Forum - View topic

This Week in Anime - Robots in Plain Sight

The only one I remember was Dinocore and that was mainly because Kaya went viral for her jiggle physics that sadly got removed after the first season.

If that Energon Universe show comes out, well, odds are it will have the same awful animation as Invincible while spending most of its budget on A-list celebrities. It would be worth discussing only to discuss how Kirkman's sauceless studio screwed up a relatively popular comic visually, while spending its entire budget on hiring Chris Hemsworth as Optimus Prime and Emilia Clarke as the Baroness.

OK, that brief rant over, a lot of these newer attempts at getting back into the transforming mechanoid or even armored creature genre (Metal Cardbot, Armorsaurus, and many others I could mention) never secure enough of a foreign audience to really go anywhere. They'll get some brief attention for not being the same old brands, but they rarely keep that attention. It's not enough to just be different from the competition; you need to have something that won't make your ears bleed, and something people will be attached to. A Cardbot toy in retail, or even worse, Amazon.com, isn't going to get the attention of 8 out of 10 kids who have no frame of reference for it and wouldn't pay attention to an awfully dubbed show long enough to care. Even if they're good toys that are clearly superior in build quality and value to Hasbro's efforts as of late.

From what I've read Kirkman dislikes his original Invincible comic these days and considers it a relic from his less progressive past which is why he changed a lot for the cartoon. Given Skybound's Transformers is more recent it might not have as many changes, especially since Hasbro would also be in control and after the mess that IDW did with the franchise I imagine they have Skybound on a tighter leash. But there's also the fact Kirkman did not write the original run of Transformers but Daniel Warren Johnson did and from what I've heard Kirkman taking over the writing has been less than well-regarded.

I do find the idea any franchise could be the Transformers-killer to be very questionable. It reminds me when people keep trying to push random new magic school-focused books or shows as the new Harry Potter and they always end up being ignored and people keep enjoying Harry Potter. Or how so many MMOs tried to be the WoW-killer and ended up going end of service after a year or two and everyone went back to WoW. Transformers just has too much character and brand recognition and is ingrained too much in pop culture to really be threatened by a new flavor of the month series. I haven't messed with a Metal Cardbot myself but from what I've seen from Transformer reviews channels they're not really that similar beyond being transforming robots. It looks more like how Transformers used to be where they had tons of partsforming, kibble, and very little articulation. I watched a video review of Blue Cop and while it looks neat it looks like a brick pretty much and has junk everywhere. I guess if people are nostalgic for the Armada-era of toys it might scratch their itch but without a strong attatchment to the character or lore I didn't really have much interest in getting any. I'll wait for them to give us a modern Goshooter (I already got the Fans Hobby version) which might eventually be coming since we did get God Ginrai fairly recently which means they acknowledge Masterforce exists.

And yeah, everyone is kind of hoping at SDCC Kirkman announces a new creative team to replace himself and the artist Jason Howard (not sure who would write, but I kind of want Naoto Tsushima to take over art duties).

Do you think readers will be fine with a manga-esque art style? Just asking because I'm not too fond of the Skybound Transformers comics. I prefer the IDW Transformers comics or at least the 1st continuity comics from the 2010s.