Ain't nothing wrong with drone-slaughter.

It's not that Air Raid dies in battle that's the issue. It's that it's pretty much the only thing he does, and now, about the only thing he may ever do. Character death can be an incredibly powerful plot point, and put to great use. People cared about G1 Nightbeat's deaths in the old Marvel G2 series and in IDW's own tales because he'd been given a chance to shine in both timelines, to become a character in his own right, and Nightbeat is hardly an A-lister in the TF multiverse. His death had impact because he was more than just a body. Scrounge remains a favorite, and his entire purpose was to appear then die in a single issue... but he was given a great storyline in which to do so.

Again I point to Dreadwing in "Reign of Starscream". His story ended with his death, but he was given ample time to be more than just Starscream's victim, and became interesting in his own right. Hell, in my hypothetical Crankcase tale, having him die up on the cube at the end would pretty much be the perfect cap-off, driving home with a knife and hammer "being a Decepticon really sucks".

As noted, nobody should be immortal, but more toys should be given more chances to be more.


M "Oh, And... I Can't Agree With The Bay Assertion Either. I Don't Think It Would Of Worked Anywhere As Well Without His Particular Blend Of 'Hey, It's ME' Cocky Jackholishness And Dogged Insistence On As Much Practical Effects As Possible" Sipher

I also have to echo this. Indeed, this is actually where it's good to take a cue from Furman, in that he pretty regularly raises characters out of obscurity. Just look at Hardhead in the IDW comics. Heck, check out Monstructor (in concert with the Dreamwave-created profile), who is himself not only an obscure character dragged up by Furman, but made of six other obscure characters, including a core member who is a disgruntled artist. That's begging for a story right there. How does an artist end up the core of a robotic eldritch abomination?

The offbeat characters can produce some of the most fun stories, especially when it gets tiresome to read nothing but WAR WAR WAR KILL DEATH MAIM all the time. Granted, within the movie universe, the pool of characters is a little more limited, but a reprieve from the Epic Struggle for half an issue can make things a lot more palatable sometimes.

On a humorous note, I totally want to come up with a Continuum drinking game. Anytime the word "legend" is used, drink!

I have to admit to a certain fondness for Crankcase. I've always loved the dour misfit type of Con. But, honestly, I think wanting characters to never be hi-and-die is unrealistic.

The problem is that in other properties, you have your standard "redshirt" characters available, who serve no purpose other than to die to show that war is hell, the danger is really dangerous, etc. Transformers, on the other hand, is fairly unique in that even the TF equivalent of hairdressers and telephone sanitizers have toys and full bios. There are no real "redshirts" in the case of fully disposable characters, unless you go to the trouble of inventing generics. Which is not only hard to do when just about every repaint of an existing mold is already an existing character, and inventing a bunch of whole new designs just to kill them off seems like overkill (pardon the pun), but the fact that even the minor characters have bios actually lends a useful weight to cannon fodder deaths.

Because, I'm afraid that not every single death can be meaningful and built up towards. It's a war--sometimes people just do die in random battles. And the conceit of working around that by never showing any real squad battles, or always showing people narrowly escaping being killed, or what have you, lends a certain feeling of unreality to the proceedings. Which is fine in some of the lighter continuities, but the Movieverse has always had a feel of being more realistic. So redshirts serve a useful literary function, and the toy-only characters are pretty much TF's equivalent of redshirts. I mean, unless we want to start killing off random GoBots again. ;P

If it wasn't Crankcase who got killed, it would some other obscure character. You have to pick somebody. And this coming from someone who loves obscure characters, I might add! I just understand the whole deal when trying to come up with a good narrative.

Am i right in thinking that Dreamwave, with Sunstorm, did a better job of making an obscure character into an ongoing big player than IDW did?

Then again, maybe I'm just taking IDW Sixshot for granted....

I think the issue is less the existence of toy-based hi-then-die and more the frequency. I don't think there'd be anywhere as much resistance if it didn't seem at times that not being an A-lister (or someone from before 1987, which gives you a perceived if undeserved A-lister status) means you're pre-condemned to be grist for the slaughter mill.

(I don't think this is always a conscious decision on writers' parts, but it's just seem to become something of a trend that a lot of writers have fallen to.)

Take, for example, the Decepticons vs Reapers battle. Who were the casualties on the Decepticon side? ONLY the two guys who weren't around in 1985. Really? And how were those deaths responded to? Literally, in-fiction, it was "ha ha who cares?"

Who's the guy Galvatron kills unceremoniously in his Spotlight? Leadfoot the G2 guy. Who dies in Arcee and Nova Prime's rampages? Action Masters, G2 guys. Thank you, Furman.

It's a little disheartening. People say that new non-toy characters are instantly picked out as the redshirts. This is indeed true to a certain extent (I'm all for us getting some nontoy TF equivalents of Wedge Antilles to counter it more... never A-list, but never there to die), but to extend that to such a broad category of toy-guys is really unsettling. And honestly, having to rely on a toy-packaging bio to make someone care about whether or not a character died...


M "Restraint, I Think, Is The Keyword" Sipher

Well, I guess I'm kind of confused on who the writers are supposed to pick when the realism of the story calls for some random cannon fodder or similar deaths. I mean, if you pick on the more prominent characters, there's going to be even more grumbling, and using all drones all the same causes the same sort of unrealisticness. It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

And, I didn't mean that one should rely on a bio to make the audience care about someone dying. Rather that, most of the time killing a redshirt just makes one care in regards to the overall situation rather than individual characters--and you don't necessarily need any individual buildup regardless of the franchise of the story--but the TF bios have the interesting side effect of adding some individual weight to the matter as a bonus for the writer, so to speak.

I think it's just a unique problem you have to chalk up to TF's equally unique approach to character development (in that everyone gets at least a little of it, so even the really, really obscure characters are going to have their fans).

If you pay attention, Sipher isn't saying you can't kill them.

He's saying give us a reason to care about them first.

Just go back and photoshop some speech bubbles about how Air Raid is retiring next week, and Crankcase is trying to work up enough energon to go see his estranged daughter.

Er, yes, I caught that, thanks. In fact, I addressed that in my first post: "Because, I'm afraid that not every single death can be meaningful and built up towards. It's a war--sometimes people just do die in random battles."

The point I was making was, sometimes you do just end up with cannon fodder, because not every story has the luxury of spending time building up the random redshirts and also building up the main characters and the plot itself. Sometimes you just can only realistically build up the overall situation where the redshirts die rather than also getting to focus on them personally. And thus, like I said, if you just need said cannon fodder, who do you pick if people gripe about even the obscure characters dying?


*snickers appreciatively*

You pick guys like Crosscut. And Fang. And Macabre.

New guys.

That you make up.

So the guys people can buy in stores get to live long enough to be interesting.

well, Chris, I don't wanna split hairs, but they HAVE established in previous stories that there are mass produced units and the like. surely they could have made the difference?

Ideally, you sprinkle another one or two guys you make up into the squad who you DON'T kill. And have them show up later and don't kill them then either.

Guys like Burke, who you see throughout the first TF live-action movie, and is alive and well and shootin' stuff up in Revenge. He's never a scene-stealer, but there he is.


M "I Hope Both He And Graham Is In The Next Movie, Too. Oh, And Fig. Must Bring Back Fig." Sipher

Which I... also addressed in my first post: "Which is not only hard to do when just about every repaint of an existing mold is already an existing character, and inventing a bunch of whole new designs just to kill them off seems like overkill (pardon the pun), but the fact that even the minor characters have bios actually lends a useful weight to cannon fodder deaths."

Could you maybe try, I dunno, actually reading my posts before responding to them? Anyhoo.


That's a good point I can agree with. I could even see parlaying one of those types of characters into being the guy who always watches his team die around him, and he and everyone else is aware of that fact.

Nevermore makes a good point about the dialogue, too. Honestly, Animated and the TFCC prose stories have been the few TF places where I've seen really good dialogue. Most of IDW's comics haven't really been that good with selling personality through dialogue, I hate to say.

If you already have the answer, then why do you keep asking questions? I'm just answering your questions. If you've already answered the questions within your own posts, maybe the problem isn't with me!

Actually, the problem is with you, in that you seem to have trouble with the amazing literary concept of "rhetorical questions". Oy.

Your rhetorical questions have answers. You just don't like the answers, and I do. When you say that killing off generics is dumb, I disagree. I much prefer it to the alternative.

If you keep asking questions that I know the answer to, I'll answer them. It won't be the answer you like, apparently, but it'll be the correct one by my thinking.

I don't like your answers because I've got reasoning for my own answers that I posted as a rebuttal to your comments already, and you didn't point out why you disagree.

I personally think that spending a lot of time creating new designs for characters who are going to do nothing but die is a waste of the artist's time, when there are already existing characters who fit the bill of minor, obscure background characters that can be used instead. If you have an argument otherwise, then I'm willing to hear it. I just agreed with Sipher making a good rebuttal, so...

But anyhoo, I guess... this is all now off-topic. :>

Geoff Senior, Andy Wildman, Will Simpson and even Jose Delbo didn't seem to mind designing generic background-fillers when the situation called for it, and they weren't fans like today's TF pencillers.
I'm fairly certain most of today's TF pencillers would love to try their hands at making their own TFs, even if they only get three or four panels' worth of presence before dying.

Yeah, but today's TFs are a fair bit more complicated than those of yesteryear. Sticking a piece of alt. mode kibble on a generic boxbot may have worked then, but they'd look out of place next to the complicated main bots now.

So now you'd have to make their appearance mesh with everyone else, which means more time spent designing a character who only appears in half of one panel, walking by in the background.

Besides, I thought everyone loved playing "Spot the cameo!"

Or, taking an existing set of arms, matching them with a different set of legs, throw in a different torso and design a new head. It's really not that hard. (Floro Dery used to do that all the time ... he had pages of arms, legs, torsos and heads and he'd mix & match as needed.)

-JimS

That's true, but I always got the impression from comments the artists make on their DA pages and the IDW forums, as well as the arcs often requiring multiple artists, that the artists were already ending up pressed to keep deadlines as it is in terms of time available.


That too, now that you mention it... especially when you're dealing with the very complex Movie designs.

I think the only way around it would be if they had the chance to do extra development ahead of time to make a bunch of generic designs all the artists could then copy & tweak from constantly.

And not just in the distant past. Casey Coller's work has oodles of generics. Spotlights Blurr and Drift are lousy with them. I love Casey Coller.

Would that still work, or would they get called lazy for going all clip-art on character design?

That's utter malarky.

UTTER MALARKY.

This isn't a movie -- in a movie you have to design EVERYTHING so it works perfectly before you put it on screen. But that's not how comics work. With a design that's only going to show up in, say, four panels, you don't even need to design a turn-around for it, let alone an alt mode, a Transformation... heck, possibly you don't even need to work out what their LEGS look like. That's the difference with comic art -- you CAN cut corners massively because it IS a swift time-based art form.

Not to mention, if you're a fan drawing TFs on a regular basis desigining a generic Transformer is insanely easy. Don Figueroa, for example, creates 500 new TF designs every time he sits down to start on a new book anyway. It's not like the Marvel days in that respect -- these artists don't really pay attention to any set character models anyway.

The idea that background TFs are "Hard to design" or "More work for the artists" is especially absurd nowadays -- nearly every generic death of a b-lister Gen2 dude has them in AN ENTIRELY NEW BODY that the artist has DESIGNED JUST FOR THE STORY SO THEY'RE NOT IN AN EARTH FORM! The same holds true of the movie guys -- who Alex Milne completely redesigns to have more movie-like bodies and to give them Cybertronian alt modes. If they're already DOING that level of redesign, then creating a generic random TF hardly seems like more work to me.

--Boltax.

I honestly enjoyed Reign of Starscream -- it wasn't too bad. But I agree with what a lot of people are asserting. The deaths didn't feel substantial.

My advise would be to read the old Marvel comic, "Tomb of Dracula." There's a comic where you have a LOT of random deaths to show you just what a threat the main villain/star is. But here's the thing that Marv Wolfman did that made it work -- he gave EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER WHO GETS KILLED OFF A BACK STORY.

No kidding -- even if it's just a four panel appearance we'll always get narration boxes, and thought bubbles showing where the character is coming from, and where they're going, and often who's going to miss them. It makes a massive amount of difference. Suddenly it's not just "Random girl in alleyway" it's Connie Mumford, who's late getting home and decided to take a detour through the alley because she's afraid of what her husband will say if she gets home too late... And when Dracula kills her off you care.

Transformers doesn't have that any more -- I understand that narration boxes and other tools of comic books are not popular nowadays, but they are amazing tools. Comics have that potential -- to tell stories on multiple levels from multiple perspectives. They're really versatile in this respect. It's not like it was ALWAYS like this with Transformers comics. Think about the original G1 Marvel UK comics... think about the classic story "City of Fear". Here's a story that creates a dire feeling of danger and horror -- and yet NOT A SINGLE TOY-BASED CHARACTER DIES IN THE ENTIRE STORY. As far as I can remember only *3* characters die outright on panel in that story -- and one of them is ALREADY DEAD (Impactor).

And yet, despite that low body count and despite the fact that all the toy-based characters are 'safe' the writing, and the writing alone, creates the threat and the sense of danger and tension. Well, okay, not the writing alone. Dan Reed's awe inspiring zombieformers contribute a lot.

I personally think that random deaths without consequence don't contribute greatly to the mood of a sequence. City of Fear is a prime example of CAREFULLY timed and used death -- we start the story with the death of a generic... and the death has impact because we see that he's terrified, that he doesn't want to BE there, and we get a tiny glimpse of his backstory. Then after that there is no other character death until RIGHT AT THE END where both Flame -- the villain -- and Impactor -- a Zombie -- die in the ultimate climax of the story.

The deaths are well-paced and have immediate MEANING to the story.

Too often in modern TF comics the attitude seems to be, "Well, we need a death here to show how badass the villain is" or "We need a death here to show how GRITTY the war is!" That's... not good writing, in my opinion. I point back to Tomb of Dracula -- sometimes you DO need death sequences to create a powerful mood. But, you also have to give the character who dies some meaning to give the death IMPACT. If you're not willing to give us those precious moments with the character before they die... then the death is just going to feel hollow, pointless and not really contribute to the mood of the story.

If we don't know where the character is from, where the character is going, and who's going to miss them... why should we care if they die?

--Boltax.
(And that's all in ADDITION to the whole idea of toy based vs. made up generic.)

Well, except that the existing toy-only guys being used have, well, toys! Movie-fying an existing design, especially one that's nice advertising for Hasbro on top of it (I find I want to buy a Clocker toy after seeing him in the various Movieverse comics, for instance), I would think is different from creating a whole new design from scratch.

But, I don't think it's impossible... just that, like I said, several of the artists sound like they're crunching to get stuff done within the time frames needed. And then they have to go design extra generic TFs on top of that just because some folks whinge that a really minor, obscure character that likely won't have a need to show up again anyway bit the dust?

Sometimes... you just gotta concentrate on the bits that actually matter, y'know? I mean, coming from a general scifi fan background, I actually kind of like the TF approach, in that the redshirts aren't just random no-name guys. Makes things way more interesting.

Not to mention that Crankcase's death was about as in-character as you could get... he whined to the wrong person at the wrong time and got the type of ignoble death that pretty much fits his sad-sack, ignoble existence.

Why can't it be?

I mean, I'm not going to disagree that taking a bunch of no-names and building them up before killing them can be a powerful one-time story. The Babylon 5 episode "GROPOS" comes to mind, among other things. But that's not the sort of thing you can do every single time it makes logical sense to the plot to have a situation where lots of people die, and expecting that is silly, if not unrealistically demanding.

If they Movie-fied Breakaway wouldn't it be the same difference to moviefy say Override as a generic they could kill off? It's just tweaking an established design.

So killing off Movie toys is bad, but killing off characters from other continuities is OK?

But, eh, I just give up, as this is the doofiest argument. Never met any other scifi franchise where people whinge about killing off redshirts. (Joke, yes. Whinge, no.)

I just don't get it. The movieverse has drones and generics already. It's like killing Tankor and Jetstorm when you have tank drones and jet drones everywhere.

Considering they don't "exist" in said Universe, yes it is.

Or take one robots head and put it on another's body if you don't want to design a brand new character from scratch.



That was Sipher's argument. Transformers doesn't have real Red Shirts. Star Trek redshirts have (at most) a name and sometimes not even that.

Almost every TF toy has a box bio you can build off of. To get the same kind of non-interest that other franchises enjoy you need to create a character that "doesn't exist."

That... was... my whole... point at the very beginning of this convo! That since TF doesn't have any real redshirts, you find yourself in the situation where fans are used to even the obscure minor characters having full write-ups, so you just have to live with this as a writer because you're stuck between not killing anyone at all even when it makes logical sense for someone to die, or risking killing off someone that some fan somewhere will like, and the fans have to live with the quirkiness of the matter.

It just seems like the problem stems from everyone else siding with the "never killing anyone except in Very Special Episode circumstances" take, while I prefer a more realistic handling in the more realistic-feeling continuities.

Or you take the third road and make up characters that don't have any write-ups that you then kill off.

So, waste time having to create a bunch of generic designs just to kill them off because the fans can't live with extremely minor characters who will likely never get any other fictional appearances anyway being killed off even though they at least (usually) get some lines and a bit of action that way. Got it.

You know, killing loads of characters to begin with is cheap. It tries to make things grim and gritty but in the end it just makes characters out to be disposable.

I think shows like Animated and Beast Wars showed that things are serious and that stakes are high by only killing people now and then.

Well of course they won't now, they just got killed off!

The Decepticons in Spotlight Cliffjumper all appear to be mix and matches of other Cons, and I rather liked their designs. The Cons in Spotlight Drift too.

I can't speak for Beast Wars, but while I loved Animated I'd hardly call it serious (in terms of tone) until the third season, and even then it still was more light-hearted/fantastical feeling than the Movieverse is.


Considering that the chances of them getting any appearances in the continuing Movie fiction was slim to none even if they hadn't gotten killed off, you'll forgive me if unlike everyone else I don't cry about it. Personally I'm happy when obscure characters get used at all... you take what you can get when you fangirl the Z-list folks.

I'm just saying, in those cases, I got a clearer sense of danger. Especially in Megatron Rising - Megatron savagely beating the autobots has more impact than if he started cleaving through lots of people. As the characters become disposable, so does the DANGER.

I don't like it when my $10-$30 toys are dead without having done anything yet. I bought these things because I liked them. That's a pretty important monetary investment to me, and it was invested for a personal reason. Sometimes being dead without having done anything is worse than never having panel time at all. At least then they could still be out there somewhere.

Well, let's look at a real life example. (Not THAT real life, since it's fictional. Still ...) In one of the G.I. Joe comics, they killed of Sidney Biggles-Jones. Off screen. By having her on a list of casualties.

Let's take it as a given that they needed a list of causalities. One can imagine that pretty easily. But was that REALLY the best use of her character? I mean, yes, she was unlikely to get another fictional appearance. And yet, to me, it felt like a tragic waste of her character potential. Her journey in the crossover comic is now meaningless. Her potential for future plotlines, squandered.

So, should minor characters NEVER die? Of course not. But their death SHOULD mean something. Otherwise, someone who connected with that character will be disappointed for no good reason at all.

-JimS

I guess it's just that I have a low suspension of disbelief? If I know from the overall stories in the series that either nobody dies, or nobody dies unless there's a big huge special episode about it, then while the characters being in potential danger is still exciting from wanting to see how they escape, there's no serious threat in my mind.


Personally, I'd rather see obscure characters get an appearance than nothing at all, as at least they're getting used somehow. There's always fanfic and personal canon if you want to still feel like a character's "out there", so I don't see the big deal.

In any case, whatever. I'm tired of being "It" because I don't agree with the majority opinion, so fine. I still think it's pretty unreasonable to whinge when there's zero wrong with killing off minor characters from a literary perspective, but I've already made that clear enough.

It's like this. You know the saying that a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic?

That's essentially what it boils down into in literature and entertainment

I don't feel any sense of danger when toy-only guys die. Because I know they can die. And they die so cheaply and so easily and so constantly. And I know that they're there TO die.

So I don't feel anything. I just kind of roll my eyes.

But if you make me like a character that I know can be killed off, then I'll be afraid for them.

If you're not going to do that, then I'd rather it be some random made-up dude I didn't pay $10 for.

Yes, I know that. But it still gives the atmosphere of this not being a lighter-hearted world where nobody dies unless it's a special event. The danger to the characters that are fleshed out thus feels like more of a threat.

But then, I do have a lower sense of disbelief than the norm, so maybe that's why I disagree with everyone else on this. It's a harder sell for me.

Not to me, because... the danger is seen as a faux "grim and gritty", 90's comics style world where everything is dark and scummy and people die except for the main characters who just scowl their way through it and persist anyway.

I guess I don't see it that way. If it's supposed to be a gritty world where people die, yet nobody ever actually does except in carefully planned plot points, then I can't take it as seriously.

Not that I have a problem with light-hearted universes, because I don't, or that I think grittier universes are inherently better, because they're not. I just expect the handling of things to match the overall tone of the universe. So be it, I guess.

Again... it's not a matter of tone -- it's a matter of execution. Please, Jeysie, slow down and actually carefully read the examples given. The problem is that you can't compare Star Trek, or Babylon 5 or even THE TRANSFORMERS MOVIE to the TF comics... because THEY'RE NOT COMIC BOOKS. They're a completely different medium which handles these sorts of things differently. Neither TV nor film uses a unique combination of PROSE and IMAGES.

I understand that a LOT of people haven't read Tomb of Dracula -- but if you're going to kill of characters in a comic book it SHOULD Be required reading.

Or Astro Boy.

Or... I dunno... Any number of comics which both USE THE MEDIUM OF COMICS expertly and KNOW HOW TO HANDLE CHARACTER DEATH.

Seriously, Jeysie... or Chris Mowry... or anyone else who is reading this post, read "The Greatest Robot in the World", a CLASSIC Astro Boy story. You want a story that's impacting, gritty, and powerful? One that has a lot of deaths but handles each one well and puts the main character in serious peril? One that MAKES YOU CARE about nearly everyone who dies? That's the story. If more TF comics were written like that (I say like, because let's face it, we're not expecting an actual Tezuka-level masterpiece here) no one would CARE whether it was toy-based or not-toy-based characters being killed off.

The problem, as always, is the execution of the executions.

I've said it before, I'll say it again -- give us a sense of where the character's going, where they've been and who's gunna miss them when they're gone.

Otherwise they're just a Star Trek redshirt -- and there's no EXCUSE for that kind of crap in a COMIC BOOK.

--Boltax.

I find myself agreeing with Jeysie. At least toy-only characters get a toy and a bio. If they get axed, they're still pretty much immortalised in some way. Made-up blokes NEED to be built up in some way if their deaths are gonna mean anything. It seems kinda...restraining to the writer to me.

"I, Firstlast, was but a lowly scavenger droid, but at last I will prove useful in fighting Optimus Prime this da-"

"GIVEMEYOURFACE!"

"Urk-"

Established, obscure characters at least have the benefit of well..EXISTING beforehand.