In all honesty, I don't know if there's anything going on in comics right now that's more exciting to me than IDW's Revolution event. It's the unification of most of the Hasbro properties into a single universe that finds the Transformers, GI Joe, ROM the Space Knight, MASK and more being thrown together into a unified story, and for someone like me, it's a pop cultural dream come true. But the one big question I've had since it was announced is "okay, but how's it going to work?"

We have, after all, been assured that this wasn't a rebooting of the continuity for Transformers or GI Joe, but since one of those book is about giant robots from space coming to Earth and the other isn't, it seems like that would be something of a game-changer when it comes to world-building. But now, we have an exclusive video from IDW where John Barber, the editor and writer spearheading the new direction, explains it --- and it sounds pretty awesome.

 

 

Barber is, of course, the co-writer of the critically acclaimed (and soon to be late and lamented) Transformers vs. GI Joe, so it's not entirely surprising that the in-continuity version involves a similar setup of the Joes taking on a Cybertronian invasion of Earth, and builds out from there. With that in place, the idea of bringing in something like MASK and treating it as the midpoint between Joe and Transformers --- elite soldiers who have non-sentient transforming cars that'll probably end up using Cybertronian technology in some form or another --- follows pretty logically. With that at the core, stuff like ROM and Micronauts can be folded in in pretty interesting ways.

It's worth noting that the whole thing seems to be built around the plot device of Ore-13, which wasn't just a major piece of Barber's run on Transformers: Robots in Disguise, but also something that, as he indicates here, dates back to the very first Hasbro-licensed comic that IDW published, over 10 years ago. That's a nice bit of continuity carryover for long-time readers.

 

Revolution #2 cover
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IDW Revolution #1 will be out in September.

 

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