Introduction: Hello again listeners, it’s been a while, but yes, WWAC Radio is back from the dead! And in fact, we’re back as a cyborg monstrosity, because this week, or month, or year—let’s go with ‘episode’—our stalwart Cybertronian correspondent, Rachel Stevens is talking to James Roberts, who’s the current writer of uh, More than Meets the Eye, the Transformers series from IDW, and he’s been writing that for… coming up on nine or ten years! There’s something for new readers, there’s something for old hands, there’s all sorts in this one! You’ll wanna give it a full listen! Without further ado I’ll turn it over to Rachel Stevens and James Roberts!
[MUSIC]
Rachel Stevens: I’m Rachel Stevens, and this is James Roberts, who I’m interviewing today!
James Roberts: Hello, we– we’ve got through some communication problems, we can hear each other, and I hope you can hear us, let’s do this!
RS: Alright, so, just to start uh, with uh, what do you do for IDW right now?
JR: Right now for IDW I am writing the ongoing Transformers: More than Meets the Eye titles. So, IDW’s got two ongoings, the other one was formerly known as Robots in Disguise, that’s now just “The Transformers”, because there’s a TV series with the same name coming out soon. So, um, Transformers and its sister title More than Meets the Eye both came out at the same time back in 2012, still going strong, and until someone takes me away, off it, that’s what I’m doing each month!
RS: Fantastic. Would you like to describe briefly, like—how would you sum up the series to a newcomer? I mean, I know you have these questions all sorts—all the time, but, y’know, just for the Women Write About Comics audience.
JR: Yeah, okay! Um, right, well it’s, um, on one end of it, it’s an old-fashioned quest, so, y’know, the high-concept pitch is that a group of Autobots in the main, with a couple of Decepticons and wild cards in there too, a group of Transformers set off from Cybertron in search of the maybe-real, maybe-not Knights of Cybertron, their sort of ancestors, and it’s a sort of multi-year quest, it’s an Odyssean type of story in that they’re going away from home, and enroute they get into all sorts of shenanigans and there is— It’s really about the personalities of the people involved. They’re all slightly damaged goods. They’re all a bit… well-worn, a bit careworn, and they’ve each got issues. It’s a story of them getting to know each other, and finding ways to survive now that the war’s ended, which, surviving may be more difficult psychologically than they anticipated. Um, but yeah, it’s about them— it’s built around this loose framework, a couple of quests, but it’s really an excuse to tell strange and unusual and sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking stories about these… these group of people who’ve been thrown together on this uh, long adventure.
I think it’s easy to get into, I think—y’know, yes, it’s—it makes good sense to start with volume one of the trade paperbacks, volume one covers the immediate aftermath of the Transformers war, as I said, this is like a postwar setup, so if you’ve got More than Meets the Eye volume one, you’ve got the broader, sort of uh, setup for the two ongoing series, and then… off we go on the quest, and, y’know, just… just go with that, is my advice.
RS: Well, I guess the next question is, like, related to the setup of Death of Optimus Prime, actually.
JR: Hm.
RS: I would recommend to people who haven’t read my articles or More than Meets the Eye, or Robots in Disguise and Windblade… stop that! Please go read them right now!
JR: [laughs]
RS: And then come back to this!
JR: We can wait, we can wait.
RS: [laughs] Death of Optimus Prime, what I thought was fascinating, was the very alien appearance of the NAILs, that Nick Roche drew beautifully, and colored beautifully by Josh Burcham, the designs were just fantastic and suitably not human.
JR: Yeah, and that was– that was um, we all credit Nick for– for visualizing them, and John and I said in—John Barber, who cowrote The Death of Optimus Prime with me—yeah, we said in the script that we wanted to, we wanted some sort of more fantastic and non-humanoid designs, because the idea was that a lot of the Cybertronian civilians had left the planet and run away (for good reason) when the war broke out. And four million years had passed. So the idea was we were getting a glimpse here of the multiplicity of Cybertronian designs, the variations on the form that we may not see, because I guess we were saying, though I don’t know if we thought about it this much, I guess we were saying that um, in terms of the two warring factions, that for whatever reason, the ‘default’ design or the default soldier, the military design was analogous to a humanoid shape, really, and we may have missed out on some of the weirder and more non-human, fantastical designs, that were maybe part and parcel of Cybertronian society four million years ago.
Having said that, um, again, in hindsight now we’ve sort of developed the… more of the backstory in terms of prewar society and this idea of the Functionalists—or was it the Functionists? And their almost societal ideology about how “you’ll do the job that’s dictated by your design and by your shape”. I look back at Death of Optimus Prime and I wonder, y’know, what some of these non-humanoid characters actually turn into, and what function they served. It’s not incompatible, but it would need some more thought if we were to revisit some of those characters that appeared in Death of Optimus Prime.
RS: That actually leads into what I was going to ask you next. I'm just curious if you thought about... For those who aren't aware, female Transformers proper were able to be introduced during the Dark Cybertron event, which I am very relieved by. I'm sure my audience is as well.
JR: [laughs]
RS: I was curious if… obviously the Caminus origin was used. I'm going to ask you about that in detail in a bit too, but I was curious if you considered introducing gender via the NAILs who had gone to alien planets and perhaps learned about gender from those beings.
JR: Yes. Although we didn't have that conversation, John and I at the time when we brought the NAILs back. Although… it was actually in the lead up to, I can't remember what the dates were, but obviously the way these things work, we knew—John and I knew some time in advance that… Of course Windblade was the winning design in a, you know, in a competition, wasn't it? To create a character. There was some delay obviously between that design winning, and Windblade making an appearance, and in that period of time when John and I were talking about how to integrate the character into the main books and, you know, explain it, her arrival, I think, you know, we were talking about different ways in which it could make sense. And um, the gender question, I mean… and one of them I remember was, you know, well, maybe there's they've just, you know, best part of them was… not so much infiltration, but part which was the sorry, I'm conscious of your non-Transformers fans here. Infiltration was a story staple way back at the beginning of IDW's run. Where it's, I guess, explaining Cybertronians’ capacity to blend in on alien worlds, the idea was that Decepticons would infiltrate and take over by stealth.
Anyway, John and I, I think, talked about how it may have been through spreading across the universe, away from the war and, you know, acclimatizing and adjusting and learning about other societies, that may be… that could well have been where some Cybertronians thought that, OK, well, I will assume that gender, I will go by those personal pronouns, or whatever.
RS: Yeah.
JR: Yeah, it was… yeah, there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about, you know, in the lead up to the Windblade, the introduction of Windblade as to how this was going to make sense, and I stress, in the context of what had gone before. I can't remember all the various ways in which we suggested explaining it, but in the end I think it was a case of, well, less is more, isn’t it? And you'll know, having read Dark Cybertron, that we didn't rush to immediately explain it away. It just, there we go. I think there was enough of a… there was a recognition among the other characters that, you know, Cybertronians referring to themselves as she wasn't standard. If you– if you know what I mean? It wasn't the normal way. It wasn't what they were used to at the time, and I think John and I felt it was something which could be explored yet in due course outside of Dark Cybertron.
RS: And I think you did an admirable job setting things up for the Windblade miniseries, in fact!
JR: Yes, well, we knew that was coming next as part of the sort of, you know, season 2, Dawn of the Autobots launch. So it was only right that, you know, that stuff was… that sort of ripe backstory stuff was left to the miniseries proper. I remember actually in the Dark Cybertron story when we had Nautica and Chromia here at the end of… part seven, I think it was. They're inside Metroplex and they drop out of the ceiling and surprise the Lost Light group. But I was keen to not have— because of course Windblade doesn't appear, Windblade comes in the next part, but we wanted… I remember John and I wanted there to be more than one, you know, quote unquote, “fembot”. And it couldn't just be Windblade. We wanted to suggest that there were others. And I know for a long time the plan, what I wanted to do, was have these two fembots come down from the ceiling but not be immediately, sort of, you know, not have that sort of female design. You know what I mean.
RS: Mhm.
JR: But just to look like, you know, a Magnus and a Rodimus or whoever, but to look like the default Cybertronian design that we were used to. And it would only be so, you know, upon arrival, visually you wouldn't have clocked that they were different, but it would only be through their use of the, you know, a certain personal pronoun that it would register that they were female. So that was something I wanted to do, but for the sake of… bearing in mind that these were characters no one had seen before, and we wanted to say there were now fembots in the IDW universe aside from Arcee, it was felt that it was important visually for that connection to be apparent on that last splash page. So the original idea was shelved.
RS: I need you to just know how happy that idea makes me feel. For various reasons.
JR: Oh, okay!
RS: So thank you.
JR: [laughs] Cool.
RS: Gosh, I want to briefly talk about the estriol headache you just did with Nautica and her spark.
JR: Oh yeah.
RS: Especially in relation to the fact that the theme of season 2, at least the opening so far, has been the theme of edits and authors, and… you know, relating the two to each other.
JR: Yeah. So this was… a real life edit. [laughs] The backstory to this is that in… is it 31? Issue 31 of More than Meets the Eye. It's a ship in a bottle episode. It takes place entirely on this… on the Rodpod, which is a little shuttle pod, and the cast, they’re trapped on for the duration of the issue and they're disappearing apparently randomly and it's left to the remaining crew members to work out what the pattern behind the disappearances is. And because I love, you know, world building and I love, I love giving readers new information, whether it's about Cybertronian. society, or about the characters themselves, I wanted to use this conceit as a means by which to give, you know, sort of, you know... big glugs of information. And so in between each disappearance, as they're trying to guess what the connection is, we sort of pick a category and then we see how that category or… how each of the remaining characters fit into that category, and one of the categories was sparktype. And so we'd established already in More than Meets the Eye that there were different spark types. I think we'd only named one, back in issue 12, so here was an opportunity to give some insight into the other types out there.
And all the Cybertronians other than Nautica had one of six, I think sparktypes. And then Nautica had a unique one, “estriol”, which was… it was a detail on the page, that label underneath her headshot, and then, you know, the story moved on. It wasn't germane to the story, you know, it wasn't… the disappearances weren't linked to their sparktype, it was a red herring, it was a false alarm, whatever, but the information was out there. And I've done that, I… I differentiated her from the others. Principally, to create a worldbuilding hook, if you like, to return to at some point in the future, should I want to, heavy quotation marks, “explain” why she was not like the other people that we were used to. And this was a… this impulse, I guess, was a residual from the days of doing Dark Cybertron, when John and I, as I was saying before, were trying to rationalize the appearance of a group of female Transformers when everything to date... I was gonna say with the exception of Arcee, but in a way that sort of made it more complicated. Everything to date, including the Arcee story, suggested that there weren't fembots, or they were somehow anomalous, in Arcee’s case. So I thought, OK, well, let's, let's maybe there's a… maybe the difference is somehow linked to their spark. So I will, I will give Nautica a strikingly different spark. It'll be clear that she's the only one of that group with that spark, and the implication will be it's to do with her femaleness. So I did that, and that was at issue 31. And then I thought… And this happens often, you know, I can't think of any More than Meets the Eye issues I’m entirely happy with, but this particular detail bugged me. And I’d sensed as well… I'm not going to claim ignorance, I'd sensed as well that it… in some quarters it was unpopular for reasons that I came to appreciate. And… it bugged me for two reasons.
Firstly, I thought, well, why? Why? Why make that the difference? Why? Why is it… that's almost too easy. Why make the spark type the difference? Why not think, think more about the fembot question and explore what gender means in the Transformers universe, in a different way? It may be me, it may be Mairghread, it could be John, it could be just an as yet unidentified future author, but you know, it can be left to be explored in a different way. That was the first thing, and the second thing was, you know, I’d obviously used... I'd linked the name to something which was feminine. And that was… that's a weakness of mine in that, you know, people who read More than Meets the Eye will know that I like playing with words and I like the etymology of words, and I like to use Latin or Pig Latin to give a veneer of respectability, or depth, whatever to to what I'm doing, and so that's where I'd reached for that name. Trying to be clever. But of course it just made it worse. So for those reasons, and because it amounted to one word on one page, I was able when the time came to prepare volume six of the trade, I was able to say to John, look, you know, I've got misgivings about this. It's a minor edit, but it's an important one, so it could be just replace that word with another word, give Nautica a sparktype which is, you know, one of the six main groups. And then all the other stuff about exploring or contextualizing or defining, you know, Transformers gender, that can come in time, but that word on that page and that issue, that's not the way to do it. And here we are now talking about it!
RS: Thank you. Definitely curious about some of the context. And you know, can I just say it didn’t bug me too much? Obviously, as a transgender woman, I can appreciate the difference between something being inherently something, like chromosome stuff, but even then, that's still… iffy, cause, you know. There's XY and all that, but—
JR: Yeah.
RS: Even then, I understood what you were going for? So I can say that I wasn't personally bothered by it.
JR: Mhm.
RS: Especially because it still allowed for possibly transgender characters later on.
JR: This is true. That particular avenue of exploring binary gender or the equivalent, or– or multiple genders and the idea of certain characters feeling that, you know, they've been miscategorized, whatever, I mean, we can still go there. It was hamfisted of me, I think, to sort of use a label that was inherently female, which… I don't know, I just think, let's try and be a bit smarter than that.
RS: I appreciate that. Thank you. Going into the transgender question, because I’m me and I have to do this, the label for Tailgate in the… for the teasers for season 2 of More than Meets the Eye—
JR: Oh, yes.
RS: Was the gendering of that word intentional?
JR: Um, I'll be honest, it wasn't. It wasn't. I like… I loved it when I found out it can be—in fact, if anything, it’s, it should be read as a female word—as “ingenue”, wasn't it? Yeah. So I'm, no, I was pleased when I found out it sort of had that scope, and I mean I'm happy for… I think I've said I've said elsewhere, that you know, each of the characters have human holomatter avatars which they can engage, if needs be, and we've established in previous issues that they can be… they can be devised by the by the character or they can be sort of a reflection of their subconscious somehow, and they can translate. I guess the holomatter device somehow reads their subconscious and turns it into a humanoid representation or whatever. And we've seen Tailgate as a baby strapped to Swerve’s back in issue 13, and I’m happy for that to be a female baby. There's nothing— I don’t think there’s anything to suggest otherwise. And someone else asked me what Cyclonus’s human avatar would be, and there’s something about Cyclonus where I just think a sort of a… a stern Victorian schoolmarm or something would somehow fit.
To be fair, going back to the original, to Simon Furman’s original series, miniseries, I think some of the avatars were female, I think Bumblebee’s avatar was a… Lindsay Lohan.
RS: Yes, absolutely.
JR: So I'm not breaking any new ground there.
RS: Whirl with their pigtails, and stuff.
JR: And of course, Whirl with the pigtails, yeah, that kind of thing. And I mean, Ultra Magnus had a Verity look alike for slightly different reasons.
RS: I'm just very curious if the Tailgate hinting was intentional or if you were going to tease anything with their interactions with Nautica or anything they consider that, because of how naïve they are, how little of the world they knew, but obviously that's… that will be coming up later on, if anything. So if that's, you know, too prying, I understand.
JR: Yeah, I mean, I… I like to keep my options open, and it's like on Twitter when I get asked, and I love that people feel able to ask questions. A lot of questions I can't answer, either because it gives something away, even in sort of whether I'm saying yes or no, something, it could give something away that could lead to people reading stuff into things. And also because I don't want to, I don't want to pass comment on something which I may… you know, I may go there in the future, so I put that in that category. It’s… the more that More than Meets the Eye continues, and the more characters we get, and the more we get into a post-Windblade world where questions of gender as we've just discussed, you know, inevitably bubble to the surface, then, you know, all these sorts of story ideas could well take shape. And I don't know. I want the journey of discovery to happen organically with readers. If I speculate, I could speculate now and I could say, oh yeah, we could do that, we could do this, but I might inadvertently shut off avenues of exploration, do you know what I mean?
RS: Thank you for obliging me in this moment, I appreciate it. I appreciate it for just, you know. I’m just a very curious sort.
JR: No, of course, that's good. That's good. Curiosity is good, I hope. I hope the comic makes people curious and ask questions and things, that's… positive.
RS: And related to Windblade in a different avenue, how excited are you to possibly utilize but to not necessarily use the colony worlds established in that miniseries?
JR: Oh yeah! Yeah. Well, I mean anything which… I think it's come at a good time, to me, you know, establishing the existence of these ones, just... It opens up the Transformers, the IDW Transformers universe again, and it potentially steers us in a different direction. And I'm talking sort of a macro level here. We've sort of done… we're talking nine years worth of stories. In the same continuity. I think it's the longest running… OK, oh no, we could get into arguments here, I don't know, but I mean—
RS: [laughs]
JR:Yeah, well, G1 was 84 to 94, if you count the G2 series— Anyway. But it's a, I think it's the largest body of work around a single continuity, I think. Tenth anniversary next year. And you know, you can, there’s almost different movements or different epochs within— different gear shifts within the IDW storyline. When we started off, they were at war, but you know it was— it wasn't the type of war that we were used to. As I said, it was this sort of stealth warfare based around infiltration, cyberforming… And then you know, with all Hail Megatron, we still have more of, you know, the sort of classic G1 animated skirmishes and so on. Then you know, then the war finished and it's still finished. And we ran that for a couple of years. We're still running with it, But it’s, you know, it's time for another sort of seismic change. And I think that change is in the endless possibilities around countless colony worlds containing who knows which characters, doing what— oh, I spilt my tea. I'm getting animated.
It's great. It's, you know, we've… and also, the Transformers universe, for better or worse, has been quite closed for a time. I mean, even with The Death of Optimus Prime, when John and I brought the NAILs back, we wanted to sort of say, you know, there's more. There's more Cybertronians. There's civilians now and all that entails, it's not just that you have good guys and you have bad guys, y’know, fighting. There's a third faction. You know, the noncombatants. And then the colonists, another variation on that theme, and the worldbuilding in More than Meets the Eye, the exploration of Cybertronian society, both pre war and post war. That's all about, you know, coloring in the background to this nine, ten year old continuity. It's trying to keep it fresh and keeping it moving forward. And not sort of reverting back to the status quo, which, and again I've said before, is something which I think is a real strength with the IDW Transformers continuity. There isn't this sort of inexorable gravitational pull back to the default setting of Autobots versus Decepticons on Earth. We've still done, and I find ways to, you know, we create the tensions between the factions, and there’s still skirmishes, there’s still battles.
But we’ve hopefully mixed it up and churned it up a lot more, creating a different type of story in the process.
The Windblade worlds will just open up more avenues for exploration. And, you know, if you think of the Spotlights as a vehicle for telling, you know, more telling self-contained stories focusing on individual characters, we might find that the colony worlds perform a similar function. If you want to, you know, explore what would otherwise be seen as a different continuity, you know, like, a Beast Wars. Probably. I'm, I don't know. I'm— I'm not hinting at anything and I don't know what the plans are, but that's my take on it.
RS: Ah, gosh, I got back into Transformers, partly because of the IDW series and partly because of Wreckers, which you will never escape.
JR: [laughs] There are worse things.
RS: [laughs]
JR: Well, that's good. So you got— when were you? When did you lapse, then? What was your prior to IDW? What did you grow up with?
RS: Beast Machines, actually. And Robots in Disguise 2001.
JR: Oh, wow. OK, OK. It still scares me— I still just assume that everybody is a G1er. But now I forget. I forget that people age and I age, and I remember we had… my stepdaughter had a boyfriend round. This is a couple of years, three or four years ago, had a boyfriend round for tea. I was in [? 26:02], sounds very English, and I must have been… I must have been writing Transformers then, because this came up in conversation. And he said, “oh yeah, no, I'm a huge Transformers fan”, he said “I grew up with them, you know, Optimus Prime, Dinobot, all that stuff”. And I felt very old then, you know! RS: [laughs]
JR: Because I thought I was… I thought, yeah, that happened didn't it? When you say Beast Machines and Car— particularly Car Robots. That's… wow. That's a niche.
RS: I’m very young. It's very exciting to see some of the Car Robots characters like Sky-Byte in what was formerly Robots in Disguise, and Windblade as well. And of course Waspinator. It's been very fun to see reinterpretations and… gosh. It is funny, you mentioned growing up with G1 and watching it age. I have a friend who grew up in India in the 90s, but it was almost like a time warp for her because she had Beast Wars toys, but she watched episodes of the G1 cartoon.
JR: Okay! And something else I suppose, there is— there is the link in the end, isn't there? Between Beast Wars and G1, but if she wasn't watching the series, then that wouldn't have become apparent. 30 years old. You know, there's going to be even more opportunities to mix and match when it comes to characters and settings and things. And the most popular ones will endure and it will just become richer, is the hope. And you know, other people now— other people will be Bayformer fans.
RS: [laughs] Well, let's see about something happier. Speaking of reinterpretations, I did read Eugenesis a couple years ago.
JR: Oh, yeah.
RS: And I remember, even back then we're using the TFUK, uh, Transmasters UK rather, interpretation of Star Saber as a despot.
JR: Yes.
RS: And you're taking some of that into your IDW thing. So could you address, like? Like the creative process, like how much consideration you have for the original material versus your reinterpretations? And like all the influences that you consider? Like, just using Star Saber as an example, because I've seen some grumpy people about that. But I personally think yours is a valid interpretation.
JR: Yeah, OK. Transmasters UK was an unofficial fan club based in the—surprise, surprise, based in the UK—and it really… there was a Transmasters fanclub based in America. This was an offshoot built around the… more of the UK continuity, and it really came into its own after the UK comic finished. And the fans, like myself, were very keen for the story to continue, and I think, remarkably in hindsight, collaborated for many years on continuing the story. As I say, collaboratively, you know play, you know, work still, all of us cooperating within the same sort of sand pit. And a few years into that, whatever you'd call it, continued storyline, Star Saber was a… Yeah, he was, he was a despot, he ruled a future version— well, future Cybertron, within the TFUK continuity. And yeah, but— I’m respectful towards, you know, my one time collaborators in Transmasters UK, so I didn't… I wouldn't sort of think, oh, I'll take some of those ideas and put them in More than Meets the Eye, because it wouldn't be fair to them. The use of Star Saber in Remain in Light, in the end of season one’s story, was because I wanted a new Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accords, so Tyrest needed a new right hand man, and I think that's what… we've been here before, in terms of trying to find iconic G1 characters of a certain stature, and, you know, with some power behind them, that haven't been used yet, and Star Saber is one of the few, or was one of the few, that haven't been poached and used and established within the IDW continuity. So he was going spare, he was going free. I would argue that the Star Saber of the IDW world is a religious fundamentalist. He's an evangelist. He's a psychotic evangelist, actually. And so it's— to me, it’s a different version. What they have in common is they're not nice, and you know, you are taking an Autobot character, indeed, an Autobot character who was incredibly virtuous, almost Thunderclash-like, in his perfection of the character. And so you're taking an Autobot character and you’re turning him bad. So I can see there is that difference. But the nature of his character, the nature of his evil, I think was markedly different between the original TFUK interpretation and the More than Meets the Eye one.
RS: Understood. I sincerely thought that there was a connection there, and thank you for correcting that!
JR: No, no, no, that's OK. But I mean in terms of, you know, more broadly in interpretations, yeah, I think it's an organic thing. I don't think the current crop of writers will look at an established character, by which I mean, you know, a known character— Like Skids or something, you know, a character that exists as a toy and is known to fans and has that sort of recognition factor. I don't think we'll sort of clinically think, OK, how can we reinterpret that person? How can we use him differently, or use her differently? But sometimes the situation will demand a certain type of character and you think actually, you know what? Bit like Skids, that person would fit in there, you know, and actually maybe be more interesting, if you look at this person from a different angle, or we reinterpret him. I know that for some people, the Ratchet of More than Meets the Eye is different, even from the Ratchet that came before, in some of the earlier IDW stories as well. To a degree, it’s driven by the needs of the story. If you're dealing with a character that hasn't got a strong presence already—like I said, maybe Ratchet’s the exception to that rule because it is sort of probably a bit of a different direction—and I guess Drift as well. The Drift of More than Meets the Eye is not really the Drift that had come before, although we did… I was careful to attribute that change to his near death experience at the end of Chaos. So, you know, he's, he nearly attempts to commit suicide, he survived, it changed his outlook on things, and the and the environment that he found himself in thereafter on the Lost Light with Rodimus and so on, encouraged this character development in a certain way, and led to this sort of uber-believer and an optimist that he was during his time on the Lost Light.
RS: I adore your Drift. I did not much care for Drift prior, but I did sincerely enjoy your interpretation of Drift, so I do appreciate that.
JR: Oh, thank you! Thank you. Yeah, he's… hopefully we saw through More than Meets the Eye that he was very, very optimistic and upbeat and open on the outside. But he still harbored, you know, he still harbored some darkness within, and this was really his way of coping. Which probably describes most of the characters on the Lost Light. They’ve all got different coping mechanisms, really.
RS: I'm curious to see how Empire of Stone lore relates to More than Meets the Eye. I saw an interview with McCarthy actually, about how he's not going to be taking so much of the hippie portrayal in the series, and I'm a bit disappointed by that. I am curious, like, how much he's working with you, if at all, for continuity, or at least John Barber.
JR: Yeah, I mean, well. With John sitting above us both there's no, there's no risk of anything being out of continuity. But I mean, Shane is familiar with More than Meets the Eye, you know, he read up on Drift’s appearances before he began work on Empire of Stone, and it all fits in nicely. It's… obviously we've already established that drift is out there, and you'll know that Ratchet is also in this mini series as well, and that will be explained and… I don't, I can't really say too much without giving things away, but just by way of reassurance…
RS: Of course, of course.
JR: …It's all planned, it all fits. And yeah, I mean, as I've said, there's different facets to Drift’s character, and I think the environment within which he operates or exists, is an influencing factor on how he acts. So, yeah, I mean, it's great. So yes, go and embrace it.
RS: Alright, I will absolutely give it a go. I just… I try not to be blindly loyal. I do like to critique the work, as it were? But I do, I, gosh, I do love it very much. I love what you guys have done with IDW, how fresh you’ve made the universe, how much new and great material you come up with.
JR: Well, thank you. You know, it's funny, it's because it's been going for so long now because there's so many books out there. You know, I imagine it can be daunting to a non Transformers fan, to a comics fan who wants to dip their toes in those waters, to know where to start. And I don't blame them. But, I mean IDW are very good at you know packaging up the old stuff, you know, in ways that make sense. And, you know, if anyone has made it this far, if any non-Transformers fan has made it this far into the interview, then you know, as I said, a good jumping on point remains More than Meets the Eye volume one, because it's got The Death of Optimus Prime in there, and from then you can go and follow the Robots in Disguise trades, and More than Meets the Eye trades, and Windblade, and so on. That's almost the beginning of, well, that's literally the beginning of what we're calling phase two of the IDW universe. So you can absolutely start there. If you really want to get in at the beginning, then you can get some good omnibus collections which package up about 16 or issues, and do so in as close to, you know, a recommended reading order, as is possible. And TFWiki is also a really good resource for, if you just want to read very tightly written praises of back issues, then that's where you start. But I'm saying all that because I do wish, I do hope that a lot of people, non-Transformers fans would give it a go and discover it for the quite richly populated fictional universe that it’s become.
RS: I personally recommend the series to anyone and everyone who enjoys compelling characterization and humor. And a splash of horror lately, especially so.
JR: Yes. Well, yes, we've taken a darker turn in Series 2 so far.
RS: But I have convinced at least a dozen people to check out More than Meets the Eye and Robots in Disguise, personally. About 20 people to read Wreckers, I believe. I've loaned out my copy of the trade quite often, yeah.
JR: Oh, well done, because every time we pick up a new reader I get a thousand dollars, so it's absolutely worthwhile. And I give it all to charity.
RS: I really want people to give the series a shot. It's well done, it's welcoming, it is not merely a toy ad, which is what turns all the people off. It is far from that.
JR: Thank you, yes. Well, you're a good… you're a good sort of ambassador for the series.
RS: A thing that I've noticed and observed in your works, and I think this is worth mentioning in the interview, is the removal of agency from your characters by the state.
JR: Right, yeah.
RS: My girlfriend actually dislikes some of Shockwave’s characterization there, because what she liked about the character was that he chose to be logical and, you know, he chose his appearance per se, but you stripped out the agency of him as a character through the shadowplay, and the empurata. Personally, I think it was an interesting choice, but it ties into what you're going with, with More than Meets the Eye, the Senate removing agency from your characters.
JR: Yes.
RS: Similar to Trepan binding and restraining and invading Megatron's mind. And of course, Shockwave’s mind being altered and the body changed, and of course, poor Whirl! Who will never be the same again, just like… you could almost see Shockwave as a bridge between Whirl and Megatron because of it.
JR: Yeah. You're… no, I take all those points and yeah, I mean it's because the loss of agency and the removal of agency is terrifying. And actually, in the broader context of More than Meets the Eye, which is all about personal decisions and their consequences. Then, you know, to me… a profound expression of totalitarianism and the abuse of the state is robbing you of your ability to make choices, to make informed choices, to exercise free will—having all those things forcibly removed is terrible. And so this is principally, but not entirely pre war, when the Senate was in its final phase, and the Functionist Council was still looming large. This was what lay beneath an ostensibly a peaceful and prosperous and non-warring society, was the lengths that the government would go to. To silence dissent, to make you malleable, to put you in your place. And I was careful, I think, with that as a backdrop and having seen what happened to Shockwave in terms of the mnemosurgery, the shadowplay in particular, and to a different extent what happened to Whirl, Issue 34 and what happened to Megatron, I knew…I mean, it would be terrible. If Megatron had been entirely, you know, rewritten, if his personality had been got at, and he was robbed of agency from that point forward, because it would have ruined, you know, any sort of character development or or exploration or the direction of his life from that point forward, it wouldn't have been earned, if you know what I mean.
RS: Yes, absolutely. It's also relieving to hear you say that as well. I was actually wondering how much of that… just because we lead into Megatron Origin from that point.
JR: Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was careful to say… Trepan says, you know, “I've barely scratched the surface”, and we, you know, clearly you appreciate this, but I mean, because we're talking and there are others listening, the visual motif throughout the issue, in the prewar stuff was, you know, we were privy to his thoughts, his thoughts were presented as text. And we saw at the beginning of the mnemosurgery, a few words were being removed, but they weren't being rewritten. It was a way of suggesting visually that the scratching of the surface, the exploration of his mind, rather than ‘here, I'm replacing your thoughts with some other thoughts’, ‘I’m implanting something new’. But, you know, the tension in that scene was supposed to pivot around the fear that the reader would feel, that this character was going to be done to, in terms of his destiny, you know, and everything that, you know, the fear that everything Megatron is, has come about because a third party interfered. That was the tragedy of Shockwave. We set that up as an outcome under the Senate, and I wanted people to be worried for Megatron, that that was going to happen to him as well. It came close, but it didn't happen.
RS: Excellent. Thank you so much for just, the profound detail you go into. I'm just going to say a couple more questions because we only have about five minutes left in your hour. JR: Okay, that's okay. We can… we'll see where we go. [laughs]
RS: Excellent. This has been quite enlightening, so thank you very much for agreeing to do this. This has been quite pleasant.
JR: Good! Well, good. Let’s hope so. Better than the opposite. [laughs] You're gritting your teeth thinking just 5 minutes, please.
RS: {laughs] Ohh gosh, no.
JR: You'll have to make an excuse for a minute, say, oh my God, I caught fire or something? You have to say, oh, God, there's, my legs are on fire.
RS: [laughs]
JR: You can’t use that excuse now.
RS: Ahh, James, thank you.
JR: I've had that before. I’ve been interviewed by people before that have caught fire.
RS: [laughs] One last thing, about 34?
JR: Yeah.
RS: Poor Trailbreaker-slash-Trailcutter. Oh gosh.
JR: Um… that didn't go down too well.
RS: No, um, I— you used him since Wreckers, even, in Bullets, when he was a member of the Ethics Committee, you had the entire Ethics Committee on the Lost Light!
JR: I know, I know.
RS: And now two of them are dead.
JR: Yes. And of course, the full name of the Ofsted planet was… that was its specialist subject, wasn't it? Was ethics. We don't go there and see it itself, but we established that a couple of issues earlier. Yeah, it's, I'm well aware that it's a deeply divisive event, the death of Trailbreaker—Trailcutter. Those that don't like it, I can't make them like it. It was intended. It was intended to do a number of things, really. It was intended, funnily enough to show, to show Trailbreaker in the best light, as the one who arguably did right. He was certainly the most compassionate of the four, even more so than First Aid. Although maybe, you know— What I wanted to do, sorry to digress, but what I wanted to do was leave a funny taste in the reader's mouth and make them think, you know. In a sense, Trailcutter plays to the standard narrative of, you know, the heroes will always act heroically, probably the antithesis of the Optimus Prime that shoots Sentinel in the head or whatever. The return of that archetypal hero of heroes, who will always do the right thing, no matter how unpleasant. And I wanted people to think, well, that's all well and good, but you know, would I have forgiven him? Would he have been justified in sort of saying, actually, you know what, I'm going to step back as well at this point, when I've realized this is a member of the DJD, like First Aid. They are infamous, we know what they've done, you know what, I do have my limits. I'm not going to donate my fuel to keep him alive. Was he right to do that, was he wrong? I wanted to pose that question, and the question takes on, hopefully, a huge amount of urgency, given that he pays for that decision with his life.
So it was ramping up the stakes, and the fallout of that ethical question. There was that, and I wanted… I know people have complained, they’ve got concerns, people are welcome to complain. That's their right. But people have complained that it cut short his journey, it cut short his character arc. Well, I would say that that was the completion of his character arc. Any character that you kill off could have gone places. It is a story of lost potential. And I have a reputation for killing people left right and center, but there are hundreds of Transformers out there. There’s thousands of Transformer characters out there. Myself, John and others could be far more slapdash and kill-happy if we wanted to be, but it’s not satisfying. You really are, you know, each time you kill somebody, you're bringing to an end their journey and you are denying everybody the stories that could have been told. Now, I appreciate in saying that I'm describing, you know, Trailcutter. There are other stories we could have told about him. But I felt it was, to me, it was a satisfying end to the journey we'd seen him go through, from a member of the Ethics Committee, but more recently as somebody with a drink problem who would overcome that problem with help, and was just turning over a new page. And yes, it was tragic. It was horrifically tragic. And that's partly the point. We could talk a long time about it. It was intended to…. it wasn't to shock, for shock, for the sake of being shocking. And there's other ways of doing that, but it was intended to make you think about how far he’d come, and the decision he'd made, and yes, about the brutality and the callousness of the DJD, and very low down that list was was the need for the DJD to find out about Megatron's defection in an interesting way.
RS: Just a couple more things really, really quick because we've already exceeded our hour. [laughs]
JR: Don't worry, it's alright. Unless you're about to ask me some absolutely horrible question or I'm going to answer your question and in doing so deeply upset you or myself. And, you know. I'm sure we can, we’ll do this again.
RS: This would be lovely! And I still wanna meet you at Botcon or something, you know?
JR: Yeah! Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I don't know where I’m going to be next year in terms of convention stuff. But hopefully I'll be able to.
RS: This isn't so much a question as, you've destroyed my agent 113 theory, which was Kaon was him. Left with the death of Trailcutter.
JR: Ohh, wow! Okay! Haven’t heard that one before.
RS: Very, very briefly, for people who aren’t familiar with Agent 113, Mr. Roberts here enjoys referencing the number 113 in his works. It was the first issue of Transformers UK that you read, correct?
JR: Yes, it was. It changed everything. Yeah. 113 came out in ‘87, it was Simon Furman writing, Geoff Senior drawing. It was essentially the sequel to Transformers: The Movie in comic form, it starred Death’s Head, and it was part one of this eight part epic or nine part epic. So it was… I'm surprised that there aren't dozens of people writing comics because they picked up issue 113. That's their first to see. But yeah, that's the backstory to the number.
RS: So we have a double agent from the Autobots who has infiltrated the Decepticon Justice Division, who horrifically kills traitors. It is a very tense position and, well, we know this person is allegedly alive, but we aren't sure yet, but I just was curious that Kaon killed the alternate Whirl, even though Megatron gave the orders not to kill Whirl at all, ever. Like, even though it's a duplicate world, like, he wouldn't have known that.
JR: Yeah, that's true.
RS: That and like, I could easily have seen just due to him being an Autobot in disguise as a murderer, wanting revenge for what he's done to the Great War and using it as an excuse and saying, oh, you know, I misfired or something!
JR: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
RS: And electrocuting Black Shadow. He didn't initially kill Black Shadow. It took Tarn to kill him, and Black Shadow was helping the Autobots with the war world stuff. I could easily have seen him intentionally not doing a lethal jolt, as it were. Yeah. So that was my theory, but you successfully destroyed it, so well done, good sir.
JR: Well, Agent 113 has got to have done some pretty appalling things in order to maintain his cover. And yes, that— actually with the Whirl, that's a good point with the Whirl thing. I think the killing Whirl, it's if you're in the middle of a, if you're in a battle situation and Whirl is attacking you in the heat of battle, then I think if possible to avoid killing him? But if you need to, if you need to kill him to defend yourself, then that's fair game. Or maybe they just really hated Whirl and disregarded the order. But yes, there's, I'm sure there's lots of theories about the mole in the DJD and… yes, well, there we go.
RS: I know, I just wanted to mention that to you because you are so good at laying out mysteries month after month after month. My sibling counted about 50 mysteries before the end of Remain in Light.
JR: Well, I hope, yeah. I mean, I try and wrap the mysteries up at a certain sort of… it's like a rolling program of mysteries and resolution so that we don't have too too many open at one time, and I try and close some off in a satisfying way. Otherwise it just becomes unmanageable both for you guys and for me. And actually, I'm sorry on the 113 thing, I didn't realize that 113 is the Pixar number as well.
RS: It's also a number in Gunnerkrigg Court as well. It's just everywhere, and I'm haunted by it. So thank you.
JR: It's strange, isn't it? It's strange. At least I can pin mine on something, otherwise I'd be spooked.
RS: I'm blaming you. [laughs]
JR: [laughs] You see it everywhere now.
RS: Lastly, just to wrap this up. What have you read or seen or listened to recently that you’d recommend to listeners or readers or—?
JR: Oh, right, okay, wow, okay, what do I…? OK, what do I listen to is, well— I'm really, my listening is bad. I used to devour new music and seek it out actively and stuff, but I don't have the time these days, so I'm… I can always do with other people's recommendations. The CD I have in front of me now is by a very good London-Australian, or British-Australian band called. It's called Allo Darlin', A-L-L-O D-A-R-L-I-N, and they're very good. And they're sort of a, they’re like an indie jangle pop thing, so if that isn't your thing, don't check them out. They're very good. This band was one guy called Wizard Hand and he's just released an album earlier this year called New Gods, that's really good as well. But beyond that, I find myself gravitating towards— and this happens when you get older, okay, so just bear it in mind. As you get older, you want things you're comfortable with, and if you're pressed for time, you're going to reach for stuff that you know is… you know you like. And so I find myself increasingly returning to The Smiths and Belle and Sebastian, there’s a new Belle and Sebastian album now, so definitely— in fact everybody go out and buy that one.
RS: Here, folks, cutting off the comic interview for a music ad. [laughs]
JR: [laughs] So, Belle and Sebastian, The Smiths, and Morrissey, and The Divine Comedy, and the old favorites. I'm sorry I can't do more. I can't unveil some super hip secret band for you guys.
RS: No, it's totally fine. And I was just curious, like, just media in general, movies or books, just like what does the author of More than Meets the Eye like?
JR: OK, well, I like... What am I reading at the moment? Mr. Jonathan Franzen's book, is that… what's it called? Freedom. Yeah. Freedom. Recently, I've been reading, rereading a lot of Graham Green at the moment… oh, the new [?] book. It's supposed to be very good, so that’s on my Christmas list. I've been reading quite a bit of nonfiction at the moment, actually. There's a good book by Corey Robin called Fear, its subtitle is “a history of a political idea”. It's a good read. It's going to seem quite pretentious, but I've been reading some of Chomsky's recent essays as well. He's always good value. Oh, on the other side of a kind, I’ve been reading a critical analysis of Stephen Moffat's Doctor Who series.
RS: Excellent.
JR: It's Series 5 to 7. So I picked it up and thought it covered Series, well, at least until the end of Series 7, but it doesn't. It stops short of the 50th anniversary. So I'm a real sucker for that type of academic analysis of popcultural stuff. There's also a book called [?] Complexities. That's an analysis of The Smiths. There's a really good Morrisey critical analysis called The Pageant of the Bleeding Heart. Stuff like that. I just, I get sucked into it. There's a really good book by Simon Reynolds called Retromania, about how pop culture cannibalizes itself and recycles itself. Pretty good fun. The history of the miner’s strike as well, so, you know, the British miner’s strike in the mid 80s, called The Enemy Within. There’s just too many books in the world, you know?
RS: So many.
JR: There's too much, too much to read.
RS: I want to work in a bookstore and I want to write. Those are the two things I want to do with my life.
JR: That's, yeah, absolutely. I need to find more time for fiction at the moment, to be honest, because I'm finding myself sort of steering towards nonfiction stuff. There's just so many ideas out there.
RS: It's beautiful. We’re a creative race, the human race. It's beautiful. Thank you so much for everything, James.
JR: It's been… it's been a really good chat, and you've kept me on my toes, so thanks for that.
RS: [laughs] You seemed very stressed during the latter half of the interview, and I apologize for that.
JR: Oh, did I? RS: You just seemed on your— yes, you definitely seemed a bit tense.
James Roberts: Oh, no! Well, there you go. That means you did a good job then. You've made me think and choose my words carefully.
Rachel Stevens: Thank you so, so much for bearing with me and dealing with my occasionally weird interruptions.
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