Not a huge fan of Stone's artwork (it's very pretty, but perhaps too light in tone for the material, at least to me), although I can follow it no problem.

That's my issue with Ramondelli. Great for covers, but not for interiors. The storytelling isn't clear - he has this tendency to frame EVERYTHING in close-up / medium, so even when we're dealing with vast scenes, there's never a sense of scale because there's never more than a few shapes in the panel that have any definition. Compare a crowd scene in his work with any other TF book and it's noticeable. Physical placement also disappears when you show everything so close - it lacks context, and it's style over narrative clarity, which I don't think is appropriate for a fairly conventional TF book.

 

Railspike was also on the Lost Light. So hey, maybe JRX/Rail Racer? He had the most unified combined mode ever in my opinion.

 

When does that ever stop anything. It's comics!

Uh... wha? Comics have been part of the medium to sell toys since the eighties, probably even earlier. Read some Marvel comics from the 80's and look at the advertisements...

Lost Light characters probably won't get the combiner treatment.

Here is the thing, we already have Prowlstator, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Swindle already appropriated "combiner" technology and experimented on the Stunticons? There must be a reason they were chosen for this.

 

I'm not ready to cry foul on Hasbro mandateing the IDW universe.

Even the generations partnership in dark cybertron really only amounted to cameos and the metrotitans.

At very least hasbro is not micro manageing it, the writers just have toys at their discretion to make use of.
Kind of like how the those behind the Prime Beast hunters season had to get predacons and predaking in there but it was not as overt as the toy line fiction took them; But for the most part they just did what they wanted to tie up some season 2 story threads and dial up some character conflicts.

 

Well said; the Predacons didn't really feel that forced on S3 of Prime.

Hell, I notice nobody calls foul on Beast Wars for selling toys. I imagine half the reason we got Code of Hero was "we have a new Dinobot toy coming next year."

 

Honestly if they'd cared about TM2 Dinobot coming, I don't think they'd have killed the original in the first place.

If it ties into RID, it makes some sense. I mean if Prowlstator causes too much trouble for them, Galvatron and Soundwave would probably try to get their own combiner to deal with it.

 

Agreed. Hell, if it wasn't for Hasbro working with IDW, we probably wouldn't have gotten most of the Gen. Deluxes that we have so far in the last year.

 

Alright I'm definitely Iooking forward to this!

Well at the end of the day, Hasbro is still the owner of the brand..

 

As a fan of combining transformers (Gestalts) from the very beginning, i love the idea. I always wanted to see something dedicated to them whether it be in animation or comics. It is because of the "problems" with combining technology, that very few of them have appeared in IDW so far.

Devastator, Superion, Menasor, & Monstructor are the only ones I am aware of. Can't wait to see the rest.

 

Btw I'm just curious as I've not been up to date on IDW recent continuity but have Predaking make an appearance in IDW TF universe yet?  

 

It's not Hasbro dictating the stuff. It's the fact that IDW directly states that Hasbro doesn't that bothers me.

When someone in a panel says that which is obviously 100% B.S. I take offense to it. I know that's me but there it is. It's like false advertising.

 

Predacons, yes. Predaking, no. See below.

 

People seriously have taken this statement out of context:

They basically answered yes to the first part of the question this answer derived from. They admitted to receiving "guidance" (likely on characters to use), however, they (Hasbro) aren't responsible for the quality of the story. That's where IDW is telling the truth. If Hasbro says, "hey, can you try to work combiners as a theme for a few issues, and we want to target X-date", I don't see a problem with that. I also don't see a problem if Hasbro and IDW collab for specific events they want to bring to fans who collect figures, so long as the stories are strong.

Marvel and DC do this crap all the time with their own creative teams. Hell part of the main reason Steve Rogers didn't stay dead and came back and took the mantle back from my beloved Bucky Cap was because the first Captain America movie was coming out soon at the time.

Kieron Gillen is a great writer, but even he admitted that when he took over Iron Man he got dealt a sour hand of major Marvel icon constraints. With Iron Man riding an RDJ high with the movies and IM3 seeing an imminent release in theaters, he was forced to work a story using Extremis. Then he got asked to find a way to severely change Iron Man's status quo. I didn't like those stories as a result, even though I like that writer, but the truth was, they were his stories about something they asked him to write about.

Same with Hasbro. They can guide the direction with respect to hey include this or that character, but ultimately, the writer is either skilled enough to make it work, or not.

IDW didn't lie. They said the stories are purely the creative teams' responsibility and not top down. Hasbro is not telling them, here's the story outline and it needs to play out like this with so and so living or dying. They just say, hey for a future story use such and such character somehow. And they likely said they received "some guidance" and not complete guidance because IDW may already be using characters in ongoing stories that they already intended on making toys out of on some occasions.

Not saying we have to like the story as a result, only that IDW is being honest with their response.

They likely had this in the works for a few years to ensure a proper set-up. Although it wouldn't be farfetched to think IDW wasn't planning this Combiner Wars event either. They already suggested that Megatron could have combined into Devastator. Now this theme suggests all Cybertronians can now combine. Hasbro could just have finally bought in on the idea for toys much the same way High Moon Studios had the arduous task of proving the Dinobots could be used creatively and make sense in the mythology when Hasbro specifically said they didn't want them used originally because they no longer fit in.

 

Well, ok, fair enough. I just don't think the spirit of the question asked was really "does hasbro actually write the stories/plot/dialogue. Maybe I'm wrong in my belief that no one would actually think that. I mean, combiner wars is the toy theme for the year, and combiner wars is the story arc as said by IDW. I guess we're just arguing shades of gray which is difficult.

Maybe I would have preferred the "some guidance" bit, and they left it at that. Instead 5% of the paragraph (2 words) was admitting hasbro influence, and the entire rest of the paragraph trying to spin it. And the characters "only if they fit creatively...." Good for them that 100% of all characters that got deluxes last year just happen to "fit creatively."

 

I'm excited for the Comibiner Wars comic but less excited for the combiners we'll get

 

And fit creatively is certainly subjective. It is my opinion that the dark Cybertron event was a bad storyline. I didn't enjoy it, although it did more than just work certain characters Hasbro wanted to sell toys off of into the story "creatively", in that it also served to set up Megatron's new status quo in MTMTE.

I also don't know how good sales of FOC Bruticus were despite the fan hate for how poorly executed he was. I've been too heavily involved in 3rd Party bliss to know if Hasbro found that they struck gold with the combiner concept again in terms of consumer demand. That they are using a Voyager as the torso unit this time suggests they've at least listened to many of the complaints in FOC Bruticus. So I won't put it past Hasbro that they are definitely seeing a more likely purchase of their combiners if they are part of a popular ongoing fiction. Sounds more like piggybacking than dictating to me at this point, but its speculative for sure.