TFARCHIVE FORUMS

Ryall tweets a ReGeneration #1 preview page.

Here is the offending article.

Horrible Illustratored-in autobrands and Prime's blue peepers nonwithstanding, I like the hell out of that art. I particularly enjoy Ultra Magnus' wrap-around sunglasses that he got as a free gift in a packet of Shreddies.*

* This is sincere, I really do like them.

---

UPDATE

3-page preview @ Newsarama.

They're calling it ReGeneration? **** a duck. Looks very generic, IMO, like something out of a 3H book. Wildman just does not suit digital colouring - the pencils are completely smothered by the Dreamwave jizz gloss; the robots look too clean and polished (see also: EJ Su). Look at the white room they're in - the stone or whatever is cracked with age, but it's gleaming like something out of a Mr. Sheen commercial. It's a shame IDW are too cheap to draft in an actual colourist.

But then I'll only be downloading legally buying oh yes it to laugh at a pair of guys having a mid-life crisis and trying to retrace their steps after two decades of failure anyway.

Oh Cliffjumper, you lovable Grinch.

I don't really disagree with any of that but I will probably enjoy the comic anyway. Am not entirely sure why, though I'm sure marketing and nostalgia make up some of the partial pressure of the fumes swirling around in my decision-making centres.

So what is this supposed to be? Is this the thing that is supposed to be the continuation of the original Marvel comics?

Yeh - not to be confused with the continuation of the Marvel comics that was published by Marvel comics, though. Especially as this probably won't be anywhere near as good.

Don't mind the Regeneration One title, but there is nothing very exciting about any of this. I can't even be arsed to be pissed off with how it looks like Cliffy.

Like I said before, if you're going to do this at all, they should have gone all out on it. Set it right after 80 and carry on into the 90's. No twenty year jump or desperate attempt to get new readers on board, this should be aimed squarely at the old school fans. It's not as if there's not many more people who read the old book than have ever picked up an IDW one, but they're all freely available to read in the many, many reprints.

Or if you are going to do it as a twenty year time jump and freshish start, don't ignore G2. Realistically, I don't think they'll be any characters playing a large part in this who weren't still around at the end of G2 (Nightbeat being the most likely exception) so it's just a case of using the jump as an excuse to get them into the right bodies.

Though has Furman forgotten Ultra Magnus wasn't in the US comic?

Are you kidding? Everyone who went down well in the Dead Furmanverse (and any concepts to boot) are going to be co-opted into this ****ing car crash. Monsterbots, Banzai-Tron, The Bride, Hardhead... He might even have the hubris to rope in the Wreckers.

Ignoring the gap bascially makes it pointless, yes - it means Furman can resurrect who he wants and write out who he wants; are we really expecting Krok to get more than a line in this, despite being Decepticon 2IC by #80? Or are we expecting Blitzwing and Skywarp, a pair of complete ****ing nobodies in the Marvel continuity? And when you come down to it this makes it no different to any other random reboot. Especially when his first round of turds for IDW featured exactly the same characters with exactly the same characterisation as the Marvel stuff - Oh no wait he dun Wheelie wow he's Alan ****ing Moore all of a sudden.

This comic is going to be ****ing hilarious.

Well good luck to Furman and Wildman. I hope they can pull this off. I think they're on a hiding to nothing with this. I can't see the point in the twenty year gap. we know there's been twenty actual years since the original book was cancelled, but it seems unnecessary to move the book on by the same corresponding time frame. It would have probably been a better idea to start at # 79 and work out the conclusion to whatever arc Furman had in mind for the book at that point, rather than keep the compacted and rushed #80 in tact. Mind you, given Furman's history of recycling unused ideas, i think we pretty much got what he intended to write for the G1 comic in the pages of Generation 2. Or the 1992 UK Annual.

As for the art clip in Ryall's tweet, Wildman's art seems as cheerful as it was back in the day. No doubt that's in part due to what look to be Baskerville's inks over his pencils. the colouring could do with being just flat to mimic the old school vibe the book will have. Still, we could have had Nel Yomotv on colouring duties again, so we should be thankful for small mercies. Also : do Hasbro insist on badly photoshopped faction symbols? Aren't artists allowed to draw them anymore?

I think I'd be willing to give this a go. It can hardly be worse than anything else IDW have given us. So long as the Dead Universe doesn't make an unwanted reappearance...

Also: Action Masters!!! I'd have liked to seen them again.

Knowing how widely distrabuted the UK stories are nowadays, Furmans probuly counting it in caonn, which would explain Ultra Magnes. Furman even said he would like to bring the Wreckers back in an interview.

You can count me among the people who find the modern Photoshop colouring really offputting when it comes to a Marvel continuation. All three of the Marvel books (US, UK and G2) had pretty distinctive colouring styles and it's too bad that they couldn't pick one of them and try to emulate it.

Cliffjumper wrote:Ignoring the gap bascially makes it pointless, yes - it means Furman can resurrect who he wants and write out who he wants; are we really expecting Krok to get more than a line in this, despite being Decepticon 2IC by #80? Or are we expecting Blitzwing and Skywarp, a pair of complete ****ing nobodies in the Marvel continuity? And when you come down to it this makes it no different to any other random reboot.

This is exactly why I'm lukewarm to the whole project. I'm not entirely sure I blame Furman for all of it, though. Didn't he say in an interview that IDW and Hasbro told him to focus on the 'core cast'?

As someone who started reading the comic around #66, a big part of the charm of the Marvel stuff is that characters like Krok, Octopunch, Whisper and Override are just as likely to show up and do something important as Prowl or Sideswipe or Thundercracker. If this book doesn't pick up right after #80 (or G2 #12, my preference) and it doesn't feature the scattershot cast selection of the Marvel book, what's the point? It's just Generic Furman Reboot #529.

Skyquake87 wrote:Also : do Hasbro insist on badly photoshopped faction symbols? Aren't artists allowed to draw them anymore?

Unless my memory is playing tricks, Nick Roche hand-drew the faction symbols in LSOTW. My guess is that most artists just don't want to do it because it's too hard, especially when the character is on an angle relative to the 'camera'

Counting the UK comic doesn't help anything with Magnus, who was last seen wandering around a random bit of Cybertron with Sizzle, Guzzle and the other one. He's not summoned by Primus, which would at best mean he's a fair distance away, and at worst mean he's dead.

Thankfully, though, there's a 20 year gap [context: assuming they're all 'present day' and ignoring the various alternate futures, the events of the original Marvel comic take place over 8 years - that's how monstrously stupid this all is], meaning Furman can just throw him in without bothing to explain anything, probably stapling a lot of his SPACE COP "personality" on as a bonus.

My biggest problem with this whole thing is that while it might pick up the continuity of the Marvel books fairly well (and if it doesn't, that's unforgivable considering the prep that's possible), it's not going to be able to capture the tone. The art and the composition of the cast are big problems, but so are twenty years of evolution for the characters and devolution for the writer and artist.

Tenner says the Nucleon and Last Autobot get one-line off-the-cuff 'explanations' conveniently used to explain how things are exactly how Furman wants them rather than how they were in #80.

Cliffjumper wrote:Tenner says the Nucleon and Last Autobot get one-line off-the-cuff 'explanations' conveniently used to explain how things are exactly how Furman wants them rather than how they were in #80.

That's still one line more than they got in G2.

If they're really going to stick to their guns and end things at #100, I wouldn't blame them for picking and choosing which plot points to follow up on. I think it'll be a choice between ignoring some things entirely or trying to cram everything in and doing a half-assed job of all of it.

It's what they do with the ideas that they do follow up on that I'm worried about. Furman's books haven't exactly been fresh and inventive as of late, so I'm expecting the story to revolve around humans salvaging Transformer technology from the Ark and founding some sort of Mysterious Organization with Far Reaching Plans that can totally take down any Transformer who isn't on Furman's list of favourites.

I'm hoping that if I set the bar that low, there's no way the reality of it could be worse.

Frankly Warcry, while I agree that Furman is a bit restricted in characters, he still is much better useing characters he knows. I mean, would it make much difference if Skywarp awakened Primus insted of Octopunch? Not much but Furman had to because of Hasbro.Infact, in the non Hasbro mandated G2, what was one of the few things Furman did with the character? He killed him off. Simurly with G2, Krok didn't make a single apperance, dispite origannly being Bludgons number 2.

O and Nucleon will be staying in the plot and Galvatron will be returning. Lets just say Fortress will get the rematch of his life...

TBH, that's exactly the sort of thing that's going to do it in. Sure, Spinister only really ended up being an awesome Mayhem-type guy because he was in the shops at the time, but the fact is he ended up as one where, say, Thrust was a faceless dullard. If they were (as a for instance) to have a Spinister-style guy who's actually Thrust it'd completely miss the point of doing the thing.

G2 deaths are neither here nor there - Furman killed off a lot of characters he was fond of during the storyline (Bludgeon, Smokescreen, Inferno, Slag, Nightbeat) in order to further the plot/up the stakes/cause a shock - there's a conscious effort to avoid doing an Underbase. I did read somewhere that in an interview he stated he regretted wiping out Bludgeon's Decepticons quite so quickly, so maybe there's some hope there.

G2 isn't faultless, especially on some aspects of the transition, but it at least struck out in what - at the time - was a very different direction for TF comics. Love it or hate it, it went somewhere new for Transformers and tore up a few trees. I realise now it's quite cool to dismiss it as "nineties" (whatever that means, ****ing Hitman and Preacher were nineties) and "dork age" (ditto), but that's just revisitionist bullshit from morons. This... isn't going to be. It's going to be the same safe, stale stuff Furman's been bottle-feeding readers for both DW and IDW.

I'm predicting the first couple of issues will be a lot more interesting than I think they will be, and that the transitions/infodump won't be quite as clumsy as I fear. Then I think the wheels are going to come off as we watch the Grimlock Is Badass, Prime Is Indecisive, Galvatron Beats Up Everyone But Only Uses Lethal Force On Guys Furman Doesn't Like soap opera.

Grimlocks stuck an Action Master at the start of this, (Somthing tells me Furman is going to kill him off) and two of the major problums with G2 the Furman can potenionally fix in Reganoration.

1.Ignoreing various plotpoints set up in the series such as Nucleon (Which will play a part here) and the Ratchet/Megatron mindmeld
2.Barely any identity is given to the Empire beyond Jiaxus and Rook. Theres a reason why most post G2 fics I read lumps the Predertors in there.

Now, to be completely fair to this, comparisons with the basic set up of G2 don't really work as they're trying to do very different things. G2 was very much a relaunch aimed at getting in new readers, expressly those the toys were aimed at. It had to, by its very nature, be off hand with how it dealt with Old Business (or even New Business in the case of how Megatron got his new body being left to G.I. Joe) because it had to hit the ground running with a whole new story. The fact it's as reverential to what had gone before as it was is something of a minor miracle (and possibly a self defeating one, would any new readers who picked up that first issue have had the first clue about Prime's flashbacks?).

Regeneration One (and am I the only one trying to resist calling it Degeneration One constantly on the wiki principle?) is however being promoted first and foremost as a continuation. It's going to be issue 81 rather than #1 and that's a different sort of beast. It should be picking up on the old plots and characters pretty much seamlessly and is going to be of most interest to people who do care about those things.

So the fact everything that's been announced so far seems to be working against that idea is what's disheartening. And again, to be fair, Furman is working with outside constraints here as this is a book Hasbro didn't want to happen and they apparently laid down some fairly heavy rules on what could and couldn't be done, and IDW themselves seem determined to focus on this "Accessibility" thing. But even if they're not his decisions that doesn't stop them being bad choices for this specific sort of book.

Now, if they'd done a G2 style thing where it was issue 1 in a new series set in the Marvel Universe but years later (sort of more like what Devil's Due did with GI Joe rather than what IDW did with it) a lot of these problems with the set up wouldn't be there.

Other thoughts: Why is Cybertron so beat up? Didn't the whole place get magically restored? Did the Last Autobot do a bodge job? (if this isn't some flashback to closer to the end of the original comic the Autobots shouldn't be so smashed up after twenty years of peace either).

Pasted on Autobrands don't bother me so much in theory, but considering it's now 2011 why can't this be done more convincingly? Mind, the smooth identical look to them wouldn't mesh well with Wildman's art even if they didn't seem to just be floating on top of it.

Odds on a "hilarious" jokey reference to the UK stuff when Magnus walks in (Kup: I haven't seen you since 2006!"?

The comic better not try to have its cake and eat it when it comes to the plot lines it is picking up, you can't have a twenty year gap to avoid some things and then still have Galvatron sitting at the bottom of a lake and the Ark laying on a hill unseen just because Fort Max forgot to send a space email to Cybertron asking for help earlier (in fairness, a fault with G2 as well).

Ulcrain wrote:.Barely any identity is given to the Empire beyond Jiaxus and Rook. Theres a reason why most post G2 fics I read lumps the Predertors in there.

Personally I thought that was intentional - they're meant to be a faceless horde to contrast with the differing 'G1' Transformers, a sort of ubermensch for Cybertron. It's saying yes, Transformers can potentially work in harmony and acheive some pretty big things, but at the cost of their 'humanity', which is not a good thing for the rest of the universe. If you start throwing colourful personalities in there you miss the entire point. Jhiaxus is a concession to the reader that doesn't really sit with the concept (though this is intentionally played up with the ongoing thread about him 'devolving' to the level of Megatron and Prime).

And Rook had no identity, just a name.

inflatable dalek wrote:It should be picking up on the old plots and characters pretty much seamlessly and is going to be of most interest to people who do care about those things.

Yup - I'd love to pick up something as close as is possible to what I'd have been picking up in January 1992 had the US book not been cancelled (note: not whatever would have turned up in UK #333 in the mooted monthly, which I suspect would be a little bit more Earthforce-y and less epic in approach due to the planned page rate of sixty a year). Otherwise I don't see the point - it's not a continuation of the Marvel comic; it's a comic that uses an existing continuity as a jumping-on point (the same way the first DW mini was more-or-less set after Season 2 of the cartoon but instead of TF:TM/Seasons 3-4).

Now, that might be a smart thing in a way as Furman won't be bound by 1992 toy release schedules (though his best work has largely been produced under constraint), his ideas now might be much better than they were 20 years ago (they're not, but still) and so on. But it misses the point of doing a G1 #81 if it's going to be a New G2 #1.

And again, to be fair, Furman is working with outside constraints here as this is a book Hasbro didn't want to happen and they apparently laid down some fairly heavy rules on what could and couldn't be done, and IDW themselves seem determined to focus on this "Accessibility" thing. But even if they're not his decisions that doesn't stop them being bad choices for this specific sort of book.

Agree. I mean, at the end of the day if constraints have changed it from being the original plan, there was always the option of not doing it.

(in fairness, a fault with G2 as well).

I always inferred that Spike flip-flopped on whether he wanted to be Fortress Maximus again. He's got form, after all - just about every post-Galen Fort Max story feels like we have the same old "Oh I want out oh no we're probably bonded somehow even though I just slapped on a tin helmet and isn't this just like thing that always seemed to happen to Highbrow whenever Scorponok went anywhere near him" story, at least that time we were spared all the angst.

Ulcrain wrote:Frankly Warcry, while I agree that Furman is a bit restricted in characters, he still is much better useing characters he knows. I mean, would it make much difference if Skywarp awakened Primus insted of Octopunch?

Well...yes and no. Would the story be significantly different because of it? Not really. But would the 'flavour' of the story change? To me at least, it would. One of the reasons I connected with the comics over the cartoons was because the comics featured toys I could actually go out and buy instead of toys that hadn't been for sale in three or four years. Those guys became a big part of the 'feel' of the Marvel book to me, and if they're not there then what's the point? Every other G1 continuity focuses tighly on groups of 84-86 guys, and if the Marvel universe is gong to do that too then what's left that seperates it from all the others?

Cliffjumper wrote:G2 deaths are neither here nor there - Furman killed off a lot of characters he was fond of during the storyline (Bludgeon, Smokescreen, Inferno, Slag, Nightbeat) in order to further the plot/up the stakes/cause a shock - there's a conscious effort to avoid doing an Underbase. I did read somewhere that in an interview he stated he regretted wiping out Bludgeon's Decepticons quite so quickly, so maybe there's some hope there.

I suspect he wouldn't have done it at all, if he hadn't been so sure that the series would be axed after #12 and they'd never, ever get a chance to be written about again.

Cliffjumper wrote:Personally I thought that was intentional - they're meant to be a faceless horde to contrast with the differing 'G1' Transformers, a sort of ubermensch for Cybertron. It's saying yes, Transformers can potentially work in harmony and acheive some pretty big things, but at the cost of their 'humanity', which is not a good thing for the rest of the universe.

I don't know if it was meant to have that message. After all, the Autobots and Decepticons manage to band together, work in harmony and stop the expanding Imperial horde, at least for a while.

I always got the feeling that the older Imperials weren't much different than your average Transformer, but that subsequent generations grew weaker and weaker (morally and presumably physically as well, considering how easily the G1 crew slaughters them) as they split off the life force of their progenators into progressively smaller and smaller pieces. I saw the Imperials as an example of what could happen to a group that forgets it's purpose completely but still keeps on going, mechanically doing what they've always done without really thinking about why they're doing it. But I don't know how much of that is really grounded in the fiction and now much of it just sprung up in my head.

Warcry wrote: I don't know if it was meant to have that message.

I think it was at the time, but it's a message that's retrospectively got a bit muddled by the way Transformers have been treated since. From Beast Machines (my final verdict on that: Not as bad as people thought at the time, not as good as its champions will have you think now. It's the Licence to Kill of Transformers. And Megatron dying because he's forgotten he can ****ing fly would be the stupidist thing ever if not for the Nobel/Savage thing fooling anyone) onwards the villains, and very occasionally the heroes, having armies of mindless identical drones on call.

That makes a version of the franchise that makes mindless identical servitude the worst thing possible, even worse than the "Normal" Decepticons would do, seem a bit out of place.

Yup - I'd love to pick up something as close as is possible to what I'd have been picking up in January 1992 had the US book not been cancelled

Indeed, I actually really like the idea suggested upthread of ignoring the real issue 80 due to it being a slightly desperate attempt to end the book with closure and carrying on from 79. Though I apriciate the practical reasons for not doing so, no least of which is that, if we play fair, The Last Autobot feels like it was written after Furman knew the book was ending as well. I can't see the original plan not being to have Actionmaster Megatron and Starscream coming off the Ark first.

I think what we're looking at here is another classic example of an IDW PR failure. The book that's being promoted and the book Furman is talking about having written aren't even close to being the same thing. So even if he does a brilliant G2V.2 (sod it, that's the meme. Everyone start referring to the book as this from now on and I'll give you a fruit pastel), many of the people who've brought of the back of being promised an 81 are going to be disappointed.

inflatable dalek wrote:That makes a version of the franchise that makes mindless identical servitude the worst thing possible, even worse than the "Normal" Decepticons would do, seem a bit out of place.

I never got the impression that they were mindless or identical, though. They didn't get much of a chance to show off any personality that they might have had, but the ones who got lines usually showed a bit of personality. That one guy in #1 who got mad at the Autobots for slaughtering his comrades stands out for me, as does Mindset. I always figured that all the generic grey and green spearcarriers would've had ideas and personalities of their own too, but we never got to see them because...well, because the book wasn't about them.