Transformers/GIJoe

[Guest starvenger]

Check out the talent they've got on the title...

 

JOHN NEY RIEBER: GETTING HIS TRANSFORMERS/GI JOE WAR ON

 

For every Yin, there is a Yang, and for every crossover, there’s another crossover, with the title reversed. Case in point, Devil’s Due/Image is currently publishing their six-issue GI Joe/Transformers crossover, and in August, Dreamwave lets loose its six issue Transformers/GI Joe crossover by John Ney Rieber and Jae Lee. Newsarama caught up with Rieber for the scoop.

 

Click on the images for larger, and in the case of this one to the right, really larger versions.

 

While his run on Captain America under the Marvel Knights imprint was kind of straightforward superheroics, Rieber bristles slightly at the idea of trying to pigeonhole him as moving away from the edges and squarely into the mainstream with Transformers/GI Joe.

 

”'Mainstream' is kind of a slippery concept,” Rieber said. “Insofar as it defines itself after the fact, if you know what I mean. If you push the envelope, and the envelope doesn't tear...

 

“That said, I don't think there's anything counter-mainstream about my writing. I want my stories to be about something. I want my characters to seem like they're alive and real. I want the worlds they live in to have depth and texture. I want my plots to draw my readers in and surprise them. I want the emotional passages to be as intense as the action sequences--and I want the action sequences to make your heart skip and your eyes pop. Hmmm…that's a pretty mainstream set of ambitions, isn't it?

 

“I don't want to pull a handful of dog-eared cards out of my pocket, pretend to shuffle them, and show you the same old magic tricks you've seen a thousand times before.”

 

Rieber said he was very impressed with Dreamwave as a company before the gig, and even more impressed with them after they asked him. After hearing them out, Rieber said that he was very pleased to find that the publisher’s ideas and his vision of what he could do with the characters meshed.

 

”My personal experience has been that the biggest challenge you're going to have, scripting a comic series, is to find the place where the kind of story that your publisher wants to publish and the kind of story that you want to tell intersect,” Rieber said. “If you can't find or create that space, you're working in a killzone. You're toast.”

 

While the Devil’s Due story is pretty much a template for how the properties could be integrated in the present day, Rieber’s is a little more “What If-y?” in nature. Instead of modern day, think 1939.

 

”Dreamwave had already seized upon the alternate reality/World War 2 concept, and sunk their teeth into it,” Rieber said. “They're totally into the characters; they'd already done an amazing amount of conceptual development - working out World War 2-era transformations for the Autobots and the Decepticons, for example, and period takes on most of the major Joes. Don Figueroa and Dan Norton were already hard at work on the character designs when Dreamwave approached Jae and me. We loved the concept. Of course. It's brilliant.”

 

The setting and era appealed to Rieber because of the heavy sense of reality that could piggyback on the story, making the story come off with a more “real” felling. “We wanted this to be a war story, and we wanted it to feel real,” Rieber said. “Real and dangerous. Given their history, and association with toys in most people’s minds, those aren't necessarily qualities you'd associate with the Transformers or the Joes.

 

“But the World War 2 setting really anchors the story. You know you're not going to see characters running around firing blasts of pink or blue laser light at each other. You know the battlefields you're dealing with. You've seen the mud. The blood. The heroism and the sacrifice. And you know the stakes are high...

 

“It's also a perfect match for the conflict between Joes and the Cobras and the Autobots and the Decepticons in the moral sense. There's no grey in those conflicts. The Joes and the Autobots are good. The Cobras and the Decepticons are evil.

 

”World War 2--some people call it 'The Good War'. Because it was exactly that kind of battle. Opinions diverge, when you talk about the wars we've waged since then. Should we have fought? Should we be fighting? What were we fighting for? What are we fighting for.

 

“But World War 2...

 

“Man, we're all glad we fought that one.”

 

Thing is the “reality” of Transformers/GI Joe does have its limits. As those who’ve checked out the solicitation for the series will have noted, no individuals (coughHitlercough) or groups (coughNaziscough) are named. Rieber’s original plan (duh) was to have Cobra side up with the Axis.

 

But…

 

“Hasbro--the licensor of the characters--requested that we strip all allusions to specific countries and political parties from the story. No Nazis, in other words. no Imperial Japanese kamikaze pilots, et cetera. So one of my challenges was to create a believable, historically viable WW2-era war story scenario sans such things. And have it make sense in an alternate-universe kind of way. It took some doing, but I did it. And in retrospect, I'm glad that we made the shift - It put some interesting dramatic spins on our alternate reality...that I'm not even going to try to describe here and now, because they belong in the story. It also let us concentrate on the Cobras and the Decepticons more intensely. Focus on them. Their unique brand of nastiness..."

 

Missing Nazis aside, Rieber said that the union between the Decepticons and Cobra is just about as stable as putting two powerful forces with hot for planetary domination together. “The Decepticons aren't really interested in sharing power with Cobra any more than Cobra is interested in sharing power with them,” Rieber said. “And that's a huge part of the fun.

 

“Both Cobra Commander and Megatron agreed to the alliance with the ultimate intention of betraying the other...pretty much the way that Hitler 'allied' himself with the Soviets while scheming to invade Russia. But that's only the tip of the Machivellian iceberg. There's tension within Cobra, in this story. Destro scheming against Cobra Commander. And then there's the Baroness...does anyone trust her?

 

“And meanwhile, back at the ranch...if Starscream weren't plotting against Megatron, could you really call this a Transformers story?”

 

And of course, the actions of the villain always calls for the creation and intervention of the good guys.

 

”Cobra finds--and awakens--the Decepticons in the winter of 1938, about the time that World War 2 was really beginning to take shape in Europe, and on the Pacific Rim,” Reiber said. “Cut to the summer of 1939. America has been preparing for war--quietly and desperately. We're not ready for it yet. But we're working on it. We send a team of twelve operatives to Europe to gather intelligence...

 

“And two come back alive. With the news that the war we've been getting ready for isn't going to happen. Some mysterious force has struck out of nowhere. Crushing the enemies we've dreaded and the allies we've feared for as though they were so many insects. It's one of those classic bad dream scenarios. Waking from a wicked nightmare only to find you're in an even more terrifying one.

 

“What would you do? You weren't sure how you were going to cope with the enemy you knew. How are you going to deal with the enemy you know nothing about? Apart from the fact, of course, that this new enemy is stealthier and more destructive than you ever dreamed an enemy could be? You'd develop the concept of the special operations strike force as though your life and freedom depended on it. Years earlier than we refined the concept in our timeline. That's what you'd do.

 

“You’d also give it a code name: G.I. Joe.”

 

The Joe strike force wakes up the Autobots in issue #1, which is a good thing, according to Rieber. “If they didn't, likelier than not, the Joe strike force would no longer be breathing by the end of the second issue.”

 

The full six issues, first issue timeline aside, spans about two weeks, Rieber said – most of the action occurs over a matter of days. “It’s a chain of battles--or a single battle, depending on your perspective,” Rieber said. “Think of Normandy.”

 

On the art side of the miniseries, Rieber said that he wrote “every panel” of the story for Lee. But wasn’t overly affected in the approach he was talking by Lee’s art style. “I think I would have focused on the intimate/emotional/frightening aspects of the story even if I hadn't been writing for Jae,” Rieber said. “Tech stuff is very important--in terms of the texture of a story, the realism factor...even in terms of plotting. If you're paying real attention to it, it's a great arbiter of what can and can't happen in a story. But so far as the reader's experience goes, for the most part, I think that the tech belongs in the background.

 

“I sweat the nuts and bolts of a world so you don't have to really see them. So you can implicitly feel and trust that they're there. But again, it's not hard to play to Jae's artistic strengths - because he has so many. He feels that this is the best work he's ever done. And I believe that's an understatement.”

 

As for himself, Rieber said the miniseries was the best of both worlds, allowing him to play with some well-known characters, as well as work to tell a serious story, heavy on the drama as well as the action.

 

”We've put a lot of intention and energy into...well, it may sound strange, but I'd have to call the quality realism,” Rieber said. “We want you to feel what it'd be like to be on a twentieth-century battlefield and look up, and find yourself under attack by a forty-foot tall metal dreadnought that's more than a machine. And you know it's more than a machine. Because you've just looked past metal hands--hands bigger than you are--and looked into its eyes. And heard it laugh. Because it's looking into your eyes, too....seeing the fear there.

 

“But the story runs the emotional spectrum, because the story comes from the characters out, if you know what I mean. And there are a lot of them in this story....if you don't already love Bumblebee, for instance...well, you'll probably love him before the smoke clears. And if you've ever thought it would be fun to hang out with Snake-Eyes...

 

“Well, you may not feel quite the same way when we're done with you. And if you want to talk about scary...

 

“Snake-Eyes is one of the main viewpoint characters in this story.

 

“And Snake-Eyes is scary."

 

Link is here

 

Anyways, I expected a Lee to be working on the title, but not Jae Lee. His art is very you-like-it-or-you-don't, but it seems perfect for a WWII setting...