Hier haben wir ein Interview mit Tom Scioli und John Barber über das IDW Comic Transformers vs. G.I. Joe.
ComicsAlliance: The amazing thing about Transformers vs. G.I. Joe for me as a reader is that it doesn’t feel like it should exist, and I mean that in the best way possible. It has this feeling that there’s no way this book should’ve been approved, because it’s so wild, raw and energetic. How did you get that feeling to come across in this comic?
Tom Scioli: I don’t know how you would get to that point with any kind of comic. Just from my perspective, I’ve been doing comics for such a long time and in such a way that’s very different from the normal career path for comics, so I don’t know how you replicate that. I don’t know how many other people are out there that would be able to have that mix of discipline and self-destructive chaotic impulse to get that. I don’t know, John? Do you have any perspective?
John Barber: To one degree or another, when you’re working on something that’s company-owned, you have to forget about that when you’re working on it, and I think that degree varies. The whole idea was to make something kind of weird, that went out the window at some point. There was probably a minute early on where Michael Kelly, the guy we work with at Hasbro as their Director of Global Publishing, called and he was like, “This isn’t exactly what we talked about.” He loves the book, but at some point, the idea was going to be safer. It’s not like there’s anything unsafe about this, either, but you want to be able to point at it and say “here are these two things that we put together to make one thing,” and I don’t think you can do that with our book. I think that’s what makes it interesting.
TS: I didn’t really know how it was going to turn out either. It’s a project where it’s like “yeah, what would this thing be?” I know that when we first talked about in the beginning, we had that very basic idea of a Jack Kirby take on this sort of thing, but when you sit down to actually make it, all these other opportunities open up. All these other creative things take over, and it outgrows that initial idea. But then it sort of comes back to it. Early on, I thought I wanted to do something more serious than just a straight Jack Kirby rip-roaring adventure, but then it turned into that kind of rip-roaring adventure.
CA: There are scenes in this book, and I’m specifically thinking about that page where Dr. Venom shoots Buzzer in the head, and it’s the kind of thing where it’s shocking. Not just because I haven’t seen it in Transformers or G.I. Joe comics in the past, but because I would never expect that to be there in a licensed comic. Even the original Larry Hama Joe book, which I’m a huge fan of, always felt like a licensed comic. Yours, though, feels weird and original, even though it’s got these characters I’ve known for almost 30 years.
TS: There’s so many ways you can approach any existing thing, whether it’s something like Batman or something like this, where there are ways you can imagine, “I can have this happen, I can have that happen,” and you can predict it. That means that it’s probably not an original idea. But if you’re coming up with something and you’re surprising yourself with it, and you’re doing things with characters where you don’t even think these characters were intended to be used this way, that’s how you know you’re onto something. That’s how you know you’re creating something, as opposed to dressing up something old in new clothing.
CA: John, you mentioned the idea of the book changing from when you first started. I know that we talked before about Tom coming in with this huge pitch document when it started. How much did the first four issues change from the original pitch to what exists now?
JB: A lot? Not a lot? I don’t know. [Laughs] Bits and pieces are the same, but a lot of it’s pretty different. Every step along the way is really different, if that makes any sense. The pages coming in from Tom are frequently pretty different by the time they’re finished than when he’s done layouts. It stays very, very fresh. Clearly, it’s very surprising. What you said about surprising yourself is what you’re doing, right?
TS: I think about how a lot of these people approach comedy movies, where they’re developing the material up until the very last second. They have a script, but then as they’re filming, they’ll try to improvise. In the Iron Man movie, they talked about that, approaching it that way. For me, until this thing is uploaded, it’s all fluid. It could be anything. If there’s a last-minute inspiration that happens, I can let it happen. Pursuant to your question, I almost think of this series as though there’s a serious, straight version of this story that we thought was going to happen, but it never did, and our book is a postmodern remix and retelling of this straight story that just doesn’t exist.
JB: You talk about comedy films doing that, and it makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot of stuff that does that. You ever watch, like, a Subway commercial, and it has the cadence of a joke, but there actually isn’t a joke built into it? I think a lot of movies come out like that, and a lot of comic books that try to do something interesting like that come out really hollow in that same way. You figure out the rhythms of a joke, so you’ll try to structure the story that way. I’m not saying Transformers vs. G.I. Joe is a joke, but taking a similar approach to comedy and trying to pull it apart, that’s what Transformers vs. G.I. Joe is.
TS: Approaching any story is kind of like that. With the scriptwriting phase, I thought we’d have to lay a lot more track to get to where we were going to get to, but once you sit down and start making the comic, you put a drawing down and all the sudden, all that stuff that I thought was going to take pages and pages to describe just happens instantly, so you can move ahead. We’ve gotten so far ahead of the agenda that we set out that we’re in a lot of uncharted territory.
CA: I’m just going to put down that the biggest influence on this comic is your love of Subway commercials.
JB: [Laughs] That’s right. It’s my biggest influence on anything. I’m always saying “Can we Subway this up a little bit more?”
Das ganze Interview findet ihr unter comicsalliance.com
Diskussion: hier!
