In the mid 1980s, on Saturday mornings in thousands of households across the UK the scene was the same.
Before Saturday Superstore, while enjoying a generous bowl of the breakfast cereal of choice (mine was Shreddies) and pretending not to be interested in the Racoons or Muppet Babies the clatter of the letterbox would announce the arrival of adventures from another universe. The continuing struggle against the forces of evil, and the antics of an army obsessed nutcase in a camo jacket and his trusted, beardy sidekick.
For Many comic fans in the UK the only way to get their regular comic book fix was not from US imports, which for many were largely unavailable outside of specialist comic book stores, but from weekly comic books distributed to local newsagents. In the mid 1980s Marvel UK was finding success publishing an increasing number of these licensed and reprinted US properties. These books, larger in format than their American counterparts, were often the first introduction to many long established characters and titles in the US. Secret Wars for example introduced many fans to characters from The X-Men and The Avengers.
Many titles would come and go, The Punisher, The Nam, Secret Wars, Spider-Man, Zoids and The Thing to name but a few, but standing head and shoulders above all others was The Transformers. Initially reprinting the US strip the weekly UK title would eventually add original content that would surpass the US contribution both in acclaim, and in how the stories would be absorbed into Transformers cannon.
At its height Transformers was selling an astonishing 200, 000 copies a week, with the UK produced strip contributing an increasing number of pages in comparison to the US produced stories. The Transformers content would be backed up by the always entertaining comic strips of Robocapers written and drawn by cartoonist Lew Stringer.
As a number of artists added their talents to the growing list of contributors the original content of the book found its way across to the US version of the book, and the UK contributors were soon finding acclaim and work on both sides of the Atlantic.
Over the next few months Fractal Matter will be talking to seven of the leading lights of Marvel UK during the 1980s, finding out how a comic about a global anti terror force launched the career of one of today’s most acclaimed artists, and how one man would begin a 20 year love affair with the robots in disguise (not literally, that would just be wrong).
Artists Andrew Wildman, Geoff Senior, Bryan Hitch, Lew Stringer, Kev Hopwood, writer Simon Furman and Editor in Chief Richard Starkings will give us a never before seen insight into the work of Marvel UK.
This month, taking time out from a hectic schedule at the recent UK Comic Expo in Bristol, Transformers artist Andrew Wildman and writer Simon Furman speak with Russ Sheath and Louis Knight about wobbly transformers, water pistol fights and the secret origin of an artist known as Hitchy!
Do you have fond memories of Marvel UK?
Simon: I certainly have fond memories of it. I don’t think there will ever be a time quite like it. We were so fast and loose in those days and the working environment was almost anarchy really. It was amazing we managed what we did, getting out these weekly comics with eleven pages of original strip. When we moved from Redan Place to Arundel Street, we had free for alls in the office, lots of freelancers coming in hanging around, and we would have fights with water pistols in the office, it was remarkable we got our comics out.
Your average staff on a title was editor and designer, that was it. Two people getting out a weekly comic. The colouring went out to the in house colourists but largely it was you and the designer. This was back in the days of cut and paste we were printing stuff out on photo paper cutting it out and sticking it down on layout paper; it seems out of the ark now. Lettering corrections, when we were re-printing US strips, had to be done by turning the film over, scratching out the American spelling work and with a fine point pen re-lettering the film; and that was all done by us. There was no one else to do it.
Andy: You only get one shot at that.
Simon: If you look at some of those colours were a bit ropey because you always had to squeeze an extra letter into the same amount of space.
How did that work come about for you both?
Simon: I first started working for Marvel UK as a freelancer right at the end of 1984, and I heard tell through Ian Rimmer, who was editor of Mavel UK and who I worked with on Scream over at IPC, that Sheila Crannah, who was the editor at Transformers, was looking for writers of originated strip. I had never heard of Transformers and I was like, I’ll do anything. I spoke to Sheila, she gave me some work on Transformers and at the same time a staff job came up as assistant editor on Captain Britain monthly which Ian was editing. I went through an interview but it was pretty much a shoe in really. That was my introduction to Marvel UK and I was on Captain Britain monthly for a good while until it finished. I then edited Thundercats and when Ian Rimmer left I took over as editor on Transformers so I had to have somebody ghost edit my scripts because by then I was writing the book as well. So Richard Starkings would edit my script and I would carry on doing the editorial stuff.
We had a succession of designers, guys like John Tomlinson, Gary Gilberty and a few others, Steve White for a while, everybody had a go on Transformers as a designer. Then come 1989 I left to go full time freelance because I was doing Transformers for the US as well, and that was my thing. I was there for about 4 years and it was a great time.
Andy: For me, my first freelance work was up in Manchester doing a Bravestarr magazine and a He-Man comic. Somebody I met in college was writing some of that stuff and he gave me a contact number so I went and did some work with them. Then somebody else I was at college with, John Tomlinson who was the year below me in college, was working at Marvel UK and had done a weeks work experience, or a summer work experience there, and I bumped into him at a comic convention. He said why don’t you bring your work up to marvel UK? That would have been something like 1986 or 1987.
Simon: I would have said 87 or 88.
Andy: So I went up and did a two page Thundercats tryout, like a sample script, and I vividly remember doing it and showed it to Ian. So I did Thundercats for them and a Visionaries cover and..
Simon: Didn’t you do Galaxy Rangers?
Andy: Actually I Inked a Liam Sharp Galaxy Rangers cover, wow I wonder what they look like (Laughs).
Then I took a strip into Steve White, who was the editor on Thundercats, and he was on the desk next to Simon who saw what I had done and was looking for another Transformers artist; and that’s when he said “do you want to do some Transformers”? I was like “what robots? Not really!” (Laughs) But ok, money, alright them”!
I carried on working for them through 88 and 89 and then when Simon went to work for Marvel US and Geoff Senior was doing the Transformers strip for Marvel US, Geoff wanted to come off the regular US book to do the Deaths Head graphic novel. I was going to fill in for four issues but Geoff never came back so I carried on.
I was doing two books at the same time. I was doing US stuff and some British stuff, and it reached a point where they were printing both of my works in the UK comic. There was my originated UK Transformers work plus they were reprinting the American stuff that I had done a couple of months before. I think it was Steve White who was editor at the time, and he was going “Why is the work you are doing for America so much better than the work you are doing for the UK”? (Laughs).
I went from Transformers to GI Joe and then from GI Joe to X-Men Adventures and then Black Cat and a six issue Spider-Man book.
What was the setup for Marvel UK back in the day? Were you all office based, or did you work from home?
Simon: I was in the office, all the editorial staff were in the office. There wasn’t really an art studio like the later version of Marvel UK where they had a kinda basement art studio where everybody lived and worked. Back in those days everybody worked from home and brought their stuff in.
Andy: When they did eventually setup a studio I don’t think anybody ever told me. (laughs),
Simon: At one time we were so late with one strip we had Bryan Hitch sat in the office drawing it and Geoff literally taking the pages off him and inking it. I think it was the last part of Legacy of Unicron or something. We were so hand to mouth on it that we were then sending it of to the colourists. We literally turned a whole episode around in one day so it was like that sometimes.
One other time we had an artist on Transformers called Dan Reed who used to draw these amazing wobbly transformers, not a straight line to be seen, he had an interesting style but he was an American guy living in Paris, and he used to send the stuff over. It was always a little towards the deadline. The deadline was getting closer and closer and no pages at all from Dan, and I was phoning him up and saying where are they and he was saying they are on their way. We missed that deadline, and we missed the next deadline, and suddenly we are looking at an issue with eleven blank pages, for which we would have to run a reprint or something. So I am now shrieking at Dan he says he has finished it and will bring it over, so he packs his portfolio and hops on the ferry and comes over without a penny in his pocket. They then stop him at customs, and I am hearing this all on the phone about how they have stopped him at customs and they have seized his artwork. Everybody in the office is watching the colour drain from my face.
Andy: Had he been arrested for drawing wobbly Transformers? (Laughs).
Simon: I think he simply didn’t have any funds so they stopped him coming in. Anyway he gets through customs finally, and arrives saying he thinks that one of the customs officers has stolen one of his pages (laughs). So we have ten pages of an eleven page strip so we then had to sit him down and get him to re-draw this page while the rest is being coloured and lettered, but it was the closest we have ever come to ever missing everything and getting sacked.
Andy: Did it ever turn up on Ebay? (Laughs).
Of course we all know Bryan Hitch, who started off at Marvel UK, any tales of debortuary by Hitchy to report?
Simon: The fist thing I remember about Bryan is that he did some samples for Action Force, which had sat on my desk, when at one point Richard Starkings came into my office and stole them and got him to do some Action Force stuff. Then I realised he was pretty good and poached him back to do some Transformers. Bryan went through up’s and downs in those days started off with his own style and Alan Davis took him under his wing and he sort of adopted Alan’s style and now he has got his own style which is great. When he came through the door was only 16, fresh out of school in Cumbria and more or less drawing comics still in his 16th year.
There were two distinct routes to break into comics in the UK back in the day Marvel UK and 200AD and a lot of creators seemed to go the 2000AD route, was there a specific reason you didn’t go the 2000AD route?
Andy: Well for me it seemed the path of least resistance; I did go to 2000AD and spoke to the art editor at the time, a guy called Doug Church, and I did some work for them, but there seemed to be more going on at Marvel UK; and there seemed to be more opportunities. Plus the fact, and maybe it’s a naive thing, that to me if there was any kind of attachment to one company or the other, I was never that big a 2000AD reader. I did used to buy it, but I was never particularly attached to the characters. With Marvel UK, it could be Thundercats, Transformers or whatever, but its Marvel and there was some kind of sentiment there, some kind of attachment. I would rather tell people I was working for Marvel than working for IPC or Fleetway or something. I just wanted to go the Marvel route.
Simon: There was a definite rivalry as well, between the two companies. You either tended to be one or the other, you tended to be either an IPC / Fleetway guy or a Marvel guy, and very rarely the twain met. We used to play 2000AD at softball and it was a fair old grudge match. It ended up with beers afterwards and everybody happy but the actual game itself….
Andy: I think that there was a division between those who tended to work for Marvel UK and those who worked for 200AD, although there were cross overs with people like Dave Gibbons. INterstingly I think Marvel UK tended to feed into Marvel US and 2000AD tended to feed into DC. Even beyond those two British publications it would feed into the two rival camps in American.
Simon: We had Barry Kitson is a good case. He started off at Marvel UK doing Transformers and other bits and pieces, then went over to 2000AD, which was rare and didn’t happen a lot, and he then went over to DC so it does tend to divert people that way.
Geoff (Senior) started off doing his very first work, I think, for 2000AD, and he had an agent who would mostly send people to 2000AD. Then he became a Marvel UK guy, but he was never really bothered about comics in the larger sense to care whether he worked for Marvel UK or DC or whoever.
It was a good time at Marvel UK and like Andrew I really wanted to work for Marvel I didn’t want to work for 2000AD particularly. The only bits I did for 2000AD was when John Tomlinson was editing 2000AD and the editors tended to bring their own guys in so I did some Dredd yearbook stuff and some futureshocks.
When you first went to Marvel UK what were your thoughts on the subject matter? There were a lot of licensed properties, Bravestarr, Action Force, Galaxy Rangers. What were your thoughts on that?
Andy: I think the way I perceived it was the way a lot of artists perceived it, in that initially I just want to draw comics. It doesn’t matter what you are drawing. You had a choice between boys action/ adventure or a pre-school title so you tended to go boys action/ adventure. For no reason than it tended to be closer to the stuff you grew up with. Once you went with boys action/adventure and you had a choice of drawing Ghostbusters or something like that, but the one that most people wanted to draw was Thundercats because, although it wasn’t actually Marvel comics, it was the closest to it. They were kind of like superhero characters, they were human essentially in their form, but they looked a bit weird and they had crazy costumes. I think that was edging closer and closer to what you eventually wanted to do.
2000AD had none of that. I didn’t grow up with Judge Dredd so I didn’t really care. There wasn’t much choice to be made between Judge Dredd and Thundercats for me as an artist.
As a writer it would be different because you could write some kind of political comment into Judge Dredd, but you clearly can’t write that into Thundercats. Actually if you were a clever writer you probably could, but you are going to miss your target audience.
Simon: I actually found my niche with those type of characters, because it became a challenge in itself. Here is a bunch of fairly stereotypical animation characters, and can you try to stretch that. I thought I would tell interesting stories, and character led stuff. Ok its robots, but I just tried to tell good stories. I found it more of a challenge, and a better learning curve than doing future shocks for 2000AD. I loved the fact that it was Marvel, and I loved the fact that it was colour, and how that made a huge difference to me that I was doing colour comics. 2000AD, as much as I loved it in its way, it felt old school already and I wanted to be doing colour comics, and that somehow was definitely the Marvel route so I felt like I had served my time. Then, when I got my shot at Marvel US I thought brilliant, it was worth it.
Was it a big jump from moving from the weekly book to going to the US on a monthly book?
Simon: Literally everything changed because Marvel US worked with plots and Marvel UK worked with full script. So all I had ever written in my life was full script, I literally used to write every page, every panel and every bit of dialogue and suddenly I had this sort of out of control way of working where you would describe chunks of action over pages and it just seemed so random and out of control.
Andy: Are you a control freak. Do you not trust the artist you are working with? (Laughs)
Simon: well I never had to think about, that then suddenly I did. That was the weird thing for me, and my plots tended to be really dense as I was dropping in dialogue and angles still; but it did get easier. It helped that I was working with Andrew on Transformers because I knew him and knew what he could do, and I knew that he knew the characters, so it was far easier to work in short hand. I started to see the good side of it, in that you would sometimes get back far better than you were expecting. I got used to layering the dialogue over the artwork to the extent where now, although I still write full script for the likes of Dreamwave and IDW, I re-dialogue all my work. I get the artwork in and re-dialogue, doing my own placements of where the word balloons should go, because I like a second chop at it. So I kind of write over my own work.
Andy: As an artist here were two things for me, as Simon was saying the difference between the plots at Marvel US and the scripts at Marvel UK; so you had mixed feelings with a plot from marvel US where you thought oh great I can inject more of what I want and move things about a bit, but you also felt slightly scared because there is more chance you would misinterpret things. It didn’t turn out to be a problem, and in fact worked really, really well. The other side of it was ‘what 22 pages??? You’re having a laugh aren’t you? In a month?’ (Laughs).
Where as with Marvel UK there were smaller, bite sized chunks so you could apply yourself to that. I remember doing an annual for Marvel UK, a Transformers annual, and it was eighteen pages, which seemed like a marathon to get through in one story. So to then do 22 pages every month felt like a lot. Psychologically it felt like a long way before you got to the finishing line. The upside of that is that it’s a nice chunk of work to have every month, 22 pages, bang. Your fighting for that six pager with lots of other artists who would be up for it.
When you wrote did you write specifically for each issue or did you write longer stories and break those down over each issue?
Simon: I definitely, especially with Transformers, wrote a long story arc. I used to love that old style Marvel tactic, where you would have a sub-plot build for months and months and then finally you would get that story and the next sub-plot would start to build. So I applied that to Transformers big time. I did this big arc that ran from issues 60 to, I think, 79. So all of a sudden we had this whole thing rolling, and by the time Andrew came on board with issue 69 I knew where I was going for the next year. Writing scripts was easy. Dreamwave was more fast and loose I tended to do the arc, and to not think much beyond that. With IDW, because we are starting from ground level and building everything, I am trying to know where I am going and layer in the stories a year or two ahead of time. I’m trying to recapture a little bit of that, where everything feeds into a bigger hold.
We are doing Infiltration, Escalation, we are then doing Storm Bringer, where there are mirror events within Infiltration/Escalation; where events weave in and out of one and the other. We then have a series of solo one shot character books all of which will lead back into the main book, and all of which will lead to events in a years time.
Do you have a favourite part of your time at Marvel UK, whether it be a story arc, page someone drew or something you look back on and say that was Marvel uk for me?,/p>
Andy: For me it was a Christmas story called Cold Comfort and Joy which was a Transformers strip, and was set in the snow. I started off drawing it, and the editor at the time gave me a real hard time over it. I can remember who it was…oh it was you wasn’t it Simon. (Laughs).
There was a lot of stuff he picked me up on, so I really upped my game because I realised there was certain things I needed to do. I was relatively fresh into comics, and if I was to have any kind of career in this I needed to respond to the demands that were being made of me. So I was pulled up, I felt really pissed about it for ten minutes, and then I though I’ll just do it. I really enjoyed that strip, I think that one was the beginning of how my Marvel US stuff looks, it had that certain attention to detail and really caring about what I was doing; not just telling the story, but getting into the detail and the world of what was going on.
Simon: I’ll always remember that phone call with Andrew because apparently I had a reputation in the office of doing these phone calls to artists where I would go “I’ve got the pages, lovely, fantastic, love em’ but….”, and then launching into this fairy ruthless list of “this has got to change, that’s got to change”. Apparently the Andrew one went on for about 25 minutes. Laughs. Apparently everyone stopped work and listened, and felt sorry for Andrew at the other end of the phone. Andrew responded well to it, I always tried to be constructive and like Andrew said the next one he did immediately after it was in response to that.
Andy: I vividly remember drawing that strip. We were having some building work done on the house we were living in, and myself and my family went to live with my parents pretty much in one room. So I was perched amongst piles of boxes trying to get this thing drawn, while I had the editor on the other end of the phone giving me a hard time. It was challenging but it was at that time in a career were you think either I’m going to rise to this challenge or I’m not. Can I do it or can I not.
Was there a point where you both felt that’s the end of the Transformers chapter in my life, it’s time to move on?
Simon
: It’s happened to me several times. Transformers keeps finishing, the segue way from Marvel UK to Marvel US. Marvel US would descend on us from time to time to tell us how to do comics, which was fine because they had been doing it a lot longer than us. So we had the likes of Jim Shooter and Tom Defalco come into the office. We went out for lunch with Tom DeFalco and Bob Bulianski, and Bob and I had Transformers in common and he said “Look Simon I am going to come off this soon. I’m slightly burned out on this do you want to do it? You realise its going to be a dead book in about three issues”. I said fair enough, I’ll take what I can get. We kept it going for 25-30 issues and I carried on doing the Marvel UK stuff and then finished. We had plans way beyond issue 80 but suddenly it was like, wrap it up in two issues.
Andy: I don’t know whether you knew, but it was at a comic convention when Tom DeFalco was over, and we all went for a drink that I remember sitting there feeling like I had finally arrived. I was at a comic convention, the Americans were over, I was working in American comics and Tom DeFalco turned round in the pub and said “oh yeah we’re going to cancel that book”. My whole world caved in (laughs).
Simon: As Andrew said that fed into more Marvel US work and then that fed into Transformers Generation 2. It was then finished again until we got called up by a guy who was running a Transformers convention, and we didn’t even know Transformers conventions existed. He said “there’s this new series called Beast Wars, and we want you to do an exclusive Beast Wars comic, and that kicked it off again. Then it got to the Dreamwave period, and that died, and now IDW have the licence. Then there will be the movie, so it somehow seems to keep clawing its way onwards.
Andy: I didn’t really want to do much of the Generation Two stuff, because I felt that I had moved on and the gap between that and the Transformers convention work was a good five years. Even I thought “Is that still going?”
What’s really cool about it for me is that there is something that people identify me with. I like doing new stuff and all that kind of thing, but to be remembered by people for something that made a difference to them, that’s really cool. How often do you get to a place where the work that you have done is there for one generation and the new work is there for their children.
Simon: For me, although I had done lots of comics, I had never been a comics celebrity. I was a Transformers celebrity though. To walk into a convention where you are walking past the row of people and somebody mutters “that’s Simon Furman”, and I think wow somebody recognises me. Its quite flattering, and I am very grateful for that.
Does it surprise you when fans come up to you and talk about stories that are 20 years old?
Simon: In the UK conventions that’s largely what you get. In the US they don’t know the UK stories as well. The Titan trades have helped a bit, but over here I have people coming up to me and its flattering when people say this changed my life, it made me read or made me interested in creative stuff. That is hugely flattering.
Andy: I had the good fortune when I first tried to get into comics to join something called The Society of Strip Illustration, which was a bunch of guys who used to meet in London. They were artists and writers and editors way back in the very early 80s. I got to know a guy called Barry Mitchell who used to do all the football strips and all the old English comics, and I had the same kind of thing. I said to him I grew up with your stuff and you are the reason why I chose to draw comics. So I get when people come and say it to me. If I had never had the chance to meet the person that influenced me, I wouldn’t understand that on the same level. You appreciate what it’s like for them. It’s not an ego thing but it’s really nice to connect.
Simon: Of course now, with the internet, you connect far too much, its instantaneous feedback. We did Transformers back in the Marvel UK days in a vacuum. Even to an extent the Marvel US original run we didn’t have feedback on. It was just readers letters.
I did all the UK letters pages and read a lot of feedback, but it was largely, “Who is stronger?” and things like that. Now of course you get instantaneous feedback with a lot of it rabid and not good. You have to be quite strong to let it influence where you go with things. With the IDW stuff people have been cautiously enjoying it. We did the Storm Bringer thing ahead of time largely because people wanted a big bunch of giant robots hitting each other, so we’ll give ‘em that.
So were you Grimlock in Grim’s Grams …
Simon: Soundwave in Soundwave and Dreadwind in Dread tidings. All of those. I loved it. I loved the letters pages and the fantastic thing was doing it in Scream. We had the editor character called Ghastly McNasty and I was doing the letters page for that, and you could say what you liked because it was this inhuman editor. 2000AD had Tharg and we carried it into Transformers and it was great. We invented these characters who were rude, so we could be as rude as we liked. Basically allowing us to say “Don’t be stupid” and stuff like that.
Literally with Transformers, and I tell people this now and they go “You’re having a laugh!”, but in its heyday Transformers UK was selling 200, 000 copies a week. When you think that the top selling American comic was selling 110-120 thousand…
Andy: What happened? Transformers US was cancelled on 59. That would be top ten now.
Simon: We used to get a stack of mail this high every week.
Andy: This high doesn’t work very well on a tape recorder.
Laughs.
Simon: Sorry, very high.
Andy: One and a half feet high (laughs).
Simon: The bulk of it you had to read and find the funny ones, then boil them down to a letters page. It was all part and parcel of being an editor at Marvel UK. The designers did a lot and the editors did a lot.
Andy: Weekly!
For you each, is there a character that you Simon would love to write and that you Andy would love to draw?
Simon: The character I would love to write is Iron Man. I actually did an Iron Man fill-in that was never used. It was written, drawn, I think Geoff drew it, but never published, however I really enjoyed doing it. I love the idea of Iron Man. It’s the middle ground between doing robots and human characters, and if I had a chance and Marvel said you can have whatever book you want, I’d have Iron Man. There is something about him, I’d have a blast.
Andy: My favourite character that I used to draw or have drawn….not necessarily Transformers. My big, big, oh my god I’ve finally got here was when I did a Spider-Man book, because that’s what I grew up with. When I finally did it though, it was a pain in the backside, all that web pattern and no face, it’s not particularly a fun character to draw. Wolverine was good to draw because there was a lot of expression in the character, that was pretty cool. I have always, always wanted to draw Captain America. I’d love to do a Captain America strip. My favourite all time artist ever is John Bucema, and I grew up with the Avengers and Captain America was the sharp end of that. Thor, that would be cool as well.
Transformers Movie, good, bad Indifferent?
Simon: Are we talking the animated movie or the new one?
Both!
Simon: The original animated movie was fantastic. If I can pick a moment where my attitude changed towards Transformers it was the movie, and one we got a change to run with those characters. I had seen episodes of the TV series and had not been impressed, I thought fairly cheesy, the plots paper thin, awful inconsistencies, nothing pretty much to recommend it. Then the movie came along and it was gob smacking, the animation was almost pre-akira, akira. It just blew me away. I remember being thoroughly pumped up by the soundtrack, and the action, and the whole thing.
Andy: Rock on Vince!
Simon: Literally as soon as we could take those characters and pull them into our story it just took off. Everybody said Target 2006 was where it became something more than just stories and it really took off for me as a writer. Animated movie big thumbs up.
Andy: I saw the movie on a video that was given to me as reference material and I thought it was great. The whole Unicron transformation was fantastic and what a voice over cast. Orson Wells!
Simon: I think the new movie will change things again, I can’t say too much about this but I have seen the designs and the storyline and I think its going to be looked at as something else altogether. The characters look different and the storyline is very different. It’s very much its own thing. The movie is going to be different with a capital D.
Andy: There is still going to be an Optimus Prime though?
Simon: I really can’t say very much.
Andy: He’s going to be an Ice Cream van.
Simon: Funnily enough the vehicles are similar enough but it’s the robot modes that are quite stylistically different.
Andy: I think that the live action movie is going to be great! When they announced the director there was mixed opinion about that but its like, ok, do you want lots of depth and meaning and character interaction with fairly suspect set pieces, or do you want full on action set pieces and a bit shallow. I know which I would choose for a Transformers movie. Bring it on!
Simon: My only reservation is, yes he does spectacle well but so much of this is going to rely on how much depth they get into the story, and if its just bubblegum action they are not going to go for it. If they can inject some kind of interest into the characters, make the human cast actually work instead of being stereotypes…
Andy: You’re such a writer. (laughs)
So, Simon Furman and Andy Wildman, you can choose the voice actors for Transformers the Movie, who do you choose?
Simon: I don’t think anything has been confirmed about voice actors. I think they are still looking at some of the original guys. I don’t think George Clooney would do a bad job.
Andy: He’d be great.
Simon: For Megatron you’d want somebody like Christopher Walken with that mad edge in their voice. You want menace even in something like pass the ketchup.
Andy: Al Pacino!
Does it sadden you that, presumably, they wont use Megatron transforming into a gun and Soundwave transforming into a cassette recorder. Does that make it less ‘your’ transformers?
Simon: The thing with the alt mode is that it really doesn’t matter. They have always been the robots first and foremost. I have altered what they transform into so many times, like when we did war within we had to re-think everybody. So I have no great attachment to the alt mode.
Andy: I think if you get really precious about this stuff you are not going to enjoy the movie. If you let all of that go it will be great.
How is the IDW stuff going?
Andy: I’m not doing much, I’ve done alternate covers and the first British convention exclusive cover ever.
Simon: The IDW stuff is going really well. It was always going to be difficult doing something new and keeping everybody happy. We had long discussions with Chris and Dan and everybody at IDW, decided this is the way to go with it and have stuck to our guns. I think its building and we are winning people round with it. That they are staying with it and giving it the chance it needs. Beast Wars has been fun, Storm Bringer is great, where we can do something big and epic and there is a nice balance of stuff. We are doing these solo books which is nice, because you can do those focused character ones like we did at Marvel UK so its going very well.
Plenty of creative freedom?
Simon: Great creative freedom. Hasbro, we hardly hear a murmur from them other than to say it’s great. IDW guys seem to trust me.
Whats coming up in the future?
Simon: I don’t know if we are working on anything together at the moment, Power Rangers I suppose. For myself it’s more and more stuff for IDW, I hope I can develop the work I did on Ronan and Amazing Fantasy to get Marvel work again, that was a big kick for me to be doing mainstream Marvel work again. Lots of Transformers related stuff as well. With the movie related stuff there is so much peripheral activity that I have got about 4 things lined up that are going to start kicking in over the next year, which are almost boosted by the fact that the movie is out there but are almost unrelated other than that it’s Transformers. I am involved with a game company who are doing the official game for the movie so that’s coming up. Its nice that at the moment when Hasbro get a licensee they say “Here’s the go to guy when you want a consultant or writer or anything else”. The peripheral of the movie is doing me no harm at all.
Andy: Apart from Power Rangers that I have been doing, and that Simon is writing, I have been doing a lot of character design work for an animation company in London. Character design for Legends of The Dragon, which has just had its first season, and I have designed all the characters for the second season. Other projects that I am developing are a children’s pre-school tv show idea that has been optioned by a European production company so that’s all going ahead. A lot of new stuff outside of comics, I am open to anything, just having fun. Draw the World Together, which originally was a one off, three month project last year, but so many people are enrolled in the idea that we are carrying on with it.
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Russ Sheath is 31 and lives and works in Devon, in the UK.
Currently studying for a post graduate teaching qualification, Russ has worked as a manager in comics’ retail and spent time defending his nation as a member of the regular and reserve armed forces.