Welcome Heroes in Disguise and Real American Robots to Cybertron SITREP, our new in-depth look at “Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe” by Tom Scioli and John Barber, published by IDW. For our first installment, we chat with John and Tom about the genesis of the project, as well as go in depth with both creators about the book in general.
In case you didn’t check it out, “Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe” was the Free Comic Book Day “Gold” comic from IDW. In that issue, there was a whole host of backmatter as well, including commentary from Tom and John. This column tries not to tread on the same ground too often, and taken together, provide a truly in-depth look at the creation of this comic.
That issue is also, as of today, free on ComiXology – so take a look!
We also have some exclusive process art to share with you throughout the article. So, without further ado, let’s get to it!
Before we dive into the issue, I’ll ask this: why do a #0 issue instead of a #1?
Tom Scioli: That way you get to have two first issues instead of just one.
John Barber: We’d planned out the early version of the story, as it would launch with issue one…Well, wait, let me back up. I should say Tom planned it out—he built a really detailed outline. But then it came up at IDW to do Transformers vs. G.I. Joe as our gold Free Comic Book Day comic. I guess we could have just used what would’ve been issue one, but I think Tom and I both felt like that wouldn’t work…I mean, then you’d be launching the regular series with #2, essentially.
I think Tom suggested doing a G.I. Joe mission where they run into the Transformers—like, anchor it to the G.I. Joe squad, as opposed to an all-out, full-scale mixing of the two—make it a G.I. Joe story where you’re with them and you meet the Transformers for the first time, but they only sort of realize what you see. I think the initial idea was a little more real-world, but I suggested doing something with the creeper bombs that Tom had already been talking about…and after a while, it turned into the final battle between G.I. Joe and Cobra. Which, at the scale this comic operates, is the prologue.
What’s the overall reaction been to the debut? I know what readers were saying at my local shop (loved it), but do you feel like the Free Comic Book Day premiere served the book well?
TS: It basically changed my life. There were a massive number of books in circulation, dwarfing any previous project I’d worked on. I was in Toronto for Free Comic Book Day along with Ed Piskor, and stayed for TCAF the following weekend. Being able to sign piles of books then have people tell you how much they loved it a week later was great. We were the toast of the town.
JB: Wow. I was just excited Gerard Way liked it. I’ve heard a lot of good things. I think my life is largely the same, but hey, we’ll see how it goes. I’m very, very pleased with the reaction. I saw, and actually still am seeing, a ton of people on Twitter just loving the comic.
Page One. Enter Starscream and Bumblebee. We’re dropped into the middle of a high-stakes space chase as they pass, what… Saturn? And here we have one of my absolute favorite devices of the issue—Cybertronian translations! It’s a great way of reminding us they’re aliens, but visually, it’s pretty cool too. What else inspired that particular choice? And why are Bumblebee and Starscream the first Transformers we see?
TS: Sound does not travel in space, so I imagined them communicating via electronic text messages, like the Watson computer that plays Jeopardy. He doesn’t listen to the questions, they’re texted to him.
Bumblebee was in the story first. Just him. He was a semi-mythical golden man that was seen by locals in the desert. He’s collecting energon to fuel his ship for the ride home. The G.I. Joes misidentify him as an enemy drone, and shoot, puncturing the energon cube, injuring the identical-looking Duke, Snake Eyes, and Hawk. Snake Eyes got the worst of it, Hawk’s injuries weren’t as bad, but he had to take a desk job, and Duke took on a drill sergeant role, rather than active combat.
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JB: Wow, that must have been a really early version…
I think the impetus for focusing in on just a couple Transformers characters is that if you’re using the G.I. Joes as your way in to the story, it makes sense to only have a couple of the Transformers. Plus, it’s a little like Alien/Aliens: when you introduce them, one or two are a big deal. But once you get hundreds of them, there’s no turning back. It gives us another avenue to play with. The interactions are really different in every issue as the series goes on.
And, plus, Bumblebee and Starscream are A-level Transformers. They’re characters people recognize, and they’re really good characters. They were the main characters in the other Transformers comic I write, Robots In Disguise, for the first year and a half. I love ’em.
Page Two & Three. I want to discuss the two pages together, because, well…that’s exactly how they work. Not quite a true double page spread/splash, but something just as exciting. The action’s taking place at the same time, and it literally melds the two worlds together. Up top, we have the series title worked into the gutter and connecting the two pages. And below, “The Flight of Bumblebee” ends, and “Operation: Doomsday Seed” begins. Tom, where these two pages drawn as one big page?
TS: They were drawn on separate pieces of paper, but each double spread in the issue was composed as a unit. I did a rigorous layout process with revision after revision, some of them filtering back into the writing process. I was pretty ruthless with the changes I was willing to make even up to the last minute. This comic was, and is, a big opportunity for me and I wanted it to be perfect.
Also, I love it that the first thing Snake Eyes does is take his mask off. For those in the know, it reads as a nice bit of foreshadowing, but it feels a little bit like a dare on your part. It’s a nice reminder that all bets are off in the all-new, previously unseen world of Transformers vs. G.I. Joe. You find yourself wondering, “Will Snake Eyes (or at least his face) meet the same fate as other Snake Eyes?” Which, of course, gets answered later on. But do the G.I. Joe and Transformers stories of the past box you in a little on what you can and cannot do? Or are you guys taking a true, all-bets-are-off take on these two franchises?
TS: The thing with page three lets you know you’re in for a roller coaster ride. You get classic Snake Eyes, the most well-known, well-loved Joe, exactly how you’d expect him, masked and silent, then in panel 2, he takes off his mask and he’s handsome and talking.
As far as it being an all-bets-are-off thing, you’re right. I’ve tricked my brain into thinking I’ve actually created all of these characters, so I can do with them as I wish. It’s informed by a knowledge and understanding of their history, but I’m going to treat them the way I’d treat my own characters in a creator-owned work. I couldn’t see doing the book any other way.
JB: I think that’s the only way to approach anything, really. I mean, I’m in pretty constant contact with Hasbro, but when you’re making a comic I think literally the only way to do it is to get into the heads and hearts of the characters; it’s not a matter of ownership in a literal sense, I think, but ownership of storytelling.
Incidentally, on Snake Eyes: when we released a preview of the issue, a couple got really mad that Snake Eyes spoke. Or, not mad exactly, because mad’s completely legitimate — but there was a reaction from a couple people implying that we, like, didn’t know he Snake Eyes didn’t talk. Like that detail had slipped by us. Like we read hundreds of G.I. Joe comics, grew up in the 1980s, and never caught that Snake Eyes was silent.
But yeah, I agree with Tom — that moment was kind of a line in the sand. What’s the one thing you never do? Well, here it is! But we get him where he needs to be by the end. I mean, making Snake Eyes good-looking and talkative completely ruins him—so I can see why you’d get mad, right? But, to me, the twist is this story turns out to be a Snake Eyes origin story.
Continued belowPage Four. It’s pages like this that make you love comics. In your own commentary, you identify the pyramid-like setting as “the ruins of ancient Cobra-La.” Is that particular corner of the Joe-verse something we might see more of eventually?
TS: People kept asking me if this book was a miniseries or a one-shot or what. It’s an ongoing series. We’re building a universe. And I want it to be a vast, wide-ranging universe with a rich past that puts the Marvel Universe to shame. And if we ever decide to stop working on this book, it’ll be picked up and continued by others.
JB: We do call the place by name a few pages later as “Koh-Buru-Lah.” That name showed up in one of the drafts — I can’t remember who came up with the name written like that, but it got mentioned, got expanded into a set piece, and then turned into the main location for the whole battle. I like that idea of, in the final comic, just throwing in an idea like Koh-Buru-Lah in and just letting it be. It implies a world beyond the pages of this book.
Page Five. How much discussion went into the Joe team we get here? I mean, do you guys really like Bazooka (sorry)? Like my question about Bumblebee and Starscream before, I’m interested in the cast and vehicle choices because there’s really no toyline to support, or marketing edict. You have the whole sandbox of both franchises to pull from, so how does that inspire the scope of the series?
TS: There was so much juggling of who to use, swapping out of characters, all the way up to the last minute. Bazooka resonates with me visually. He’s memorable looking. He’s red-white-and-blue. He has a name that equates with comics. “Bazooka Joe” being something of a symbol of the comics form itself. We pick the characters that fit the situations, that resonate with each other. Characters that contrast, complement. Sometimes even redundant characters that are too similar create a neat echo effect.
JB: The cast changed a lot. I was actually a little…I don’t know if “concerned” is the right word, but my instincts always tend to be “what’s the absolute minimum number of characters you need,” and…well, that’s not this book. And for me, it’s about figuring out what I’m doing here that works for the voice of the book, which is really basically Tom’s voice, and realizing that…like, if we’re a jazz band, this is a Tom record. Maybe I can go off and be Miles Davis on my own — not that I’m Miles Davis, but whatever I am, it doesn’t matter: this is a John Coltrane record, so even if I am Miles Davis (and again, I’m not) the record is still a John Coltrane record whether I’m playing or not. That doesn’t mean I’m not there, or that I’m not contributing, but if I was coming in and saying, like, “let’s try this with only five characters” that’s just not right.
So, ah, it kinda all works like notes in a big jazz record, right?
Also, to me, the whole thing reminds me of when I was a kid and I’d be playing G.I. Joe with Richie Lemon and we’d pick our guys, and we’d get a ton of action figure but we’d always have these five or six that were the main characters in our story. You still wanted the other guys around, even if the focus is going to be on Snake Eyes, Scarlett, Duke, Hawk, and Roadblock—or whoever.
Page Six. Dr. Venom’s cover story is kind of the best. Just ignore the skull and crossbones all over his suit. Nothing sinister. And Major Bludd loses an eye, but gains a few new fans of his poetry. How much fun is it to toss in those little bits from the file cards? And can we count on seeing those kind of personality Easter eggs when more Transformers start showing up? John, from a character standpoint, how much do those profiles effect who your versions of these guys end up being?
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TS: I thought those filecards would be a fun way to convey story information. It was one of the elements I remember best from the toys. You’d imagine the rich history of each character.
JB: I actually went back and looked at some of the original bios, especially the early Transformers ones, and it’s very, very cosmic. Like, the G.I. Joe filecards, I can still quote. I mean, I was six and I knew what an expert in all NATO and Warsaw Pact small arms was. Larry Hama wrote most of those, and they tended to fit in with the personality of the character in the comics. But the Transformers ones, there’s like a different path of evolution that didn’t get gone down… I mean, it seems to me that a lot of the Transformers characters went a different direction over the years, as compared to what their Tech Specs said.
Or, maybe more accurately: the Transformers ones are bonkers cosmic, and the G.I. Joe ones tend to have a little more grounding. Larry obviously knows the military world. But the Transformers stuff was big-scale space opera. I think going back to that, and using the way-larger-than-life aspects, works for the Transformers in this series.
To me, when I’m writing “Robots In Disguise,” the Transformers are regular people in a giant space war. But here, in “Transformers vs. G.I. Joe,” they’re like Greek gods. Their personalities are big, their reality is big. Everything’s a scale we humans can barely comprehend, and that only Tom can delineate.
Page Eight. So yeah, the first thing Cobra Commander does is kill four G.I. Joes. All first year, green shirt Joes looks like. Zap, Short Fuse, Shooter (nice inclusion!), and… who else is that? This might sound insane, but what’s your approach regarding the violence in this book? You mention in your commentary wanting to, at one point, go full one war comic. With such a unique look to the series, do you feel like that allows you to get away with more?
TS: That’s part of what makes the retro Kirby art so subversive. All is forgiven when it’s drawn in such a jaunty, colorful adventure art fashion.
JB: Well, he didn’t get to be Cobra Commander by not being dangerous. I think this is all about walking this weird line between the 1980s cartoon, with everybody parachuting out of exploding planes, and the comic, which was (and is) much darker and more violent and all the violence had repercussions.
Page Nine. This page, along with so many others, evoke the movement and poseability (or lack thereof if you’re a Transformer) of the classic action figures of both lines Many of the scenes look like the battles I’d wage with my G.I. Joes on my parents’ deck growing up – or, at least, how they looked in my head. Was there a conscious effort to create a look that was more evocative of the non-comics properties?
TS: The original G.I. Joe and Transformers comics were big sellers. That said, way more people know it just from the toys and the cartoons. That’s pretty much how I was before I started working on this. I’m working primarily from what speaks to me in the comics I’m reading now, the cartoons I’m watching, my nostalgic memories, and from what I imagine to be the expectations and familiarity of the readers.
JB: I don’t know — even at the time these were coming out, if you liked Batman there were Batman toys and cartoons and comics, and Spider-Man toys and cartoons and comics. As a kid, I didn’t really grasp any difference. It wasn’t until later that I really got hold of the idea that everything started as one thing. But I think the toyetic appeal of this stuff had a lot of influence on the early Image comics, too—those comics were sort of building on the G.I. Joe and Transformers toys. To me, it’s all linked.
Page Eleven: One of my favorite bits in the book is how Transformers are doing Transformer stuff, and the G.I. Joes/Cobra are too busy to notice. From a storytelling perspective, was it important for you to show each property in its own (mostly) self-contained story before having them collide?
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TS: If they had a more direct confrontation, it would be more of an issue #1 than an issue #0. I like the idea of them tangentially just barely meeting and misidentifying each other before going their separate ways, knowing they’ll meet in a more decisive way later on. As this series develops, I see “learning to understand the unfamiliar” as an ongoing theme.
JB: Yeah, beyond the action and zaniness, there is something actually going on philosophically here.
Anyway — on this page, and everywhere, Tom makes this stuff look so easy, but there is sooo much going on in these panels. Yet, they’re crystal clear. The drawing style makes it look like it’s simple, but try to unpack everything in panel two: the creeper bomb overtakes the rattler, Snake Eyes lands on the Rattler and shatters the canopy, Cobra Commander pulls his gun, Baroness loses control, Starscream changes to robot-mode and kicks Bumblebee in the chest, Roadblock is back in his M.A.C. helicopter shooting at Cobra while he’s thinking Starscream is some sort of a robot drone, the Cobra battlepods are shooting at Starscream, and the Skystriker is engaging the enemy. That shouldn’t work as a panel, and it totally does. I’ll never stop admiring Tom for not only sometimes pulling off a shot like that, but doing that on every panel in this comic.
Page Twelve: The iconic shot – if this isn’t soon a poster or t-shirt, IDW is dropping the ball. I suppose it makes sense that for G.I. Joe to be focused on the Transformers, Cobra would have to not really be a threat (at least early on). Was it always the plan to take Cobra off the board pretty early on? Or will they play an active role in the series?
TS: No, in fact, this aspect of the story was one of those magical developments that came in a late draft. Cobra Commander wasn’t even in the story at all for most of the drafts. It was one of those “bolt from the blue” ideas like “American Barbarian” or “Final Frontier” that I can only stand back and marvel at. It came from the ether.
JB: Yeah, there was an entire full draft of this comic written, plus another different one all laid out in pencils, both with this being a relatively small-scale G.I. Joe mission. Then Tom hit on that bolt from the blue, and it all made more sense and worked better.
Page Fifteen: The colors throughout the issue evoke a classic newsprint feel, which is quite different than the color palette used in the current Joe and Transformers books. This page, as noted in the backmatter, is exceptionally colored. Was the different palette to help distinguish the book as its own continuity, or was it simply an aesthetic that you guys dig?
TS: It makes it look classic. By doing that, it gives the book authority. It makes the other comics from the modern era seem derivative of what we’ve created, even though they predate us. It’s a psychological trick. How do you make a comic made in 2014 seem like it’s the first, last, and only version of these decades-old brands? This was our solution. It’s an aesthetic I like a lot, but it’s not the only one we considered.
JB: Yeah, I think every comic needs its own solutions. I mean, this comic really stands out against the other Transformers and G.I. Joe comics — which I really like their aesthetic, too. I really, really like good modern comics coloring; like on “Robots In Disguise,” Josh Perez and Joana Lafuente color that book amazingly. But I like seeing things that look different. Tom’s logic is interesting here — I like that thought.
For the uninitiated to the GI Joe universe, this issue provided them a very clear guide to who these characters are, and what their motivations and personalities entail. Will readers get a clearer view of the Transformers side of the book in the future?
JB: It’s important to me, for anything but especially for a Free Comic Book Day comic, that this comic is accessible. Ted Adams over here at IDW was very concerned before we started that this comic would be clear to somebody that hasn’t got a master’s degree in Transformers and G.I. Joe. There are times where you can get a little more inside-baseball on some stuff, I think…but FCBD isn’t the place.
After we finished the issue, he read a PDF of it and called me and..I don’t know if you noticed, but this comic is a little unusual. So I didn’t know how Ted – how anybody – would react. I mean, up to this, it was Tom, me, Carlos Guzman (our editor), and Michael Kelly and the team at Hasbro who’d seen it – but I’d only talked to Michael about it, from the Hasbro side. So the first person I see reading it is Ted, the owner of IDW.
And the first thing he said was that it was totally accessible. And it’s funny, because as far out as the story goes, as complicated as the formal aspects of the comic are, it does walk you into this world. “Here’s what G.I. Joe is; here’s who Snake Eyes, Scarlett, Duke, everybody is. And what’s this mystery of the Transformers?”
So, ah, yeah—that’s exactly the plan with the Transformers, too. I don’t want to count on anybody having everything about the characters memorized… but if you do know everything, I think you’re in for a fun ride, too.
TS: The balance in this issue is a little more on the Joe side than the Transformers side. That balance will vary from issue to issue. The issue we’re currently working on, #2, is very Transformers-heavy.
While many, if not most, of the readers of this series had the opportunity to pick up the issue on Free Comic Book Day, some will be entering #1 with totally fresh eyes. Will the first issue be a traditional “setting up the book” story, or will it jump in a little faster, due to the #0 issue?
TS: I treat each issue as a stand-alone mini-movie, but like the Marvel movies with bits and pieces carry over from chapter to chapter. Each one is a complete reading experience, a complete aesthetic experience for that matter. That extends to the look of the book, too. The art is very different in issue #1, although still related to the art in this issue. It’s a new look for my work that I’m very excited about sharing with the world. I think some people will be blown away by it.
JB: Yeah, this is a prologue issue, not an if-you-missed-it-you’re-out-of-luck issue. Issue 1 is issue 1. If you’d never read any comic at all, issue 1 is a good point to jump in to the medium. But wherever you’re coming from, things have changed by the time issue 1 occurs, so it’s not like we’ll be going over the same set-up—the status quo is different by the time #1 starts, so in a way, everybody’s on the same footing coming in to the issue.
I know you both have big plans in place for the series. Without giving too much away, how much foreshadowing takes place in the issue? Are there any particular beats that fans should pay particularly close attention to? Any teasers you’d like to drop on us? I mentioned to you once before how I felt there was a deliberate inclusion of a Storm Shadow – like reflection in Cobra Commander’s helmet there at the end. Admittedly, though, it’s not that unusual for me to just imagine random visions of Storm Shadow. I blame Larry Hama.
JB: There are like three really big things in this zero issue that seem like they just stand alone in this issue, but are actually set-ups for big stuff to follow. But I can’t tell you what.
TS: Pay attention to all of it. When John first floated the idea of us possibly maybe kinda sorta doing a Transformers vs. G.I. Joe comic, I immediately began work on it. I can’t help myself. I needed to have an understanding of the whole breadth and scope of the universe in order to tell the story the way it needs to be told. That rough sketch of the entire universe, past, present and future informs many of the choices and incidental details in this issue. It was a gamble that paid off.
Thanks to John and Tom for their time, and we will see you all back here in July to discuss #1!
