“Death” is not a nice subject to talk. But, as Shane McCarthy; the creator of Transformers: Drift explains, he clearly did not axe characters just to stir-up the fans.
“Ok so I’ve had a few emails and messages come in this week regarding my killing off of a few Transformers characters and how that it was “fact” that I’d done this to annoy and “flip off” the fans and (long time Transformers writer) Simon Furman. I’m going to be completely honest here and say that, when I read these messages, I laughed. A lot. A real lot. Not at the fans, hell no, at the concept that anyone, ANYONE would ever do such a trivial thing….…It’s all story, Fellas. That’s how it works. We’re hired to tell a story and, in many stories, people die (even Transformers).”
Click here to read his post regarding “Death and Comics…”
Backscatter
Screw Death! Let's see some TF Zombies! "He's Undead Jim!"
Cinemastique
I wish I'd saved it now, but there was an article wherein, when asked about the criticism levied at ROTF, Bay made a comment to the effect of "Well, the box office revenues speak for themselves." Probably paraphrased; It's been a year or so. Point is, people buying because the market is cornered =/= immunity from criticism.
I concur about people (TFs) staying dead. Transformers are robotic organisms (not robots in the strictest sense), and more importantly, they're human analogues as far as the narrative is concerned. We, as humans, can relate to them. If we assume they're immortal, then they become removed from us in that way, and the entire point of them fighting a war becomes kinda ludicrous.
lol
foxindebox
I'm sure if anyone "dies", Alpha Trion will have a spare body knocking around somewhere…… He's like that you know.
GizmoTron
Sorry, but I think that shipped has sailed with Optimus Prime. Since his death and rebirth, its hard to ever look again at a Transformer's death as being finite in anyway.
As for meaningful deaths and ends for the Transformers, I'm not sure it really applies to them the same way it would to a comic about humans. I'm reminded a lot on this subject by an episode of Energon (yes, I know, awful cartoon), where there was a scene where Megatron planned to destroy Earth, and ordered Demolisher that he was to collect all of the human's sparks after the destruction in case he ever found a use for them. And Demolisher said something like "but sir, they don't have sparks, they only get one life to live" to which Megatron said something like "really? That's unfortunate but oh well". Again, I know, Energon, grr, but I think back to that scene whenever I think about the deaths in other Transformers media, and it just reminds me that to them death is never the end and they can always live again. That no matter what impact (or lack of) that death had, it's in no way their true death.
So even if they kill all of the '84 toyline or just a bunch of random guys they made up just to die (something I think fans should be more tired of by now), it seems like with Transformers these robots can always come back somehow someway. So there shouldn't be so much whining on the subject of killing off such and such so much as there should be more critique about the story and how the character met his or her end.
In other words, I personally like less "oh noes they killed Scrapper now we got no Devastator!" and more "Spike killed a Decepticon all by himself? How? What the hell?!"
SMOG
Agreed 100%.
Drift has the potential to be a Mary-Sue type supercharacter, but I think he's beyond that now. It'll be curious to see if other writers pick up the character and do anything interesting with him (besides just horribly murdering him to gain the short term favour of a few power haters).
I think you've hit upon 2 important factors… declining editorial control/attention has been killing comics for a long while now. The other side of it is that casual fans don't read TF comics. Fanboys read TF comics. And fanboys notice when writers screw up or mistreat a character. That's part of the reason Costa's writing has put my teeth on edge… I'm a huge TF character nerd, and things like his depiction of the Combaticons is like getting poked in the eyeball.
Alas, poor, awkward, badly designed Crosscut. We barely knew ye.
Whenever I think about short-lived generics, Crosscut ALWAYS comes to mind for me. Glad I'm not the only one.
I can agree with this.
To Marvel's credit, Cap stayed dead for a surprisingly long time… though everyone still knew it was nonsense, and it carried just about zero emotional resonance.
I suppose it could be argued that pacifism would have been anathema to Deadlock too, but I see where you're coming from. It's like when Blitzwing almost defected in Season 3. Some people thought that made Blitzwing an anti-hero… but all it really made him was badly-written.
Naturally it's possible that characters can change and evolve, but when it comes to Transformers, it must be acknowledged that there is a degree to which each character conforms to an essential snapshot, usually reflected by their toy bios. Like other comic book characters, they really aren't allowed to stray too far from that before relapsing one way or another.
Carnivac as a conscientious objector? Nope. Sorry. Don't see it.
Drift? We'll see. Honestly, the spiritual warrior/monk archetype is pretty bland… in that sense I don't care very much about Drift or his story. But he has some potential… and with all the compulsive hating going around, it's hard not to want to stick up for the guy (and McCarthy by extension).
zmog
Anguirus
I get that it's backstory, but without fail all of the hatred for Drift is variants on the claim that "he's going to get the Matrix/slay Megatron/get named Shiniest Robot in the Universe," etc. Turns out that he isn't doing anything important now and didn't do anything important in the past. But I'm sure someone will conjure a reason to be enraged at this.
Ponder this one…how great would the fanrage have been if McCarthy had taken an existing character and given him a story arc involving a pacifist tribe of robots causing him to abandon the Decepticons and then switch to the Autobots? And then accomplish nothing as an Autobot except introduce a strain of philosophy? I've heard people say that Drift should have been Carnivac, but pacifism is like the OPPOSITE of Carnivac.
…huh. Maybe that explains why nothing seems to be happening in Costa's work, they can't afford it to.
Still, 10,000 is a much greater number than the total number of G1 toy characters, and when you consider flashbacks we are looking at a still higher number.
(Now I'm trying to remember why I thought a million was a good estimate. Is that actually from something or did I just think it was?)
Repugnus
That could be any number of problems. It seems like I'm constantly having to reupload pages to imageshack 'cause the files keep getting messed up somehow. I just checked the thread for it here on TFW, and it looks like I need to replace page 12. Again! Thank you for bringing it to my attention. But once I have that fixed, it should (hopefully) be fine. Worst case scenario, you can always just check out the Deviantart page I set up for it, where the images generally seem to be much more stable.
Exactly! And on top of that, Kick-Off was the perfect example of a deliberate use of a character. His tech spec mentioned that he was captured by Decepticons and forced to fight as a gladiator. So, if you'll excuse the repetitive nature of the next few sentences, when you have a story that needs an Autobot to be captured by Decepticons and forced to fight as a gladiator, who do you call? Backstreet? Joyride? Sunrunner? No! You get the guy who was actually captured by Decepticons and forced to fight as a gladiator! It's like the exact opposite of what we saw with Quake. Now, granted, if Kick-Off suddenly became a popular character and always showed up in every TF universe in this exact same capacity, then it would get stale, but this was his first non-background appearance in TF fiction, so it made perfect sense to use him to fill a role that he would fit into perfectly.
I may be mis-reading your intention (and if so, I apologize), but the Drift mini-series takes place long before his first appearance in AHM, so they're not boxing him up so much as they're providing him with a detailed backstory. That said, I'm not a Drift fan myself, but I find the hatred for him incredibly amusing, and so, in my opinion, that alone justifies his existence.
Unfortunately, Costa inserted that bit into Spotlight: Prowl about the total TF population numbering around a mere ten thousand. If that's the case, then at the rate they're getting killed off, they're on the fast track to complete extinction, especially if we keep seeing massacres like the fight scenes in LSotW.
Bass X0
Doesn't mean they should though.
I'm sick of characters returning from the dead in Marvel comics. When Captain America was shot, the first question I asked myself was how long it'll be until he returns?
So I don't want death to be a slight inconvenience in Transformers comics either unless there's a big story surrounding their resurrection.
Anguirus
I feel the EXACT same way as you (I'll pass on the scary picture, though). The hatred for him is so fantastically, absurdly exaggerated that it showcases what a small thing it really is. Sorry, but when you keep referencing some advertising campaign that I wasn't around for and insist that a character who has done nothing is a "Mary Sue" or "Wesley" despite the fact that doing nothing is antithetical to those concepts, then you are basically just making the cadre of devoted Drift-haters look silly.
If anything, it appears to me that IDW saw that fan-reaction wasn't going to be what they wanted for this character and dialed him back a bit. (Sure he has his own series but even here, they are boxing him up into an obscure little corner where he doesn't affect the war.) That's laudable, in fact, but noooo, when you offend TF fans once they will never forgive you. (Much like Hot Rod's debut, really.)
As for death, generics, and obscures, I think you are making a very good point as well. One of the things I like about Drift is that he's not a goddamn G1-G2 toy. There simply aren't enough of those to populate a universe of about a million Transformers and assorted other aliens and robots. What we have here is a syndrome where one writer spams in a toy character to die, and then another writer wants to use the character (everyone has their favorites, after all) and just brings him back. Since there's basically no editorial control with respect to continuity, this happens several times. It wouldn't be a big deal, except that if you are actually reading these comics, you're the sort of person who notices these things. (Myself, I usually just read the Wiki and laugh at the convoluted lives and afterlives of characters.)
You can't make every death mean a lot (not even Roche, he draws big battle scenes too), but you can at least make them meaningful, non-gratuitous, and for god's sake if you're going to pretend to have the balls to kill a popular (or even just a toy) character, let it stick!
Budiansky had it right way back when. He killed tons of generics because he couldn't often kill toy characters (except in big deck-clearing events), so much so that you could predict whether someone would survive the issue by whether or not a toy was on shelves (or even just by the design, as the Marvel designs were different from the toy-based ones). And yet…nearly every one of them was named, had dialogue, and gave you something to hang an emotion on before they went. Straxus kicking Crosscut onto the space bridge has more pathos in two panels than IDW usually pulls off in a whole issue.
SMOG
All this Drift-hate is only making me love the character more…
= TRUTH.
My only problem was that some of the pages seem to be corrupted jpgs, and come out blurred in spots so I can't read half the dialogue. Or maybe it's just something on my end?
Even Kickoff (that was him, right?) had what seemed like it was going to be a little character arch… and then he turns up dead. Even that corpse in the pit had some meaning to us, because we'd seen Kickoff fighting for his life earlier.
Of course, you're right… though at the same time, it's not the 80's anymore. A lot of the writers and artists are fans now, so we see a lot less "generics". The creators love throwing in those cameos. Unfortunately, it sort of undercuts the fun of seeing an obscure cameo, if it's really just a meaningless walk-on death.
zmog
Onslaught Six
Here's my thing.
How do we even know these guys are fucking dead?
What, Drift shoots a couple guys? Did you see the '86 movie? Prime literally shoots like the entire Decepticon army and even then, the only guys who "die" are two of the Seekers and the Insecticons (who got ran over by Hot Rod and Kup, no less)–and they were still alive enough to protest getting thrown out of Astrotrain.
Bumblethumper
Did Electro die in a similar manner to his toy?
… if not, then … NERDRAGE!
Fit For natalie
That cheapens the very usage of their deaths in the comics, though. If somebody died, and especially if they died well, then it's better for them to stay dead. As much as I love the cast of the Wreckers, for example, I don't want them to "come back no problem" simply because this is a comic book and they are robots.
So at the end of the day, the point is, if you're gonna kill off characters and are unwilling to create random characters or hi-and-die characters to fill these positions, you might as well make the death have some relevance to the story or impart an emotional response to the reader, rather than just being an opportunity to show "bloodshed". There will always be a need for battle scenes of soldiers dying by the dozen to show the brutality of war, but it's easy enough to accomplish this using generics.
Xformermike
I am thinking about all the characters that have died in the past only to return in current incarnations.
Really… Death in transformers is just fleeting. I wouldn't concern yourself or act outwardly about it… They'll be back! =P And even if they don't come back… Well.. So what? Find a new character to like! There are certainly enough of them!
Repugnus
I agree on both counts. McCarthy is far from perfect as a writer, and AHM had some serious flaws, but there are still significant parts of his work I've thoroughly enjoyed, such as his portrayal of the Megatron/Starscream dynamic. Costa, on the other hand, has been leaving me staggeringly unenthusiastic about reading each new issue of the ongoing. I find myself bored by the storyline, annoyed by his misuse of decompression, and tired of being told that he's going somewhere with all this and that it will eventually get good. In my opinion, if the journey is wholly unentertaining, then the destination isn't worth it. Yet, as you mentioned, many people seem to give him a pass due to "GI Joe: Cobra," which indeed was a fantastic mini-series, but we shouldn't forget that he co-wrote it with Christos Gage.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm a big fan of many obscure characters, and so part of my goal with that comic was to write a story that didn't showcase any big name characters and see if I could still get the reader emotionally invested in what happens.
I think it's worth mentioning that there's a big difference in the way death was handled in LSotW versus what we're seeing in the rest of IDW's TF line. First and foremost, all the deaths in LSotW had purpose. When a wrecker died, the who/how/why of it seemed very deliberate. Secondly, very few of the characters who died felt wasted. These were guys whom many fans hadn't even heard of before, but we got to know them and learned to love/hate them, so when they died, it had a strong impact on us.
Now compare this to what we're seeing everywhere else. With the possible exception of Ironhide (whose death I wouldn't even count because he was resurrected almost immediately, and the whole thing seems to have been done for the express purpose of transporting him to Cybertron and cleaning up all the leftover nastiness from AHM), none of these deaths have mattered. Just look at Quake. Yes, his death advanced the plot by allowing Bombshell to find a new use for his Cerebro shells, but why Quake? Don't get me wrong, I couldn't give a flying flip about Quake (not all obscure characters are my cup of tea, I suppose), but even I felt ripped off by it because it was so random. You could have substituted any other fourth-stringer in his place, and the scene would have played out exactly the same way! And I'm sorry, but if you can do a substitution like that without any negative impact on the story, then that's a huge, red flag that something's seriously wrong. In this case, Costa might as well have used a generic, because at least that wouldn't have slammed the door shut on any other writer after him who might've been able to find a good use for Quake.
Even Scrapper, who was arguably the only "important" character to have been killed, got a death that felt cheap. The issue played it off like the culmination of a character arc for Spike, but if that had been the case, then there should've been at least some semblance of a build to it. After all, you can't have a very effective climax without rising action. Instead, it just comes out of nowhere, referencing events from AHM as more of an excuse than actual justification. Honestly, when I finished reading that issue, it kinda felt like Costa simply didn't have any future plans for Devastator, so why not kill off Scrapper to show how tough Spike is and pad out the TPB?
Of course, I could be wrong about the reason for Scrapper's death. Maybe there will be some future payoff for it. But regardless, if a series even so much as feels like it's spinning its wheels (as the ongoing most certainly does far too much of the time), then that in and of itself is a big problem.
Kungfu Dinobot
He should be glad Roche didn't turn him into a magic 8-ball for pwning the autobots, and then kill him off
Oracle_Aesir
he probably didn't read it because Nick snubbed Drift, and didn't include him in the cast
Kungfu Dinobot
McCarthy probably didn't even know LSOTW existed, since he thought he got rid of the Wreckers in Spotlight: Drift, you know
Oracle_Aesir
I don't mind death in Transformers at all, I mean that's one of the reasons why I love Last Stand of the Wreckers so much
Sizzle
This.