The reboot was likely Hasbro giving them a final chance to retain the property. The numbers were going down long before the reboot.

 

I tried it too. Didn't stick with it.

I was actually surprised that IDW2 didn't try to connect the various Hasbro properties. Maybe the plan was to get there eventually, but the main book didn't get off of Cybertron fast enough.

 

Sorry, I was being snarky, let me link directly to the earlier stuff:
IDW to Lose ‘G.I. Joe,’ ‘Transformers’ License at End of 2022
IDW to Lose ‘G.I. Joe,’ ‘Transformers’ License at End of 2022
IDW to Lose ‘G.I. Joe,’ ‘Transformers’ License at End of 2022

Insider information? No. Basic analysis of how media consolidation affects content production and strategic focus on IP, instead of anti-superhero talking points? Got you covered.

 

I think this comes back to what I was saying before about comics being so frustrating to discuss here.

 

Personally, I've been happy to have Transformers comics NOT feature humans for a good long stretch.

And I say that as a fan of the Marvel run, which was also pretty human-heavy.

 

Frankly, a big element of the memory of the Dreamwave run is that it was building up hard into doing its version of the Transformers the Movie events (with a whole lot more), but shut down first, so there is always an element of "what if" there. The year 2005 can only happen once. It has the benefit of exquisite timing that can never come again.

I've been a very big proponent in the comics subsection of the next round of Transfomers comics have humans and the Transformers being really, really alien (not necessarily look, but in culture, in personality, vibe). One of the things I've written is that when Hickman took over X-Men, his goal was to intentionally make "the strangest heroes of all" a little bit uncomfortable for the reader. Well mission accomplished... and then some. Frankly, he did too good a job: I've been cheering for Orchis to genocide the hell out of mutie island, because fundamentally Krakoa is a terrible threat to the world and everyone that's going to end just like the last mutie island.

But the vibe Hickman brought to X-Men is pretty good for the franchise I think. It shook things up. I think Transformers can use the same. We, via the humans in the book, should be a bit discomforted by 20+ foot tall, 6 million year old robots landing on earth and extending their 4 million year old war to our planet in the name of energy. We should not intrinsically trust Optimus Prime has Earth's best interests at heart (something Furman got very right early in IDW1). And Megatron should be something unlike Earth's ever been seen - the black swan of black swan. The greatest threat the world's ever known. And culturally, technologically and behaviorally, this millions year old civilization which is visiting earth should engage in behaviors that we have no frame of reference for. IDW1 post-Chaos occasionally came up with some really smart things in this regard, but it was from the Cybertronians perspective. Next time, it shouldn't be.

The awe and the fear should go hand in hand. This is what X-Men does very well. They start acting normal and doing old school X-Men super hero stuff for a bit, and then you remember they live on this insane island with all their supervillians, dangling three drugs over the human race's head and have ambitions to rule the world one day. Getting the right artist-writer team to do this would be challenging, especially after IDW2's many problems.

But that said, everytime I bring this this up, I get boos because to a degree, it is certainly taking the Bayverse 2007 film's fundamentals even further, and lots of people want to see cutsey robots living their lives like every day people.

 

It's because collected editions are the greater revenue generators than individual comics now over the longer term. That entire concept didn't exist in the 80s and only emerged in a limited form in the 90s. If you buy monthly comics, you're basically buying chapters of a book now.

This is why the DC's business model going out to 2030 is going to look something like, cutting the number of monthly published comics on shelves down from ~30 to ~15 (mostly Batman, Superman, Justice League) and have most of their publications digital only. And then they'll do collected editions of their digital to sell at retail.

 

Well regardless of what one thinks of IDW as a whole there's no denying the comics left a big impact on the brand and will likely to keep on being in TF fans minds long after they're over. At this point we can only hope that Skybound comics/Image comics will be able to do a similar feat in the future and hopefully they won't try to overcorrect the flaws that IDW did bring to the point where they'll bring in a different type of flawed TF stories like for instance making them feel too alien to the point where it's more off putting then interesting.

 

God I'm so late to this but you know what? Very good point and now that I think about it? I think Hasbro will likely still go for it. Maybe not in movies for a good while but comics I can see them doing at least for G.I. Joe and Transformers because those franchises have been mashed up so consistently by them. Then again, we also still don't know necessarily who's gonna nab the license and what their plan is so you could be right and they could totally go for just standalone universes.

 

This is good but knowing Hasbro, they're still gonna license the IP out to another company. Just stop the comics. Comics are already dead in the water.

 

What's wrong with licensing it out even if the industry is weak? Hasbro gets paid, some fans get stories, everyone wins.

 

And if it makes even one penny it’s all upside for Hasbro. New Transformers media isn’t just an advertisement for the toys but a chance to develop new characters and IP to introduce.

 

I apparently made a no-no boo-boo in a previous post so I will tread carefully...

I'm still kind of new to the IDW stuff (though I've read a lot of phase 1 and 2, plus I'm picking up the current stuff) but it seems like most people thought phase 1 was ok and phase 2 was not? Personally, I kind of thought phase 1 was "eh." The art distracted me (I kept getting Rob Liefeld vibes) but the story was mostly interesting. However, I really thought phase 2 was creative. I liked that so many bots had so many different and, in some cases, weird personality quirks. I liked that the stuff on cybertron was a different take on the war (consequences) and that the Lost Light stuff was completely unlike anything I had seen in a while. I always liked the episodes of the original animation where they were out in space like Star Wars going weird places and encountering weird things. The current stuff seems really bland and rehashed to me compared to all the other stuff. Just curious what people hated so much about phase 2 (if they did).

 

I don't think Phase 2 has gotten hate so much as IDW2, the 2018 reboot. It's not universal, but there's a ton of love for MTMTE/LL, Wreckers, Barber's run, and other Phase 2 stories. IDW2 made creative choices that I really liked but that I concede are not broadly popular.

 

That must be my mistake. I can't seem to keep track of what is a phase and what is an IDW2 lol. I went to college! This shouldn't be that hard!  

 

Honestly, I think my problems with Phase 2 stem from the fact that they had to work with convoluted muddled continuity caused by the lack of vision and commitment to following through with how Phase 1 first started out with. It also didn't help that I really didn't like where Prowl was going after a while, and I kind of stopped/lost interest before the big Dead Universe event. I just got burnt out, there were too many books coming out and just, I don't know, reading the titles was starting to make me feel depressed. The fun was gone. And it had been gone for a long time with all that BS of the Ongoing before MtMtE and RID even started. Prowl was an utter jerk, Spike could kill a Constructicon for no fucking good reason.

I get that there's going to be death in an ongoing that uses so many characters and lore, but at least make the deaths serve a purpose other than some convoluted story idea or some half-baked BS thing where Spike could just create some kind of bomb out of whatever at a construction site and it kills a Cybertronian. Up until that point the IDW series wasn't like the movie series where you could just have humans killing Transformers, I could accept that in the movie series and I loved IDWs movie series and wish they'd kept telling stories in that universe because they actually did a pretty damn good job of it using the toys and giving them identities and filling in plot holes the movies were leaving wide open.

But yeah, Phase 2 just... I got fed up with it, burned out and frustrated and that was before we even started going into Hasbro Universe Avengers or the Prime Wars tie-in mandates from Hasbro.

It was too real world for my liking I guess, or something. It's hard to put a finger on why I changed as I read it. Really hard.

Hope that helps explain my POV on the subject at least.

 

Absolutely. All valid points. I feel like we can all have differing opinions so I like hearing what other people liked / disliked because sometimes I miss things. Thanks for replying.

 

There's much I enjoyed about Phase 2, but I'm in absolute agreement with the frustration that "Prowl (as) an utter jerk" seems to have become the default understanding of his character. That's just not the Prowl I came to know and love back in the day. (I blame Furman, though. It didn't just start in Phase 2)

 

There's no need for us to keep lumping on IDW or it's employees; their time with the license is winding down, and any new comics will be hard reboot.

It'd probably be better to start up a new thread for it, but I'd be curious on what people would want and hope for in a new comics line from a new publisher.

 

Nuance is fine, but please don't make the Decepticons too soft and cuddly or the Primes before Optimus too one-dimensional evil like IDW1 did. I feel like the IDW2 Decepticons and Seninel Prime were major improvements on that front.