Fico Ossio

Two issues into IDW's Revolution event, and while the purpose of the event is to combine most of the various Hasbro toy properties into a single, unified world and not to keep score on who's winning the big fight, I think we've found a pretty clear leader. Rom The Space Knight, who returned to comics after a thirty year absence, is mopping the floor with everybody else in this book. Seriously, in the first issue, he interrupted a stalemate between the Transformers and GI Joe by taking out four Joes all by himself, and in the second issue, he straight up judo-flips Optimus Prime into a creek. All the other teams have at this point is a missing arm and somebody who wants to quibble over the definition of "decimate." Like I said, there's a clear leader, and you can see it for yourself in an exclusive preview below --- but be warned, there are some pretty big spoilers if you haven't read the first one yet!

More than anything else I can think of in recent memory, IDW's Revolution is a comic book that suffers from the crushing weight of expectations. In a lot of respects, it's also the easiest sell to come down the pike in a long while, taking most of Hasbro's toy properties --- with the notable exceptions of My Little Pony, Jem and the Holograms, and Dungeons & Dragons --- and combining them all into a single universe, bookending it all with the return of Rom, the Space Knight. The thing is, in doing that, it's not only attempting to create a new foundation for a shared universe that will involve all of those properties interacting with each other and also pursuing their own storylines, it's competing with everyone who grabbed two different action figures at once and banged them together as a kid. That puts a ton of pressure on Cullen Bunn, John Barber, Fico Ossio, Sebastian Cheng, and Tom B. Long, but they've found a pretty elegant solution: Just straight up overloading the reader with action in a first issue that opens with a mountain exploding and ends with one of the more surprising deaths in recent memory.

The thing about doing comics based on toy properties is that eventually you're going to want to play with all the toys, and today, it looks like that's exactly what IDW has set out to do. After years of keeping them separated into their own universes --- with exceptions like the senses-shattering, soon-to-be-finished Transformers vs. GI Joe --- IDW is combining almost all of its Hasbro toy properties into a single universe. The shakeup comes in a biweekly event called Revolution, co-written by Cullen Bunn and John Barber, with art by Fico Ossio, which will combine GI Joe, Transformers, MASK, ROM the Space Knight, Action Man and Micronauts into one permanent shared universe.