With the release of the Transformers movie this summer, the robot toys from the eighties are about to hit big once more. FractalMatter caught up with Chris Ryall, Editor in Chief of IDW Publishing and co-writer of the company’s Transformers Movie Prequel comic, and legendary Transformers writer Simon Furman to get their thoughts on their latest creation and the arrival of the movie.
Chris, you are credited with the story for the prequel books, how much direction did you receive regarding its content from the film company/Hasbro?
Chris Ryall - It came in bursts, really. I began by reading the film script and then jotting down notes of things that were mentioned in the script but not fleshed out, just looking for areas that made sense to logically expand upon. I developed a first outline for the four issues and sent it off. After the various approvals, I got notes on other areas to cover, incorporated those, sent another draft, discussed things with the folks working on novelizations and found ways we could link our stories, and then kept fine-tuning things. From there, I got the outline into Simon’s hands, and he found all sorts of ways to tighten, sharpen, and just improve upon what I already had.
Simon, what did you think of Chris’s story when it first arrived? Chris, did you have any worries about working with the Transformers writer?
Simon Furman - I thought it read really, really well, and made the most of the stuff the movie simply had no time (or probably budget) to get into properly, like the war on Cybertron and the stuff that happened after Megatron is discovered under the ice and before the movie kicks in. Most of my initial suggestions were to do with making it a complete and rounded 4-issue entity in its own right, one that very much stood alone, while still feeding into the movie itself. And so Bumblebee’s role kind of expanded to fill the entire four issues. He’s very much the star of the show. Chris and I just bounced the outline back and forth until we had something that we both thought made the best of both (our) worlds.
CR - From my end, my worries started to be the idea of working on this thing without Simon. I’m sure it was harder for Simon, but from my perspective, having a guy like him involved to bounce ideas off, or to just help make better the scratchings that I started with was a huge boon. I’m all for attempting a Transformers script solo, but something like this, a story as big as this, needed Simon to pull it off convincingly.
Ok, whose idea was the city of SimFur in the first Prequel issue?
CR - I doubt Simon would ever be so vain… I just threw that in as a little nod to Simon even before he’d signed on to work on this with me. There’s a character named “Figueroa” in the movie itself, but no one named “Furman.” So I was damned if a big prequel was going to happen without a tip of the hat to Simon for all his amazing work with the franchise. He let it stick, and Hasbro didn’t question me too much about this strange city name on Cybertron.
SF - I was a little dubious about the SimFur thing, only because I didn’t want people to think I was using the book to massage my own ego. But as it came from Chris’s side of things, I was more than happy to go along with it.
The pace of the first issue is rather swift in terms of plot, one could almost suggest that just the first issue would serve as a prequel for the movie in terms of setting up whys and wherefores of the Transformers being on Earth. Where do you go for the next three issues?
CR - Ohhh, we’re just getting warmed up. I love that the comments from your review and another review mentioned the surprise over us already heading off into space at the end of issue 1. In these days of padded stories, it’s nice to move things along faster than expected. But the end of issue 1 takes place light years from Earth, and also hundreds of years in Earth’s past. So for the three issues remaining, we have time to look at the impact (literally and figuratively) of these Transformers landing on our world, what they do upon arrival, we look at the organization that springs up around their arrival and we see how these alien robots affect the lives of generations of people, all of which comes to play in the movie itself.
I keep talking about this being an epic tale, and it really is, in that it covers a hundred years’ history on Earth, and really adds backstory to what people will see on the big screen in July.
SF - We had some intriguing ‘loose ends’ to play with. Like the teaser trailer, with the whole Mars probe thing… in 2003! So… maybe that meant there were Transformers on Earth a ways before the start of the movie, and maybe Sector 7’s apparent familiarity with Transformers (or N.B.Es) stems from more than just Megatron! That was how we worked on this really, exploiting every possibility, every plot crumb from the movie script.
How difficult is it imprinting a character’s personality in a tie-in to a movie you haven’t seen? Is it easier because they are essentially the same characters they have always been?
CR - Basically, yeah—even if the facades appear a bit different in the movie, the essence of who these characters are is the same. And the script itself gives us enough of the characters’ personalities that we could extrapolate from there, and build upon what was going to happen in the movie. The nice thing is that we got to do a lot of exposition for Megatron as well as for Bumblebee, so you get inside his head a bit and see his motivation for approaching things the way he does.
SF - For me, I was coming from two directions. There’s the classic characters, with their classic characteristics, and the newer characters, with still to be defined characteristics. For instance, I played Starscream almost entirely like classic Starscream. You can, I hope, read his dialogue and imagine the Screamer of yore. But with ‘bots like Barricade or Blackout, it was more from scratch. I was writing, concurrently, a visual guide for Dorling Kindersley, which entailed fleshing out the movie characters (big time) in terms of profiles, abilities, etc. So some of that fed back into the Prequel series. Bumblebee, I think, is quite a new take on the character.
How did the joint writing work? Have either of you worked like this before?
CR - I never have, no. And while I doubt Simon needed me here, it’s all gone smoothly so far. I took a first pass at issue 1’s script, then Simon tightened it, and we reversed that direction for issue 2, and so on.
SF - Strangely, I’ve never co-written something before. With something like The Engine: Industrial Strength (www.whorunstheengine.net), the online series I co-created with Andrew Wildman, that was very much a co-production, but even there I tended to write the script and Andrew would draw/animate them. Recently, I’ve co-written a spec movie script (with author and film critic Mark Salisbury), and that was possibly my first experience of proper co-writing, with the whole thing shared 50/50, and the script literally passed back and forth between us. Writing the prequel with Chris was very organic. The story was his, I fed back into that, and then the scripts came from one direction or the other, with appropriate second pass from whoever was in the backseat that time around. What was nice for me, was how it ‘evolved’ continually almost. Creatively, it was a very rewarding experience.
Simon, is there any writer out there you would like to see writing Transformers as well as yourself, and why?
SF - Surely no one can write Transformers as well as myself! (Just kidding). You know, I’m entirely supportive of new writers coming in. I always have been. Right now, we’ve got Nick Roche and Eric Holmes (oh, and that Ryall fellow) contributing to the creative mix, and I think that’s majorly healthy. I plainly can’t write everything, and don’t want to (as I always want room in my working schedule for non-TF projects (and non-comics projects for that matter). So, bring ‘em on, I say. The only criteria being that they’re able to put together a great TF that works within whatever particular continuity (be it movie, Infiltration (et al), Beast Wars or whatever). That’s it.
How do you both think the Movie and this comic prequel differ from the existing hordes of Transformer comics and animation?
CR - Well, the designs make things seem a bit darker, and give a more alien feel to the characters, which is good. I like that it very much plays up the fact that these robots are giant alien creatures and not just cuddly little semi trucks that humans can easily relate to.
SF - Like Infiltration (et al), it’s just a baggage-free reboot that can be enjoyed by a much wider cross section of the general public. Twenty or so years in, I feel any franchise needs that kind of level playing field reintroduced.
What are your impressions of the design elements of the movie characters?
CR - It’s impossible not to fall in love with any designs once you’ve seen Don draw them. It’ll take some fans time to get used to them, but then again, so did organic webshooters in Spider-Man. At the end of it all, we were just trying to tell a great Transformers story no matter what the characters looked like, and I think we’ve done that. And these designs really do make sense cinematically, too.
Do you think the movie stands a chance with long-term Transformers fans, and probably more importantly (for the film company) do you think the film will be a commercial success?
CR - I think yes to both. Longtime fans always decry changes to their characters in movies, but it’s a rare occasion that it doesn’t work out. And people need to remember that the folks involved with this movie not only know how to make a huge Summer movie work for the masses but the producers are also huge Transformers fans. It’s in good hands, and I think the comments that followed the latest movie trailer show that fans are going to love this.
SF - I definitely see this as an ongoing franchise (of its own). Everything about this says ‘sequels.’
Humans are not needed in Transformers, movies or otherwise. Discuss.
CR - Disagree. Humans are absolutely essential. Look at any movie featuring giant creatures, from Godzilla to Jurassic Park. Without humans, there’s no scope, no scale, nothing relatable, and no real sense of threat. Or sense of wonder. I think you need that for these stories to be more than just “giant things punching each other.”
SF - Disagree. Everything that allows us (the reader or viewer) to relate to the Transformers comes via the human characters/point of view. The whole nub of Transformers is eloquently summed up in the ‘their war, our world,’ tagline. The Transformers grow through their interaction with the human cast, the humans acting like a mirror for the robots’ own ‘humanity’.
Ok, some quick-fire questions to finish us off:
Any more Beast Wars from IDW in the near future?
CR - Yep, late Summer.
SF - Oh boy, yeah! Doing the Beast Wars (character) Profiles series with Ben Yee (also out late Summer) has really opened up the larger scale aspects of the (whole) BW series for me. Expect things to go epic and cosmic this time out!
When will we get a reprint of the Transformer’s UK epic Time Wars story?
CR - Hopefully late summer, or later this year, anyway. After Target: 2006.
What non-Transformers work would Simon like to get out of his system?
SF - Writing movie scripts is definitely something I want to do more of. My first experience of this was a blast, and we (myself and Mark Salisbury) are already working on more ideas. Plus, I have a series coming up with Dynamite that is just a labor of love for me. More on this when I can. And oh, I’d love to be let loose on Iron Man. One of my favorite Marvel characters.
Any chance of having Liam Sharp do some work for IDW in the future? We all love Liam.
CR - I’d be all for that if we could work it out.
Name the Transformer you think is the most useless.
CR - ChrisCharger.
SF - Wheelie.
Is Nick Roche really that scary in his TF geekiness?
CR - Well, he’s Irish, so that explains a lot, said fellow Irishman Ryall.
SF - He’s an Irishman who doesn’t really drink. Now that’s scary.
Autobot or Decepticon?
CR - 51% Autobot, 49% Decepticon.
SF - Grimlock.
James Dodsworth - Born and raised in Yorkshire, residing in London since 2000, James has a Law Degree and works for the Anti-Financial Crime Office of a International Asset Management Company. He is a writer and editor for FractalMatter.com.
But his main claim to fame is living next to the pub where Shaun of the Dead was conceived.