein from IDW. They have found a core audience that will stay with their product and are clearly slanting their future direction towards keeping them happy. I can't really blame them for doing that. Viewed from that restricted perspective it makes a kind of sense.

I do agree that they should have made more play of the movie take on Transformers though. That is going to be the version that the wider comics reading audience are going to recognise after all. It would have been in their interests to push that a bit more I believe.

(As to getting "name" creative teams though, that would be an uphill struggle. Transformers is, at best, perceived as a movie cash-in property, and at worst a kids toy-tie-in comic. Neither of these are going to be particularly attractive things to folk who are getting a bit of name recognition. If they are starting to get some traction and are working on other peoples characters they are going to want the ones that are seen as being the "iconics" in the comics world - Superman, Batman, Spiderman, etc)

Mind you, IDW are still getting numbers on Transformers that are superior to those achieved by recent comics incarnations of other US 80's robot franchises. Either the Voltron or Robotech comics would have sold their grandmothers for the numbers that AHM is getting. So I suppose IDW could be doing worse....

Karl

[charlesrocketboy]

Re frequency, they could always do what the Power Rangers tie-in mag did in the 90s and start monthly, then turn fortnightly when things seem secure.

[blueshift]

May 8, 2009 21:05:00 GMT legios said:

Mind you, IDW are still getting numbers on Transformers that are superior to those achieved by recent comics incarnations of other US 80's robot franchises. Either the Voltron or Robotech comics would have sold their grandmothers for the numbers that AHM is getting. So I suppose IDW could be doing worse....

But seriously, what the heck is Voltron or Robotech?

In brand recognition terms, Transformers is a far stronger brand. It never went away, it has consistently been on toy shelves and on tv, and had a recent huge movie based around it. It isn't like some of the other 80s properties where people might look at it and hum and harr because they can barely recollect it.

Because of that, IDW have to pay a hefty licensing fee. No idea what that was, but when they went bust, Dreamwave owed Hasbro $494,442.00 for 'TF Royalty'. No clue if that was a cut of the profits or the liscensing fee or a combination (seems a bit high for either to be honest) but you can imagine they'd had had to plonk down a hefty sum to get the license.

[Deleted]

Dreamwave owed that much? Pat and Roger Lee did pretty well to keep those porshes then.

[blueshift]

May 9, 2009 21:45:49 GMT @oneshallstand said:

Dreamwave owed that much? Pat and Roger Lee did pretty well to keep those porshes then.

Oh yes. They basically got out of the collapse of Dreamwave with the company going belly up and owing tons, with some financial fiddling that meant they got to keep all their nice stuff whilst not paying anyone else, then the company itself got resurrected as DreamEngine.

Pat Lee still gets work from DC and Marvel too, which is pretty horrid (the art and the concept!)

[The Doctor]

...and then Pat pulled exactly the same stunt at DreamEngine.

Some of his DC and Marvel work round about that time was ghosted by Alex Milne, who was not paid or credited for his work. (source: Lying in the Gutters column at CBR).

-Ralph

[The Doctor]

Back on topic:

One way to think about AHM is the differences between crafting Transformers comics for children and Transformers comics for adult fans. Would a child tolerate and continue to buy/have parents buy a story that takes a year of their life to tell? Or is this style of storytelling perfectly acceptable when it's clearly marketed and aimed at a pre-existing older fanbase who are perhaps ok with this style of pacing?

Discuss!

-Ralph

[charlesrocketboy]

May 10, 2009 8:57:54 GMT The Doctor said:

Some of his DC and Marvel work round about that time was ghosted by Alex Milne, who was not paid or credited for his work. (source: Lying in the Gutters column at CBR).

Quoth TF Wiki:

"This article is about Pat Lee, the superstar comic book artist. For the uncredited artist who actually draws all his stuff for negligible pay, see Alex Milne."

[legios]

May 8, 2009 22:01:33 GMT blueshift said:

But seriously, what the heck is Voltron or Robotech?

In brand recognition terms, Transformers is a far stronger brand.

True, I mentioned them solely as they were the closest comparable contemporaries - US Mecha shows that had had recent comic incarnations.

I'm not disputing that the brand recognition of Transformers, especially over this side of the pond, is significantly higher - which I would say is reflected in the much higher sales of the relevant comics.

But as Ralph says, to twitch the rudder and drift back on topic.... I suspect that the pacing of All Hail Megatron would not be viable in a kids comic - but I think that goes for comics more generally, when you are seven or eight a week is a long time let alone a month. So to wait four weeks to get a chunk of story very much runs the risk of the interest waning, especially if the story is paced rather languidly. I can really only speak from my own experience here but when I was younger the comics that worked for me were those that came out frequently (Marvel UK Transformers) or those that came out less frequently where either the seemed to be a great deal going on to catch my interest (Claremont/Byrne X-Men, Legion of Superheroes) or that presented me with a sense of a complete story (the DC pocketbooks that were printed over here, Brave and the Bold). Comics where not a lot happened at was four weeks between issues? Young Karl was not likely to be back for those.

I do think that the shift in the market away from "comics as a medium for the casual reader", to "comics for comics readers" has led to a change in the way stories are paced. There is an assumption that people who buy comics are aware of the "rules" and know that it is likely to take a year before they actually have a complete story in their hands (or are reading it in a trade in which case there are a whole different set of constants in play, and that is another story entirely). I think that shift, which goes along with a shift toward an expectation of a much older audience, which has led to the much more languid pacing of many modern comics.

Whether this slower pacing is acceptable is another question, and I think that is more of a matter of individual tastes. Over recent years I have become less tolerant of stories that are stretched over six months or a year simply because they can be, or because that is how many issues make up a trade paperback. If I'm told a story requires twelve issues then I tend to feel that it is going to have to be extremely complex and dense to require all that space - bearing in mind that Watchmen only needed ten issues.

I have been interested to reflect that both of my favourite IDW Transformers series have been four issues, rather than six, in length. Both Stormbringer and Revelations worked very well on a monthly basis because it felt that there was quite a lot going on in each issue. The plots were kept moving very pacily - something that I think is quite important in a fundamentally plot-driven franchise like Transformers. By contrast I did feel that Escalation and Devastation both felt like they were artificially drawn out. I actually think that by trimming some of the fight scenes a little bit they would have made rather nice tight four or five issue series and benefited from the plots having a bit more zip to them.

Hmmm. I've over-drifted a bit there. I think what I am trying to say is that it isn't just a trend in Transformers comics, it is a trend in US comics generally which I would agree is linked to a shift in the perception of the general age group that comics are intended for. I also think it is linked to the assumption that all stories have to fit into the template of eventually being collected as an 140-ish page trade paperback or multiples, resulting in stories being fixed at that length regardless of whether the story itself functions best at that length.

Karl

[blueshift]

I honestly believe comics need to move to a one-shot basis with loose overarcing stories, such as like with Planetary. It would make them so much easier to get into, and the market really needs new readers!

[Andy Turnbull]

I think that comics also need to start looking at a proper change in format. Now advertising revenue is obviously down across the board. But I'd seriously be asking why the larger companies don't make a better fist of anthology titles. They package them without the A list creators which kills them dead.

Can you imagine 100 page slabs of comics every month, where you have say from DC a book that has a ten page illustrated Frank Quitely story EVERY MONTH amidst other stuff Hang a few big guns on the book to get people in and then have people trying new stuff in there. The fanboys will pick stuff up because of the "name" attached and stick around for that and hopefully they'd be exposed to new stuff.

Andy

[The Doctor]

Spoilers in this link for AHM #14:
www.idwpublishing.com/catalog/issue/686

Hmmm, surely that story content should have been in AHM proper? There were 12 issues, after all.

-Ralph

[grahamthomson]

But Sunstreaker nobly sacrificed himself to destroy the bridge that the Swarm were using to get to the Autobots. And then the Swarm used another bridge that somehow appeared.

(Or so my understanding of events via the TFWiki goes.)

[Andy Turnbull]

Yes it should have Ralph, but it's been a bit of a cack-handed series from the start so this is no real surprise.

Andy

[Fortmax2020]

"Meanwhile, GALVATRON returns! Join CYCLONUS..."

Hang about. Shouldn't at least Cyclonus be dead as the Expansion fell through??

[Deleted]

McCarthy seems to be ignoring everything he and other people have written in the not-too-distant past hence the cack-handed story for AHM.

[blueshift]

Personally I don't mind Cyclonus coming back. He's a far more interesting character than most of the guys they normally focus on I dont' mind a little fudging here and there

[Deleted]

AHM is a fudge-packed series.

[legios]

I am quite surprised that they weren't able to get the Sunstreaker story element into the confines of what had been a twelve issue mini-series. You would think that the motivation of a character who was involved in a major story element in said series would be something that they would want to cover.

Karl

[grahamthomson]

Perhaps the death of the Dead Universe means that the undead are now not dead and free to wander around the Universe, all dead cool like.