I don’t think Alex’s comments and the discussion about the model that DC/Marvel use contradict each other that sharply...

So basically:

* there’s a set page rate
* it’s up to the artist whether they want to do that job for that price or not

I mean, Warren Ellis went into this thing in laborious detail back in the day, though from a writing perspective. Effectively he had a rate, Marvel calculated whether or not the series they were offering could hold up with that rate, and determine whether they could make the trade off.

So IDW has a “base rate”, which can adjust itself depending on the company’s situation, and then has the choice of approaching freelancers with it and seeing if they want to accept it. Doesn’t seem that much different than what you were theorizing above.

I know *you* know this but I also know how quickly a statement can potentially become taken as fact by a different reader. so just wanted to mention here that this is Alex’s speculated rationale and not necessarily a known fact.  

Didn’t want to provide a post with three pages of quotes but wanted to say both Focks and Strife make really good points.

It could be that IDW needs content to be made faster for the purposes of trade selling and obviously highly detailed art makes that pretty tough. As for the art, it’s not awful but it’s definitely a far cry from Milne and Zama. It’s not a giant stretch to say they’ve likely gone onto better paying work; that’s how almost every industry runs (and note there are many comic artists over time who have just left the field entirely onto different and better paying work).

 

So I like this idea, a lot, especially since it still ties Unicron in with Cybertron.
That said, I also like the idea of Unicron as presented in the comic. An engine of vengeance driven by the wrath of a race who suffered for Cybertron's colonialism. It ties into the post-Dark Cybertron themes concerning colonialism and the complicated and often brutal history behind it.

 

Every company uses a base rate/starting rate. It definitely fluctuates at places like Marvel (where bigger names get offered higher rates, ice even heard of an example or two at boom that that's very rare from what I hear. Marvel/image/dc seem to be the most flexible) and each company's base rate varies (my starting rate at marvel was higher than most companies I've worked for, for example) but yeah. That's the biz.

I feel like there's someone who publishes the results of an anonymous survey every year that details what different companies pay. The rates some companies offer would surprise (and possibly mortify) people xD but it's out there for the curious. But yeah, I haven't seen much fluctuation in my rates with idw. I've gotten nearly the same rate my entire time working with them (15 years?) and only once was I able to negotiate a little higher than the base and that was very much towards the beginning of my relationship with them. I tried to negotiate a little more for a series semi-recently and it was a no-go (so I turned down the project). And this is all as a colorist. The rate offered me for drawing has been consistent through the years, too (though I've done that less than coloring overall.) I assume it's the base they offer all illustrators, though I haven't asked to compare. But that's the nature of the beast!

I'm sure all the theorizing about rates=quality of art matters at places like Marvel that can be more flexible. But I haven't seen much evidence to the point happening at idw so part of me is like "get that out of your head" haha

It's all boiling down to subjectivity. It's just not a style you're fond of. But yeah, the creative team is brought together by the editorial team. Like you, they have different tastes and dislikes. *But everything is approved or not by the license holder* be it TF, Samurai Jack, Star wars Adventures, Marvel Action and anything else that's published.

 

As the guy who brought that idea into the thread in the last couple of pages, all I have to say is, we got the definitive word on the topic here folks, so hiring cheaper artists = dead theory as far as IDW is concerned.

It was only ever a theory transposed onto IDW though. The stories involving veteran talent at Marvel and DC being essentially too expensive to work (at least from the publisher's perspective) has been going on for years at Bleeding Cool, for folks interested.

I think it would be one thing if it happened in a vacuum, but the shift from, frankly, what you and Kei Zama were producing in Optimus Prime (at the time one of the best looking comics on shelves) is... yeah... tough. Especially when the subject matter - the start of the war - is pretty weighty stuff. Seeing it unroll in something a few DNA strands removed from chibi art is just this terrible clash. As I wrote above, one of my favorite IDW artists was Livio Ramondelli, and he kept doing these "ancient past" and dead universe stories that played to his artistic strengths. But you'd never see him do Thundercracker and Buster's wacky adventure, no more than you'd see Esad Ribic do a run on Squirrel Girl. Esad sticks with Thor, the Eternals, Secret Wars... high concept stuff. Seeing the contemporary start of the war story rendered in a style more fit for "a wacky adventure" undermines the story being told.

When I see clashes like this, I think of Jason Aaron's note at the end of the the of Thor: God of Thunder

Esad Ribic was the perfect artist for that book, which was 25 issues of, well exactly that dark fantasy, heavy metal vibe that surrounded Thor losing his faith in Gods. But his successor in Thor #1 , Russell Dauterman, was the perfect artist for the "new spring" of Jane Foster as Thor and the High Fantasy themes (elves! faires! giants! magic!). If their roles had been reversed, it would have been a terrible creative mismatch. But this choice enabled Thor to have by far the best art in Marvel for years.

Hopefully IDW changes course and similarly matches artistic style with content.

 

I DO appreciate the very well thought out responses I've come across from you, though! I hope that's not misunderstood. You're very intelligent and level headed so I appreciate that!

The only thing I could say is idw (like every other company) likes to have that visual distinction with things like these reboots. I mean, who doesn't? It's a common practice. I don't have concrete evidence that that's specifically the occassion but it's a pretty safe assumption that was the reason for the reboots (g1 and bw) NOT looking like the majority of stuff you'd seen in previous titles. Just chalk it up to disagreeing with the direction that was chosen. Like Alex said, it's not for a lack of "want" on some of the older crews part and now it's been assured it's not a case of some artists costing more. It's just a conscious decision to move in a different direction. And it's not like your favorite artists aren't showing up here and there. But I so appreciate idw and Hasbro for being open to letting new artists take a crack at the brands they all clearly have a love for. EVERYONE working in these books are a fan and want to put out the best work they're capable of to do these characters justice  

 

I appreciate the compliment! To be clear, I'm keeping my comments about the Transformers ongoing. With regards to the Beast Wars book, I'm really loving what's going on there. It's a real breath of fresh air.

After reading your comment, I think there is a big element here of perhaps the oldest thing to go on in comics in the relationship between creative teams/publishers and readers: attachment to an era. This has been examined many times, but it's the "who is my Flash?" "Why is my Green Lantern?" "Who are my X-Men" question. Well for me, like many people, born in the 80s' grew up in the 90s, the answers are Wally West, Kyle Raynor, and the Jim Lee X-Men of 1992 and the Fox Kids Animated Series. Barry Allen was that old Flash who died when I was 3 years old. Hal Jordan was the old Green Lantern who went nuts and tried to remake the universe. And Uncanny X-Men #200-#270 had some weird shit in it. Australia? The Siege Perilous? Really? But to people 10 years or more older, all that is their Flash, Green Lantern, and X-Men.

And on the other end of it, I couldn't care less about the return of Barry Allen (who was gone so long he might as well have been a new character), or any Green Lanterns after Kyle Rayner, or pretty much anything that's gone on in X-Men between the end of Grand Morrison's run and the start of Jonathan Hickman's (who is my favorite comics writer). But to some people, that's Flash, Green Lantern and X-Men period.

With these Transformers comics, I think there is probably something similar going on. The sheer issue number and storytelling scope of Transformers at IDW 1.0 almost happened by accident in retrospect, in large part because Hasbro had a stable publishing partner in IDW for the first time, really ever. I'm old enough a fan to recall that the original Marvel Transformers run, just 80 issues loomed over absolutely everything as "the better version of the saga" than the Sunbow cartoon. The Dreamwave stuff brought back Transformers comics, but there weren't actually all that many issues across all the titles. Like thirty and change. And then IDW comes along, and it does Infiltration, Escalation, Revelation, Spotlight, Maximum Dinobots, All Hail Megatron, the 2009 Ongoing (30 issues), RID and MTME (58 issues each), Til All Are One (14 issues) Lost Light (25 issues) and Optimus Prime (28 issues), and a slew of other miniseries. Suddenly there are a couple hundred books over 14 years, and an extremely deep continuity (albeit one that made sense because of John Barber's heroic efforts). It's like we slid into it. With Infiltration, IDW could have easily been the temp license holder for the next few years until someone else came along around 2010, and then reboot again. Instead we got this continent of story telling stability.

And it was so good for Transformers! I think more recent fans ho hopped aboard the last decade don't know how barebones the Transformers backstory was before IDW started to flesh it out bit by it. It was pretty much The 3 volumes of War Within at Dreamwave, some really old and apocryphal stuff in Marvel and Marvel UK,

For so many of us, that was "our Transformers" in one form or another, especially when Michael Bay was assembling movies on the cutting room floor, and Hasbro changed cartoons every 2 years.

And then it was gone, and replaced by a new continuity - jarring enough - with an art style that is a radical departure. I definitely think some of the dislike towards the books, including on my part, is from this "my Transformers are gone" thing, just like any other super hero. I still haven't gotten over that Tim Drake got pushed aside for Damien Wayne.

I completely get what you're saying about editorial wanting an intentional different direction to differentiate the book. That's the reason for creative revamps no matter the company or character after all! I just firmly believe there is a dire artistic mismatch that is undermining the story. I hope it changes, because Transformers needs this new saga to bring new ideas to it, just as IDW 1.0 did. Because imagine by comparison if IDW 1.0 never happened, the most sophisticated Transformers storytelling we would have ever gotten would have been the War Within and Furman Marvel stuff. Hopefully in a few years IDW 2.0 surprises us with something as awesome to Transformers lore as "Functionalism" and a book as gorgeous as Optimus Prime and Autocracy.

 

@StrifeZ I really love the concept of the “this is ‘my’ (Transformers, Flash, Green Lantern, etc.)”. I never thought of it applying to TFs in this way but in retrospect that sort of thing is obviously there, particularly with long running “eras” of continuity!

 

Oh it applies to petty much everything there is a fandom for. It's almost like a law of nature or something.

What's your Star Trek? For me, since i grew up in the 1990s, it was the The Next Generation-Deep Space Nine-Voyager era. I could watch an entire episode about a moral dilemma with nothing but acting and talking. i don't need explosions. I like the current shows on CBS All Access alot. But even the revived "Picard" show isn't "my" Star Trek because the differences in production vision, writing and directing between 1993 and 2020 make that impossible. The ancient "who is a better Captain, Kirk or Picard" nerdom question of yesteryear is just an expression of this concept. People will always choose the Captain they grew up with.

What's your Star Wars? Well I was too young to really grow up with the Original Trilogy, but to old to be more than a passing viewer of the Prequels. But I remember how the prequels were detested. Absolutely detested, most of all, for not being he Original Trilogy in tone or acting quality. And then a funny thing happened: a lot of fans grew up with those prequels, and not the OT. And they grew up even more so with Clone Wars. Now the prequel era is one of the most explored and popular parts of of the saga, along with their actors, and the movies are at the very least appreciated, and in some ways loved. Because that was the Star Wars of one generation of fans. A Generation 2 if you will.

I can even do it outside of Science Fiction / Fantasy.

What's your (insert sports team). For me, it's the New York Yankees of around the turn of the millennium. The height of the Steinbrenner / Joe Torre era, when they had Derek jeter, Alfonso Soriano, Tino Martinez, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neil, Mike Mussina, Andy Pettite, Roger Clemens, Marino Rivera, Mike Stanton, Orlando Hernandez, Scott Brosius, David Wells, David Justice, Jason Giambi. Sure, they were maybe the greatest baseball team ever assembled over that few year span, and won a startling amount of World Series. But that was the Yankees my brother, my dad and I watched all the time, went to games to (we traveled there from Boston), and followed. And yeah life got busy and it trailed off. Players retired or were traded. The team went up and down. But if you ask me, "whats your Yankees", I'll say the ~2001 Yankees. And for any sports, plenty of fans can give you a similar answer.

Or even Sports Entertainment. Ask a wrestling fan "what's their WWE?", there is an excellent chance they are going to say "The Attitude Era", which is when a lot of us were growing up with the WWE, around the turn of the millennium. Our champions are Stone Cold Steven Austin and the Rock.

Fandom in general implies some kind of assumed "ownership" for lack of a better word. We get invested, we eat it up, and then when its gone, we're suspect about what comes later because we don't have the same investment.

Is it possible for lighting to strike twice? Yeah, but it's rare. And it's easier if you're older. "My" comic book Avengers, for example are both the New Avengers (from around 2004, the team of Captain America, Iron Man, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, the Sentry, Ronin) and the "Marvel Now" Avengers of the Jonathan Hickman "Incursion Crisis" era (with a massive, overpowered roster). Very different teams and stories. Almost diametrically opposed really. I don't really care much for the Avengers before, between and after those two periods of time, separated by about a decade. But I was also 19 when New Avengers began and 29 when Marvel Now Avengers began. I was past the age of being too emotionally attached.,

If you want to pull it back to Transformers fandom, you just have to look at the Bayverse movies and its legacy. Optimus Prime having a mouth, was this obnoxious thing that Energon took after Beast Wars from, that carried forward into Cybertron, that then got carried forward to the 2007 movie when they decided to pull the concept designs closer to traditional Transformers. It was so weird and off putting for a long time. And that 2007 movie Optimus Prime, with his overwhelming blue and flames and little red, was such a departure. But for an entire generation of Transformers fans, that's every bit Optimus Prime as G1 Prime, and now, by 2021, he's just another another of the many forms of Optimus Prime. How much Transformers merchandise has had that design? How many figures has he gotten? I bet you because of the nature of the movie, its more than even G1 prime.

 

it always bugged me how arcee turned into this self righteous custodian of keeping bots with power in check

it also really rubbed me the wrong way when sunstreaker gave her the comatose sideswipes jetpack and she acted like a jerk and like she was already entitled to it. it seemed a lot like just because her and swipe worked together for a little while she overthought them as having this deep closeness or kinship and she seemed really overly loyal to to the point of being a bitch about it

 

Optimus Prime turn into political issues just for sake of ACAB and any USA political issues. I can't say you can't bring political issues to your stories, BUT if you bring it too much WITHOUT bring any different side, it's just a plain like plain bread without anything. Or like a hypocritical person.

Transformers crossover with, MY LITTLE PONY?!

Star Saber, duh, something wrong with IDW.

Arcee, duh, something wrong with IDW (2).

Rodimus. I'm not a fanatic G1 Rodimus Prime, in fact I more like a fan of G1 season 3. You can see I ever roasted G1 Rodimus Prime in my memes. But IDW version (especially MTMTE and Lost Light), it's not like him I know. It's just different character who used Rodimus's name, not his personality. Like TFP Smokescreen who using Hot Rod personality but not his name. Transformers Energon Rodimus was more much better than IDW. The only one I like Rodimus in IDW is his story on Autocracy.

 

I give you all note, may one of you will be a writer of Transformers franchise. If you want your Transformers stories good with bring any political and social issue, make sure you see and treat those issues as neutral side.

 

If IDW hires me my book will be cancelled faster than Generation 2, in the meantime i'll make Starscream the emperor of the universe while bashing the Autobots idea of freedom
MWAHAHAHAHA

 

Yeah, so long as their "neutral stance" agrees with you, right?

 

I can say IDW are not a neutral side. I can't find their different view of political and social issues they brought. All I saw just ACAB is right and anything like that. I can't say it much because:

 

Yeah, IDW definitely canceled my idea, as I made Prima ruined any Transformer life just because someone killed his wife and stole his shiny stone.

 

I’m sure no one agrees with IDW.

 

Have you read the whole thread ?
Right or wrong, there sure are many people who liked what IDW was doing

 

And just as many don’t buy the comics.

 

That's another point entirely, for example the 86 movie was a flop when it came out but it's not a dead topic today, many still defending or bashing it

 

IDW comics are a dead topic. The only way they’ll receive vindication now is reading the comics online.