Isn't the license up after this year? Maybe we'll see it move to DC or Marvel.

 

Er...Roberts has only been writing the comic for 6 years, and writing fanfic for maybe 10? Did you start reading him when you were 5?  

 

I don't want to rehash any discussions, but at this point I think it might be best for someone else to get the license. I'm down for a fresh start with a fresh perspective.

I'd really like to see BOOM or Dynamite get the License.

 

First time I’ve heard of that.

 

In the closed or deleted threads re: Chris Ryall, there was a link where someone explained (hearsay) that
A) IDW’s right to the Hasbro license expires at the end of 2018 at which point Hasbro chooses whether to renew it
B) sales are low enough that this is now a serious consideration after a bad 2017
C) they almost lost the license earlier this year

If you line this up with the timing of events (and recent activity like Roberts’ comics suddenly hitting their schedule again) and what looks to be the “natural” conclusion to Roberts’ storyline hitting at the end of the year, well...

The “reboot” is probably a good way to bet hedge. If the license stays w IDW they have a “second chance” to keep going with a different direction, and if it doesn’t they’ve at least concluded their stories in a way that won’t leave everyone/everything hanging.

(The above assumes a lot of things, obv)

 

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....

 

If we go back to the war, we definitely aren't seeing Galvatron...

 

Depends on which war  

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

I could take a Simon Furman/Don Figueroa comic and a James Roberts/Alex Milne comic.

None of which will happen of course.

 

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.

 

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.

 

A man could dream...