Friday, June 5, 2015

Author's Reflections- Comic #300
































#300
 
This comic was basically split up into thirds because at the time the chat board had a limitation of pictures that could be included per post so I had to post each of the three parts at different parts of the day. I didn’t mind doing that, it added to the uniqueness of the milestone and splitting it up helped for storytelling purposes.
 
The first nine pictures were simple…in fact because I wanted to keep who came out of the hole a mystery, I was able to reuse some of the pictures a couple times. I was happy that none of the readers were able to spoil the reveal by guessing who came through the Purple Hole, making the end of the comic have that much bigger an impact.
 
I definitely wanted to feature the Decepticons in the next part of the comic, licking their wounds after the fight. Waspinator’s idea was meant to be random, based on what Starscream had said about good guys always winning, though some readers thought it alluded to Shattered Glass characters, in which Autobots were evil and Decepticons were good, were the ones who came through the Purple Hole. The Shattered Glass story was the Botcon theme that year (2008) so I don’t blame them for making that assumption. I liked the building applause Waspinator got for his idea, started by Inferno, the one who normally handed him never-ending torment. The last thing to address is Megatron mentioning ‘Kiss Players’…which is something I don’t want to delve into here, nor do I really like to recall as part of the Transformers franchise period. If you really want to know what it is and you don’t mind horrifying yourself, feel free to Google it.
 
The last eleven comics served to neatly wrap up the movie plotline, send Optimus and a handful of other Autobots off to be featured in the crossover with TFW2005 Boards member ShadowDragon as well as reveal who came through the Purple Hole. It sounds like a lot to cram into eleven pictures but I think it worked just fine without feeling too terribly rushed. After making fun of the movies for the better part of fifty comics I had to flip things around and say that G1 isn’t an infallible cornerstone of the franchise. I was happy to work in one last movie spoof dealing with Jazz’s death. Honestly G1 Ratchet probably could have saved him if he had the chance.
 
Unicron’s re-emergence with two heralds in tow was just something I wanted to do to keep with bringing gods into the comic in milestones, and I thought that it would be unexpected since I already used Unicron and killed him off. Little did I know that it would be something that would literally affect the comic long-term and offer dozens of future plot threads. The heralds were fairly obvious choices; I jumped at the chance to use Nemesis Prime since I love the Classics Optimus mold and Galvatron was obvious due to his longstanding ties to Unicron in nearly every iteration of Transformers lore he appears in. The Classics Galvatron toy wasn’t the best…it was small compared to Megatron, and it suffered from design issues due to originally being planned as a larger toy but being shrunk down and released at the deluxe price point, but since I didn’t have any intention of killing off Megatron and reformatting him; rather using Galvatron as his own standalone character like I had imagined when I was a child playing with my G1 toys, it worked out fine.
 
I’m not saying every comic that follows is great…in fact, far from it. But I consider this to be the turning point in the comic after the big shakeup of moving and explaining the scene change and uneven storytelling with too many threads going on at once with the movie spoof and all the upgrading going on. In my opinion this is where things really start to get good!


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