Met John Barber at Cybertron Con 2016 in Shanghai, really cool and friendly guy. Wish him all the best, I'm sure he'll do very well in his next job, he has very high EQ + IQ!

 

No! That's a cheap catch-all excuse fans use to defend bad writing. "Don't blame Flynn, blame Sega!" I've read and reviewed IDW Sonic, and the shortcomings of the script are attributed entirely to a talentless hack, not Sega's mandates. Take the first arc for example. Sega never said "We want you to recycle the exact same plotline in every issue" - that was Flynn. Sega never said "We want you to eschew all tension from the story and focus entirely on exposition" - that was Flynn. Sega never said "We want you to use the same predictable stinger with the villain watching from the shadows" - that was fucking Flynn!

So DON'T try to excuse a shitty writer by blaming Sega. I've heard that a thousand times and it never, ever works.

You got that backwards. Archie Sonic got worse the longer Flynn wrote for it. Did you read the Mecha Sally arc that ended the original timeline? Flynn completely squandered the potential by having absolutely nothing of consequence occur during Sonic's chase to retrieve Sally. He just got perpetually postponed along the way which turned the entire arc into a tiresome slog. I'll bet you're going to say "But Sega TOLD Flynn to stretch out the arc, to have no emotional weight, to drop everything at the end" or some other lame excuse. At least Ken Penders had the vision to expand upon the culture, lore and society of the series to make the comic "a world unique and beyond what you know from the Sega games" as the tagline indicates. Flynn's only intention was to reduce it.

If you really want to see Archie Sonic done right, try reading Sonic Retold. At least here you'll see how the story is handled by a competent writer.

 

Seriously though, did Barber contribute to IDW2 at all? Because given how slow the plot was going, he might have been taking a backseat or something.

 

He did not no, which is a shame cause he is an amazing editor and coming up with the ideas for stories (as he was the head editor for RID and MTMTE for all of Seasons 1 and most of Season 2) and is "God's gift to continuity" as the wiki puts it.

 

Well that explains a lot, really.

So how much longer until the elephant in the room gets acknowledged? Or rather, how long until IDW and Hasbro open up about the Transformers IP going somewhere else? I guess it’ll be if/when the whole Skybound thing gets finalized?

 

Certainly not any sooner, and there's no rush for Hasbro. It's in their interests for fans to keep buying the current Transformers comics.

 

Wow that's crazy, I'm not reading all of that though.

 

IDW at 2016: made comics abt other Hasbro brands besides transformers and collab with it
Me at 2016: GG IDW

 

Best of luck John

 

I think it was a serviceable story coming off the growing pains of a writer that essentially was still having to write safe stories since the off-the-rails content that was made by Penders essentially tried to create a bad fanfic out of the franchise, and when Sega basically did something similar that made Penders go "How dare they steal my ideas?!", plus even IDW Transformers had growing pains after it's transition from Dreamwave.

And let's not forget it was Sega that said "Sonic can't cry, Sonic can't lose, etc." as a result. You can say that Flynn's writing in the Mecha Sally arc was a slog and basically was made as an undoing of the world read about, but it's also because of Penders that Flynn had to play damage control and make the safe stories you declare to be bad and invalidate his contributions, and it's still Sega that basically said "Sonic can't lose" and made the stories still seem bland as a result. There's only so many ways one can make a character face inconvenience without it breaking the rule of "losing".

Penders was basically the one who drove the series too far and put the series into fanfic overdrive, especially with his "contributions" to the Echidnas (Need I point to the Black Onyx when it should have been the Master Emerald that held Tikal and Chaos, yet because of Penders and his "lore expanding", they basically had to come up with a macguffin item because Penders need to bloat the story under his name). What you consider his vision to expand beyond the games was a bad fanfiction writer basically being given too much creativity to a point of actual detriment, and Flynn's "reducing of the worldbuilding" is course-correcting, if anything.

We're digressing from the topic of IDW Transformers and this is becoming more of a "Complaining about Sonic Content" debate rather than an actual Transformers conversation, however. If you wanna make it a point to tell someone the "10001 Reasons Ian Flynn is a hack writer" reply you'll be slaving on the keyboard to type in order to enlighten us, save it for private messages or twitter.

 

Yep, that Revolution stuff was the biggest mistake they ever made.

No, I'm not going to read about Action Man. If he's in TF comics and you expect me to keep reading... good luck.

Edit: Or ROM, or Micronauts, or MASK. No, thank you.

 

This guy gets it.  

Now on the actual topic of things, if Barber wants to retire from Transformers comics altogether, then who should be main architect/editor, if not whoever’s doing it on IDW2?

 

I wasn't a fan of his writing Transformers. He didn't seem to know how to write Prowl and I didn't like Thundercracker's screen writing or the dog.

I always liked Needlenose in the G1 Marvel comic as an underdog but he made him a jerk.

He had an uncanny knack for focusing on Transformers I can't stand such as Rattrap, Kup, Alpha Trion, Wheeljack, Bumblebee and Optimus Prime. He also focused too much on humans.

I'm not sorry to see IDW lose the Transformers licence. I didn't like Barber's writing, the Sciolli Gi Joe crossover, the Terminator crossover, Stormbringer, the Bumblebee mini series or the current Grimlock mini.

Their art wasn't always great especially Livio.

No offence to anyone who did like those things but they weren't for me.

 

No accounting for taste.

 

I can't imagine that there are grown ass people who get angry about Sonic fiction.

 

If there are grown ass people getting angry over toys, that isn't out of the question.

 

For a guy who wants this continued in private, you sure like discussing it in public. So I think I'll do the same.  

I know about Sega's mandates and they don't interfere with how Flynn started afresh with IDW. At least there he was given carte blanche to write whatever story he wanted without being beholden to previous continuity. He could have reintroduced the Blue Blur in a fascinating new origin story, but what he gave instead was the most boring, generic, exposition dump I have ever read in my life. Check the review. There's no build-up to Sonic's first appearance. He's just there on the first page and is like "Hey, there's a town under attack!" Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight... end teaser. Now are you going to tell me Sega mandated THAT? Then Flynn writes the exact same thing in the next issue, only replacing Tails with Amy. Then he does the same thing again in issue 3, this time with Knuckles! What kind of shitty writing is this? Are you going to claim that Sega forbids creating suspense, diversifying the narrative or exploring character motivations? We never get a hint at why Sonic prefers the solo act, the point is completely glossed over and makes him unrelatable. I swore off IDW Sonic after the first arc, but I've heard similar complaints from readers who pursued further, such as resolving the metal virus arc with the CHEAPEST deux ex machina by having Super Sonic fix everything. This is NOT the result of a suffocating IP holder, it's the result of a writer with no goddamn talent.

This is why I still support Penders' writing. The work he did on the Knuckles comics expanded the echidna's role far beyond what Sega could have dreamed. It's a history that spans thousands of years and many generations of Knuckles' lineage. The more you read it, the more invested you become. If you call this "fan fic writing", then it is GOOD fan fic writing. I'd much rather have this than Knuckles sitting alone atop the Master Emerald just waiting for something to happen, wouldn't you? (And on the subject of the Ancient Onyx, it was a necessary change because the Master Emerald is a separate gemstone located elsewhere. It's a minor point.) The "course-correction" you advocate is destroying all these elements that made the comic interesting, ultimately leading to reduced sales and Archie Sonic being cancelled. While Sega's mandates didn't help matters, Flynn should have been fighting for the inclusion of family, romance and expanded societies instead of capitulating to Sega's demands like a fucking shill. Instead he lied to fans about reintroducing the Freedom Fighters because he openly disavowed them as a symptom of 90's environmentalism despite their popularity. He has no respect for the series' roots, no respect for the community and no respect for the integrity of his writing. Say what you want about Sega being uncooperative, but to portray Ian Flynn as an innocent victim, slave to their every whim is fucking irresponsible.

 

He absolutely knew how to write Prowl, he made creative choices that you didn't like, that's not the same thing as "not knowing."

But like others said, no accounting for taste. The tastes in this thread are all over the place, and I think I'm glad none of us are responsible for deciding the future direction of the brand.

 

Oh absolutely. As it stands, no matter what visions we have for Transformers, we all have our own sense of taste in the matter to how we would guide the series, and even if we did have the reins and had the support of half the people on the entire forum in support of us, there's always gonna be as many against what we envision for the Autobots and Decepticons.