Tom ScioliReseñas

I was really excited to read this comic. I was hoping for a more serious take on their story, and artwork looked stunning. However, I was a little disappointed.

The original series took a few wild swings as the company tried regain some attention from the Transformers. It appears this comic tries to link these attempts together. It's a little confusing at times. It would have been better if they just rebuilt the original universe.

Despite the confusion, the artwork is very well done and it renewed my interest in the series. I saw someone call them the "K-mart brand of Transformers". So I give this series 3 blue-light specials out of 5 blue-light specials.

A shallow skim through the life of Stan Lee that won't add much to the knowledge of faithful comic book fans and that will leave newbies confused with the sprawling mass of barely introduced comic book publishing figures and fictional characters crowded onto the pages.

The art, with it's uninspired layouts, is mostly a string of talking heads where the word balloons sometimes comically overwhelm the stacks of long horizontal panels.

Still, I'm a sucker for comic book history and am always happy to see cameos from favorite writers and artists. Or Stan, if I have to.

Not as fun as Stan's graphic stuff but interesting.
Desperately trying to catch up on books I've read in 2023, before it turns 2024. Don't think I'll make it.

First time I encountered Tom Scioli's work--TF vs GI Joe--I thought he was on some powerful psychedelics. Go back and read comics from 80s and you'll notice some of the crazier stuff in his storytelling, both visually and plot-wise, is delightfully on point. Go-Bots is no exception.

Enjoy the ride!

Pretty weird and disorienting but I think that's the point.

Once you figure out the tone of the series, it's both a lot of fun and an extended nerd whistle to 80's nostalgia.

If only Michael Bay used this for his shooting script. The film would still be crazy, but a good and creative crazy.

That was like reading a 13 year old's version with an american color scheme. Don't waste your time.

Y'know, I get what they're going for there on the cover, but it feels wrong and ticks me off.

As for the rest of the book, it started out fine at the dawn of time as a chronological retelling of events from the first 80 or so issues of Fantastic Four, showing us how the cosmological events referenced in the series actually weaved together, but by the end of the first half it had pretty much fallen into a boring rut of recapping all the individual issues. Sure, there were little tweaks here and there, bringing in stuff that didn't happen until much later in continuity or in other media and turning the Reed - Susan - Namor love triangle into something darker, but the relentless recapping wore me down. And did we really need the Power Rangers/rainbow of Panthers nonsense?

And including a reprint of Fantastic Four #51 just went to show how much better, wilder, goofier and screwed up the original source material is.

Jack Kirby's life, presented as if he were the narrator of a classic Marvel comic -- well, I take that back, with the giant captions, stiff art, and strict six-panel grid, it looks more like a product of Charlton Comics, Marvel's Connecticut competitor. But Kirby's life is big, even if these panels are small. (Oddly, the creator has chosen to depict Kirby with a giant manga head while everyone else in the book is illustrated in a more traditional style.)

Based mostly on interviews Kirby gave late in life to fan magazines and books devoted to him, we follow "The King" from his birth in 1917 to his death in 1994. So if you are a Stan Lee fan, prepare to see him thrown under a fleet of buses. Kirby was a grinder, churning out ideas and pages like a machine, often working simultaneously on several projects for multiple publishers. It's sad to see him be worn down and become embittered with the industry that took so much from him while giving little back.

Kirby's art could be goofy at times and way too blocky (those giant rectangular fingers reaching off the page!), but it was striking as hell. His writing on the other hand . . . The more control he had over the dialogue and plot, the worse his books became. The cosmic crap of the New Gods/Fourth World and Eternals is just unreadable. I think there's a reason none of these characters (maybe excepting Darkseid) ever became big hits no matter how often DC and Marvel have tried. (And now the movie studios think they can do something with them. Poor saps!)

Anyhow, I still respect Kirby as a creator and will not deny the huge impact he had on the industry during his life and beyond. Giant corporations will still be milking his work long after we are all gone.

If you took Kirby, old FF comics, Grant Morrison, the New Gods and a heavy dose of snarky modern dialogue, you'd get this book. Can't wait for the rest of this!

This was a fun read, but some of the characters are beyond annoying, especially the protagonist's sisters. The art was a bit hit or miss for me. Sometimes it was breathtaking, other times it was it was hideous. I haven't read any of Kirby's work so IDK if the terrible perceptive is something being rifted from his art, but it kept distracting me here. Overall an enjoyable book, and I'll definitely be reading more.

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I picked up Transformers vs. G.I. Joe #0 solely because it was free at Free Comic Book Day 2014, which I guess is the point of it all. As a dedicated un-fan of G.I. Joe, I expected nothing out of it... and it blew my mind. Tom Scioli's comic told an entire story on almost every page, doing more with the medium in one issue than many writers accomplish in entire careers. People should be teaching that zero issue in universities. I knew from that moment that once a collection of the entire series was released, I would have to buy it, and I read it to cap off my run-through of all IDW's Transformers comics.

I'm pleased to say the entire thing is mostly as good as that #0 issue. Any single issue here could be a premise for an entire miniseries of its own. Scioli and co-writer John Barber rocket through ideas: Decepticons making a fake peace mission to Earth, G.I. Joe as insurgents on Cybertron, Cobra teaming up with the Decepticons on Earth, Metroplex as inhuman prison, Scarlett in an experiment to convince her both G.I. Joe and the Transformers are just toy lines... everything here is awesome, from the big ideas, to the small details. The whole thing has the exact right tone, alternating between the sublimely ridiculous and the ridiculously sublime. Scioli knows you can't take this seriously (someone goes "Yub Nub!" at a victory party) and that you can only take this seriously (G.I. Joe guns down the entire UN because they're not handling the conflict seriously enough).

It falters a little bit in the third quarter. Scioli and Barber's commitment to never staying still means the whole thing escalates too quickly for its fourteen-issue length, and it seems to me that some of the flashback stories in that part of the series are designed to stall things to keep the pacing in place for issue #13. But the last couple issues are delights all over again, as things keep getting bigger and better.

Honestly, there are times where it's like something you might come up with as a kid. I loved the occasional inclusion of maps and diagrams, the stuff I used to obsess over (or try to make!) as a ten-year-old fan of Oz or Narnia or what have you. But it's the pleasure of childhood combined with the seriousness of adulthood in a way that diminishes neither. Some Transformers comics and even more G.I. Joe comics often seem to want you to forget that this is all ridiculous by making everything Proper and Serious. But Scioli never loses the sense of play that drew you into these series to begin with. This is everything you could ever want a comic book about giant transforming robots to be, and more, and better.

Absolute madness.

This story and art reminded me of playing with action figures and making up stories with them in the 1980's.

An amusing little romp that felt a lot like an adult version of the 80s cartoons I grew up with, with dashes of Jack Kirby and Star Wars. (Of course, one of the cartoons, He-Man, felt like it already had a lot of 80s influence).

More Kirbyesque hijinks from the creators of Godland Volume One. Cosmic fun, rampant silliness on display.

In this graphic novel, Casey and Scioli blow the dust off the vast cosmic machinery of 1960's-era Kirby-Lee collaborations, and reboot it for the contemporary present (by deploying it in a world that contains junkies, S/M, punk rock girls, and irony). It makes an ambitious attempt to be both parody and homage and a satisfying SF/adventure story in its own right—and if it occasionally falls short of getting this balance exactly right, it at least gets points for trying. Fun.½

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