I just realized “I’ve survived the Mike Costa Transformers comic, I can survive whatever 2018 Marvel Venom dish out. It won’t be worse then that.” Must be a very confusing statement to comic Venom fans lol
LMFAO earlier today I was JUST thinking about what a bizarro plot twist this is, as a person in both of these fandoms?
2009: Mike Costa writes some of the actual worst comics in human history, so bad that their notoriety spread beyond the Transformers fandom. Mike Costa claims that the Transformers aren’t real people with real emotions, and can’t have relationships because there aren’t any girls.
2012: James Roberts swoops in with More Than Meets The Eye, decides that all the Transformers are actually gay and live in a homonormative society, and gives us a buffet of canon queer relationships.
(We cross over to a parallel universe or alternate timeline, probably)
2016: Mike Costa writes Venom and gives us a tender, domestic, and fully queer story about a man and alien being struggling to overcome their checkered histories to be better for themselves and each other. Eddie and Venom both make a real effort to improve the communication and trust in their relationship, grow together as people, and have a child that Venom wants to raise in Eddie’s image.
2018: Don Cates writes Venom and begins the process of aggressively no-homo’ing Costa’s run by looping us back to the 2000s and making sure to loudly proclaim how terrible Eddie and Venom are and always have been for each other, how they don’t even like each other actually, and how their whole relationship is in fact nothing more than a toxic metaphor for Angst and Darkness!!11!1
HAHAHHAHA THANK YOU FOR WRITING THE HISTORY OUT
Mike “Transformers can’t love because they have no females” Costa
?
?? Alien abduction?? Some sort of Enlightment?? Mirror Verse Crossover??
?
Mike “Symbiote and Eddie Brock are in love this is a love story” Costa
It has just come to my attention that Mike Costa teamed up with James Roberts to write the transformers “Chaos” storyline, which was pretty good from what i‘ve heared
And after that his attitude towards transformers fiction seemed to have changed…
To put it simly: i think James Roberts is indirectly responsible for making Venom gay
Hold on. What of the Mike Costa tf run is legendary bad? Obv the whole they’re not people thing is fucking bullshit, but that also seems contrary to what he wrote (unless there was a ghost writer)?
Oh my, where do I start.
Mike Costa missed everything important about Transformers.
His run started with the last story arc All Hai Megatron. The story ended with the Decepticons defeated and stranded on Earth. It is a mess itself (AHM has mixed review at best) but at least it leave an empty slate, so it’s not a Hot Mess.
But Costa chose to let the human be the focus of his story. The human main being a Dudebro
™
who hunts down transformers (powerful Decepticons no less) and make them his bitch.
The
Dudebro
™
is such a Gary Stu of Costa. He is all mighty and was written and drawn as so notorious a White
Dudebro
™ that even the male readers in the actual transformers fandom, who are, ironically, mostly dudebros, hate him. Especially when the
Dudebro
™
killed a member of the fucking Devastator (you can say it’s The most famous and loved combiner in the TF fandom) with his BARE HAND and A CAN OF WINDEX.
No Transformers fans want to watch this Dudebro looking down and killing their beloved Transformers as if they are nothing. IT’S DISGUSTING.
Costa didn’t focus on the Transformers, and when he did, totally didn’t get any of the characters, because he admited in a raged interview that he didn’t get them because “they have no family (as in no genectic relative relatives) and no females”.
For example, Optimus Prime, the wise leader of the Autobots, who is more like an even
more stubborn version of Captain America, who was a MILITARY LEADER in the previous IDW story, was written as a passive,
pathetic piece of junk who surrended himself to the human just so he can
sit in a cage at the human’s mercy for 9 fucking issues while his
fellow mechs are dealing with the human and Decepticons outside.
I’m sorry but this is what Optimus did when the human abducted one of his Autobot in the first IDW TF story arc:
Optimus Prime may be kind and caring for those he cares, but he is a fucking military leader who has been fighting for 4 fucking million of years and he won’t hesitate to kick your ass if you are a threat, human or not.
At this point reader were starting to be pissed off and started to dropping the books. The official IDW forum discussion threads were started to filled with more and more negative reviews, but this is not the end of it.
Costa also wanted to write Political Epic later on, but his ignorance is so INSULTING and RACIST it’s become hilarius:
The Stunticons (another famous and powerful Decepticon Combiners) became
Kim Jong-un’s bitches lmao
The Heroic USA and their bitch Optimus Prime fight the evil forces of the North Korea in the DMZ. But after ten min of ground battle, they reached the North Korea/China boarder.
Also, he clearly didn’t know SHIT about politics in Asia (except North Korea=eViL) because he wrote People’s Republic of China (the China that’s recognized in UN) as Republic of China (Taiwan)
If you have even a little bit of knowledge you’ll know that these two “countries” has been in civil war since the WWII and even though there’s no active warfare, the PROC is actively wanting to take over ROC/Taiwan so that they can unify China. TAIWAN IS RATED AS THE 2ND LIKELY PLACE TO ERUPT WWIII because the political struggle between PROC and USA and Costa didn’t know shit about any of this.
(As a Taiwanese, it’s hilarious because our government’s biggest goal when the civil war was still hot was to defeated the PROC but lmao it’s achieved in the IDW Transformers universe)
Also, the Predacons are China’s bitches now because they are red and gold (duh)
I guess we know who’s the Good Guy and who’s the Evil Guy, huh?
After this “International Incident” arc, like half of the fans of the original fandom either dropped the book or dropped the fandom once and for all. But some people, like me, hanged on. And the official forum became more and more resentful because readers must find outlet for their frustration and man, did they criticized Costa.
Anyway, IDW give Costa 31 issues for his run. And imagine the SUFFERING we went through. But that’s not all, by the time he finished this Hell, he lashed out to the fandom in an interview:
“They don’t have all of the basic things that humans have that motivate
them and give them motivation for drama for a story. They don’t really
get hungry, they don’t get tired, they don’t have women or relationships like that [which] they value because they don’t have females that they can love; maybe brotherly love, but how — they don’t have parents? They don’t have religion or spirituality… you have to manufacture [these things] and that makes it very incoherent."
He basically called the TF fandom “a bunch or negative people staying in their closed and hostile fandom” in the interview so you can imagine how the TF fandom take it lol
Few artifacts can evoke the golden, kaleidoscopic wonderland of childhood like a beloved plaything. The mere sight of a threadbare doll or a well-worn, well-loved action figure can transport us back to a time when life was new and boundless and filled with beauty and magic and discovery beckoning at every turn. A child’s toy isn’t merely a lifeless assemblage of metal and plastic and molded polycarbonate. A child’s toy is a vessel for creativity and joy and imagination. A child’s toy is something that’s deeply loved, and that which we deeply love becomes a part of us.
That’s what the Transformers meant to me. I was nine years old when the Autobots and Decepticons thundered into my world. An ancient race of enormous sentient space robots brought their age-old conflict raging down to Earth and into my imagination. They were unlike anything I’d ever seen before. And they were awesome. I spent countless hours playing with my Optimus Prime action figure, trying and failing to conjure Peter Cullen’s fixture-rattling voice as I’d lead a noble charge of Autobots across my cluttered bedroom floor. I’d collapse and reshape Megatron’s forbidding form into a deadly Walther P38 handgun, laying waste to the traitorous Autobots and looking over my shoulder for that scheming Starscream (and occasionally pretending I was James Bond). But no Transformer captivated my interest as much as Bumblebee.
Bumblebee was a humble yellow Autobot scout who took the alt form of a VW Beetle, of all things. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t striking. By Transformers standards he was small and callow and not particularly powerful. But he was the Transformer with the greatest affinity for humanity. He was the one who was most like us. He was the one who was most like me.
At home, nestled in my room, surrounded by teetering stacks of tattered paperbacks, splashy comic books, and warped VHS tapes, I would lose myself creating Bumblebee’s stories. Together we wandered through faraway lands, grappling with the evil Decepticons, running high-wire reconnaissance missions, and racing through canyons of disused cardboard boxes. For a lonely child of the ’80s, Bumblebee wasn’t just an overworked, scuffed up plastic toy. He was fully alive. And he was a part of me.
Thirty years later, I have the amazing opportunity to breathe life into Bumblebee once more. Only this time, I get to share our story with the world. But our story is going to be a little different.
Five films into the TRANSFORMERS series, audiences have come to expect a certain kind of cinematic experience from the franchise: expansive, muscular storytelling with jaw-dropping spectacle, high-octane action, cutting-edge visual effects, and giant rock ’em sock ’em robot battles. And explosions. Lots and lots of explosions. BUMBLEBEE represents a dramatic shift from that template. This film is an intimate, deeply personal, character-driven love story that plays out like a classic Amblin movie from the ’80s. With explosions Lots and lots of explosions.
Well, maybe not that many. Because while BUMBLEBEE has plenty of white-knuckle thrills, sci-fi insanity, and pulse-quickening feats of derring-do, this film evokes and pays tribute to those indelible qualities of the Transformers of my childhood. And for me, that meant magic. Wonder. Imagination. And love.
And it all began with a child’s plaything.
I hope the enclosed toys shine a light into the darkened, cobwebbed corners of your youth, evoking beloved memories of your own. And I can’t wait to share some of mine with you when BUMBLEBEE races into theaters this Christmas. It’s a story thirty years in the making.
Cheers,
Travis Knight
Director, BUMBLEBEE
I HAVE GREAT HOPE THIS MAN SOUNDS LIKE HE ACTUALLY LOVE TRANSFORMERS
I was going to think about your ask properly after I got home, but then I completely forgot about it. I’m so sorry.
What will a mechanical race’s language sounds/looks like? I am not a linguist, so I can only guess. But Cybertronians most likely have a much wider vocal range, i would be interesting if their speaking language is tonal-based and their written language pictogram based on the word’s tonal identity.
It will make most organic species impossible to speak it, or be able to hear the whole range of their language, which serves (and/or fuels) Cybertronians’ xenophobia nature, it also make the written language very difficult for aliens to learn too.
It’s written in canon that Cybertronians can recognize people’s accent (Megatron being harassed by police for his Tarnian accent), so it’s natural to have different Cybertronian regions speaking different dialects, and I imagine they can range from mild tonal shift to basically a completely different language. Also,
I imagine the pre-war senate would have had enforced some sort of
“standard Cybertronian”, probably the Iacon dialect, as their official language and
“proper” Cybertronian. Even though Cybertronians back then still largely spoke their home dialects outside of “official” occasions, after The Grate War, >90% of
the population was killed off, many dialects had probably died and forgotten long time
ago, the Official Cybertronian pretty much became the only language left.
Small head canon:
Cyclonus’ region was probably famous for it’s coarse and harsh sounding dialect (judging by his singling), but since no one speaks that dialect nor recognized his particular accent now, everyone made a huge fuss about Cyblonus’ singing and thought it’s a murder scene. If it’s the golden age, people would just be “Ohhh, the Upper Tetrahexian drinking song! A bar must be near by.”
So, someone in Hasbro China leaked their upcoming commercial confidential secret aka the (almost?) whole list of the Power of the Primes product line. And I saw the Terrorcons are in it.
I should be cheering but since Hasbro combiners so far are all kind of crappy, I guess I’ll just calmly wait and see.
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 