There isn't anything wrong with one-dimensional characters as long as that isn't ALL there is. A handful of reall well thought out, deep characters, along with one-dimensional characters that can act as a foil for them, something to play off of, is not really a problem.
I don't think IDW Waspinator appeared enough to make me care about him. Or have a big enough role. I wouldn't want them to make Waspinator "mature". Leave the angst and edge to Rampage or Dinobot. Though I think there could be a balance between playing his status as the Woobie/Butt Monkey/Chew Toy straight (where we see him growing more and more fed up with it till he does his iconic "I said no" moment and quits or some variation there of) while still maintaining his status as the lovable and determined goofball who keeps getting back up no matter what the universe throws at him. "Wazzzpinator never surrender!". A person or character in this case should never be defined by their disorder. If Waspinator had say PTSD I could see him at most having survivor's guilt from surviving the quantum surge while Terrorsaur and to a lesser extent Scorponok didn't. Not sure how he'd feel about Inferno's and Quickstrike's deaths. QS was a jerk to him and Inferno was well insane. At most he probably misses having them around to play cards with. Him having flashbacks to previous moments of being blown up could easily be played for laughs when he's confronted with similar scenarios and he either goes "Nope" and gets out of there. Or sighs in resignation before going in (Megatron would not be happy if he disobeyed orders) and getting blown up. If he's still upset about Terrorsaur's death he might avoid looking directly at the lava for awhile. Hyper arousal-anger, irritability, easily startled, panic, and anxiety. Downplayed, but the first two were there with his complaining about the universe hating him and whenever he was dragging himself off to the CR Tank. Granted anyone would probably be angry and irritable after being crushed into a cube... He did express worry a few times (given his explosive track record I don't blame him), but in a war wouldn't you? Don't recall if he was easily started, but I know he wasn't prone to serious panic fits. So minor to mild anxiety at worst. Avoidance-he'd probably just go flying around to clear his head. I don't see him drinking his problems away. The thing that needs to be kept for Waspinator to still feel like Waspinator is in spite of all the crap he goes through he remains positive and refuses to give up. From the little I remember I didn't like IDW Waspinator because of just how broken he kind of was.
I'm a loving person who doesn't "do" hate. I leave that to people who feel the need to hound others because they can't deal with people who have opinions not shared by the majority. There is absolutely everything wrong with comedy-relief characters. They are a bland and boring narrative contraption for authors who are too insecure to think they can write a good story (and good comedy) that can entertain people without the use of cheap gimmicks. But since I moved on from this as soon as I posted my comment I'd like to express my slight dissapointment at the art and the sneak peak. Man, Hasbro really has no ambition to do anything with its Transformers fiction but feed the demographic of obsessively nostalgic TF fans the exact same things they saw when they were kids and which they want to see all the time in exactly the same way forever. How boring to just repeat the premise of the original BW cartoon, (but with a new character!) I hope the story will be more than that, because there isn't anything in this sneak peak to make me want to buy the first issues.
>Asking a question is now hounding. Okay. (Also X) You do realize comedy relief characters are usually not the main characters, right? I'm sure that the Bard would be shamed by your acidic tongue regarding his writing ability, were he but alive today.
My writing teacher told me the best way to make a character feel 'real' is to give them a motivation (A Goal, Want, or Need). We were given three questions to think about: 1) What do they want? 2) Why do they want it? 3) How do they go about trying to obtain it? So job, modus operandi, etc. This is the most varied since you go into function, alt-mode, etc. Even a one note character can have all of this like say Wingspan for example? He wants knowledge, because he's nosey or has a lot of curiosity about things, he does everything from research to spying on people. He'll even use violence to get information out of prisoners. I'm actually working on a Transformers Characters Motivation sheet to try and break this down (though I exclude the "How" for how varied it is and focus more on personality/character). I just love the dysfunction junction trope and creating the ultimate motley crews of Autobots/Maximals and Decepticons/Predacons.
Literally nothing here can even remotely be described as "hounding." Unless you were also "hounding" me after you replied to my first comment.
Is anybody else considering customizing the Bat Primal figure, in order to turn it into Nyx? Evem though we haven't met her character as of yet, I already consider her apart of my headcanon Maximal crew
New interview with Erik Burnham. Not much new, but it's nice to get more insight on the book's creation.
From the interview: Erik Burnham: One of the things we're going to be doing is adding in new characters... and we have some right up front in issue #1. Nyx, a new Maximal, was spotted on the cover to the first issue when the announcement was made and HOLY SMOKES, fans have theories, there's fan art, there are fan sculpts... she's no more than one image and she's already hooked a crazy amount of interest. And there's more where she came from. Hmm.
Good. And I bet he means both new characters like Nyx and new characters that weren't in the original series.
It's nice to know Erik and I kind of have the same background of only having watched BW and fallen in love with it after the fact, though he was old enough to have been able to watch it back in the day and didn't simply due to the fact that he didn't have a channel that provided it where he lived and I... was one year old when it originally aired so I wouldn't have had any meaningful memories of it from the time as is. But the point is this demonstrates that years after the fact, in spite of its age showing in terms of visuals, BW has a lot of staying power thanks to its excellent writing. And while there's the obvious cynical corporate side to all of this (Kingdom coming out and also the 30 year cycle) I fully believe both Erik and Josh are ecstatic to work on this book-- Josh definitely since he's a BW superfan, but clearly Erik as well-- and I hope it shines through in the end and opens up the floodgates for more new BW fans, especially those who might otherwise be put off by the original show's dated CG.
As long as it's well-written and the new characters serve a purpose / are well defined introduce all the OC's you want. I don't blame those who are skeptical though given IDW's poor history with original Transformers characters.
