Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Comics, idw, mike costa, transformers

Mike Costa Transforms Into Blatantly Honest Writer

Chris Ryall, editor-in-chief of IDW, recently tweeted;

"Freelancers, really, take this to heart: if you're writing characters you don't own and want to keep writing them, mind what you say online."

What might have caused such a proclamation? Could it have been Mike Costa, talking about writing Transformers comics?

He was asked if he even liked Transformers anymore, he replied.

"I went through a period, I'd say, maybe in my first year of working on the project where I started getting really burned out and I started thinking, man this is really tough and it's not as fun as I thought. One of the things that makes it so not fun is that the characters are so difficult to understand. Approach Transformers as a writer, and you go to first principles, which is that stories are about people or they're about objects that are personified. You can write a story about a soda can but you have to have some kind of human connection there.

"The problem with Transformers is they're not people. they are instead giant robots that are millions of years old that have been fighting a war for millions of years and that change shape into cars. And that makes absolutely no sense, there's no way to identify with that. They don't have the all of the basic things that human being have that make people human, and that motivate them to have drama or a story. They don't get hungry, they don't get tired, they don't have women or relationships that they value, because they don't have females, they don't have people that they can love, other then like maybe brotherly love, kind of, but what does it mean that they have a brother, they don't have parents, they don't believe in an after life there's no, like,  religion or spirituality that they have. They don't really need shelter, they don't need a home necessarily, because they're giant robots, that can weather the elements.

"All of these basic things that motivate a person in any kind of adventure story or romance story, these characters do not have them. You have to manufacture them. And then that becomes completely incoherent because why would a robot that's millions of years old have a personality of a human being that is recognisable? He wouldn't, that's insane, that's such a crazy disconnect to reality, it's a huge suspension of disbelief that the apparatus that underpins it gets really rickety.

"Because you think I have to write this guy as if he's a wise ass, as a wisecrack kind of character, because that's who he is and an actual giant robot from light years away that was millions of years old wouldn't act like this and wouldn't be interesting to write about because I can't even image what that thing would be like so I have to write a person. So you have to fudge why they're behaving as they do and it's very difficult.

"The fans are probably going to get on top of me for this, truth is Transformers are toys. They are toys. That's why they're giant robots that turn in to cars. They're toys. There's no reason why a robot would turn in to a car. I mean I guess they did it to hide, but then why did they do it on Cybertron. I guess you could come up with a reason for it, a lot of writers have come up with reasons for that, but it's just so strange. As many problems as  the movies had least the movies came up with this concept that Transformers can transform into anything and that at least makes sense but why would you only transform into one thing? Why is Optimus Prime transforming into one truck all the time, and the reason for that is that the toys only transform into one thing and so you can identify who he is when he's a truck. If he kept tranbsforming into different things you wouldn't know who he was.

"Comics aren't interesting when they're about cars and trucks. It's really hard to pull off a car chase on a comic book page. Cars aren't expressive and they can't really move in any way other than forward or backwards, there's no character to a car. unless you're doing a cartoony thing where the car can be plastic and actually gesture of have expressions, which we're not.

"So there's all these huge limitations that are put on you as a writer doing Transformers…"

He continues at length. And how he found his way through…

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!