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TRANSFORMERS: ROBOTS IN DISGUISE #15 hits the stands today, courtesy of IDW Publishing and Hasbro! Bumblebee and his provisional government have had to face a lot over the past year… but they never imagined they’d have to fight an angry Devastator with Prowl as its head! In honor of this action-packed issue, we sat down with artist Andrew Griffith to take a look at his original pencil art! The comic, by Griffith and writer John Barber is available at comic book stores everywhere and at https://transformers.comixology.com/ or via the Comixology and iBooks apps on your computer or mobile device!

PAGE 1- We’re inside the Autobot Med-Center as the action goes on outside—there’s quite a few different ’bots in here, all—of course—with different designs. Did you spend a lot of times on this page, making sure everyone was correct and adding the various states of damage? ANDREW GRIFFITH: Well, since I only pencilled this, I had to leave a lot of that up to the inker [Brian Shearer]. Maybe it’s just me, but I find I can only put so much detail in with pencil before it becomes a smudgy mess. But I did make sure to let Brian and [colorist] Josh [Perez] know who the guys were, that were intended to be specific characters.

PAGES 2 and 3: When designing Devastator, did you have any kind of specific brief to follow, other than including Prowl as a vital component? And were you given much freedom in the design? ANDREW GRIFFITH: Yes, there were definitely specific aspects of his design to keep in mind, some of which I shouldn’t even hint at so as not to ruin anything about issue 16. I had a good bit of freedom in his design. The toughest part was the fact that John wanted Prowl to be the head and part of the torso, so I wouldn’t be able to just use Prowl as a leg in place of the deceased Scrapper. And I wanted to keep some of what Guido [Guidi] designed for ALL HAIL MEGATRON, so hopefully there was some of that look still there. I did have to add the purple chest shield back in though, because if I would have left it off like Guido did, Prowl’s integration into Long Haul’s section just didn’t look very good.

PAGE 4: The Autobots fight Devastator, which doesn’t seem to go well. When doing the drawings, do you take a much of a vested interest in the characters, knowing what might happen further down the line, and maybe not denting up the ones you like better as much as others? ANDREW GRIFFITH: Doesn’t go well for the Autobots, you mean? Seems to go pretty well for Devastator, though. Well, the way John likes things to go, everyone ends up pretty well beat-up and dented. But sometimes damage to a particular character has to be kept in mind very specifically, such as Metalhawk’s gutshot wound, or Bumblebee’s crumpled face. The best stories are character driven as far as I’m concerned, and the characters are what draw me most to Transformers, so I think it’s safe to say I take a lot of stock in how the designs and wear and tear reflect on specific characters. There’s some battle damage that’s appeared in recent issues that even provides a bit of foreshadowing, if you know where to look.

PAGE 5: Megatron watches as the destruction on Cybertron continues. Again, with Megatron in his new body, why did you make the choices you did in this design? Were there many different versions before settling on what we see here? ANDREW GRIFFITH: Not really, this was the only real design that I came up with. The idea was to make a Megatron that was indicative of both his original G1 look and his pre-Earth comics design, as seen in STORMBRINGER. Sort of your quintessential Megatron. So… hopefully, I pulled it off. I hope to get the design I did for him out somewhere in the near future, as well as some of my designs for Devastator and how Prowl’s section fits in.

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In 2012 IDW went digital with Transformers: Autocracy, the story of Optimus Prime’s ascent to greatness and leadership of the heroic Autobots. Now the follow-up series is about to be unleashed and once again we travel back in time to a darker, dirtier and altogether more dangerous Cybertron than the one we’re used to… and that’s saying something!

Co-writer Flint Dille and artist Livio Ramondelli give us an insight into Monstrosity!

“The Decepticons are defeated. Zeta is gone. Optimus Prime is in control, but what you realise is that keeping the peace is sometimes harder than winning the war” – trust Flint Dille to find a cloud in every silver lining! It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any longtime Transformers aficionado; this is the man who killed Optimus Prime just half an hour into the original animated Transformers movie, only to oversee his return as an crazed robotic-zombie for a third season episode!

In fairness, Flint was still involved when Optimus Prime returned again in more triumphant fashion towards the end of the animated series’ run;

“Optimus is a great character, but what people tend to forget is that great characters often have times of incredible adversity, inability, unpopularity – how will Optimus hold up? Monstrosity is about what happens after the war – it can go well or it can go badly. It seems like it should go well…”

Seems like, eh?

Parallels are often drawn between Optimus Prime and other real world heroes, and Flint notes similarities between Monstrosity’s stand-up citizen and another great from history, who himself was in the Oscar spotlight recently.

“I recently watched ‘Lincoln’ and I can only speculate on what would have happened if he’d lived, but reconstruction wasn’t pretty. Monstrosity takes place in a world that needs to be rebuilt; not a hopeless world, but a world kind of teetering on the edge of both renaissance and oblivion, kind of like the real world today.”

Transformers comics have been enjoying their own renaissance period in recent times under IDW’s stewardship and artist Livio Ramondelli has certainly played his part in making the stories look as striking as they have done, with Autocracy in particular having a quite distinctive look – chunky yet detailed action-packed panels, with quasi-painted style colouring particularly effective at setting the tone. Explosive reds and dramatic golds, moody blues, contemplative natural greens and soothing, cleansing whites – would Monstrosity continue along a similar vein?

“Monstrosity picks up shortly after Autocracy, and so the planet will look very similar to how it did in the previous series, featuring the same sort of colour palettes,” explains Livio.

Although the story will definitely take us to some new locations – the characters will go to areas of the planet we’ve never seen before, and so the design of those environments will certainly look strikingly different, they’re going to discover a side of Cybertron that isn’t just cities. Also, there will be a major location in Monstrosity that is neither Cybertron nor Earth, and it definitely has its own colour palette, amongst other monstrous properties!”

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PAGE 1: After being sealed inside the cell by Overlord, Chromedome quickly gets out, knowing of the chaos that’s about to ensue. Recently you’ve been testing the Chromedome/Rewind relationship. Has everything been leading to this?

JAMES ROBERTS: In several respects, yes. If I may resort to some old-school comics hype, issue #15 is a no-holds-barred, pull-no-punches finale that will change everything! It marks conclusively the end of a certain era of MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE, and it does so with drama, action and death. Overlord leaves his mark.
Incidentally, the first 14 issues of MTMTE—and the annual—have set up three very significant overarching plots (well, technically four, but we’re keeping the last one below the radar for the time being), and one of them was the Overlord plot; and yes, issue #15 definitely wraps that one up.
Overlord’s had a presence in the series since way back in issue #1, when Prowl referred to him as “the cargo” in a secret conversation with two of his agents aboard the Lost Light, the Duobots Shock and Ore. The fact that Ore tried to plant a tracer on the Lost Light’s quantum engines (so that Prowl could keep tabs on the whereabouts of Overlord) led to the ship nearly blowing up, which in turn released a hidden sparkeater. It was while sealing off the sparkeater’s “den” that Red Alert first heard noises from Overlord’s secret cell. He told Rung about the noises in issue #5, then drilled a hole through the roof of the cell in issue #6 (in a story which was all about Overlord thanks to Fortress Maximus and his post-traumatic stress). Red Alert shared his secret with a comatose Rung in issue #7, only for all evidence of the conversation to be stolen by Drift (as it turned out) in the same issue. In issue #13, Rung shared his concerns with Rodimus, and in issue #14 we learned about Overlord’s origins. So yeah, we’ve threaded the idea of Overlord being on board throughout much of the series so far. In that respect, everything comes to a very definite climax in issue #15.
As for Chromedome and Rewind, or more specifically Chromedome, I consciously made issues #12 to #15 a sort of Chromedome arc (there are a lot of “Chromedome”s in that sentence). Nearly every character in MTMTE has had an issue or two devoted to them.

PAGES 2 and 3: The entire Lost Light crew engages Overlord. Utter chaos and carnage ensues. How do you get to grips with a seemingly unstoppable character like Overlord? Was any of this an afterthought from LAST STAND OF THE WRECKERS?

JAMES ROBERTS: Overlord is one of the most powerful Decepticons, yes, but key to his character is that he’s not a mindless thug or someone with a ten-million-year plan or someone who wants to usurp Megatron. He wants to BEAT Megatron, yes, but he harbors no dreams of ruling the Decepticons. He’s his own ’bot and has been every since going AWOL after Megatron tried to use him as a portable apocalypse. Given that he’s not on the Decepticons’ payroll, so to speak, he’s not going to fight Autobots just because they’re Autobots. In this case, he’s attacking the crew of the Lost Light because (as far as he’s concerned) they’ve tried to contain him. And don’t get me wrong: he’s not above some rage-fuelled revenge. And sometimes—often— he likes destroying people for the fun of it.
Was any of this an afterthought from WRECKERS? Well, the story ended with Overlord alive and captured, and between WRECKERS and MTMTE nothing had been seen of heard of him, and I thought the crew of the Lost Light needed a big name villain to fight, even if everything’s post-war now. I had for some time—since before MTMTE—wondered why “Phase Sixers” like Overlord and Six Shot were so much more powerful than everyone else, so as much as anything else the Overlord arc in MTMTE was my attempt at explaining that. We’ll be returning to the subject—and answering some more questions—in upcoming issues.

PAGE 4: Whirl blows things up (he does that a lot) and Pipes wants to send a message to Cybertron. Was Pipes a character you’d always wanted to explore more and give depth too, since all we really had was the Sunbow cartoon and the original comics series?

JAMES ROBERTS: It’s always fun to give Whirl some page-time, yeah, and I got a chance to make a joke about depth perception, but I wanted to use this scene to remind people that the Lost Light is still unable to make contact with Cybertron. Blaster thought he’d cracked it in issue #13’s main story, but the prose story in the same issue established that he’d failed. Pipes’ conversation with him in the latest issues reinforces that for those who skipped the prose story (shame on you).
As for Pipes… he was another one of those G1 also-rans that was overlooked both as a toy and a character. I think he was in a Season 3 episode of the original TV show, and he cropped up in only one UK story, so yes, not much had been done with him. I find it hard to resist characters like that.
But you know what? He made it into MTMTE only because I knew that in issue #6 I needed Fortress Maximus to shoot a load of Autobots who, because of their color schemes, reminded him of Overlord, and he fitted the bill. Then I decided he’d be a good foil to Ratchet and Drift in the Delphi two-parter (issues #4 and #5). After that, his positive outlook on life and general eagerness made him a good fit with other diminutive ‘bots like Rewind, Tailgate and Swerve.

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STEALTH ATTACK! Trailcutter has a problem: the Lost Light has been taken over by the Decepticons—and no one else seems to have noticed! Can the Autobots’ defense strategist singlehandedly see off an army of infiltrators? And even if he does, will it convince his crew mates that he's got more to offer than kind words and forcefields?

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Transformers Prelude: The Spotlight falls on Orion Pax, Thundercracker, Megatron, Bumblebee, Trailcutter, and Hoist in this collection of six individual stories that explain an important moment in each character's life. From the distant past to current events, each story adds to the Cybertronian lore.

Beast Hunters Volume 1: It's the beginning of the end for Transformers Prime! But a new enemy is revealed and the stakes are racheted up even higher as the Cybertronians continue their quest for peace throughout the universe

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