Back in October 2014 at TFcon USA in Chicago, we had the chance to sit down with James Roberts, writer of the IDW Transformers comic More Than Meets The Eye. You can listen to the whole interview in Episode 75.
Recently a few folks on the TFW2005 message boards in the Transformers Comics Discussion section asked if we could provide a transcript of the interview for future reference. This is a time and labor-intensive process, so we owe a huge debt of thanks to Mort from the TFW2005 boards (AKA Marian Hilditch (@MMortAH)) for helping us make the transcript. It’s a really interesting interview, and we hope this helps more people get access to it. Enjoy!
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TransMissions (Charles): Alright, so we’re here with Mr. James Roberts at TFCon, to talk a little bit of More Than Meets the Eye [MTMTE]. And this is a really special interview. We want to thank James for taking the time to talk to us out of his busy weekend. And he has been busy this weekend.
James Roberts: But it’s a pleasure; will always find time to talk.
TM (Charles): Alright, so Jeremy why don’t you start.
TM (Jeremy): OK, I guess we wanted to talk about Dawn of the Autobots first, because it’s wrapping up. We saw with Dawn of the Autobots that it wrapped up a whole lot of issues that were lingering from Season 1. Like Rewind and then the alternate Lost Light, answers to questions like who was on the list that had died. Is there anything that you consider wrapped up that we didn’t necessarily get into the book?
JR: So the stuff that still needs to be wrapped up or stuff that I’d intended to wrap up, but…?
TM (Jeremy): Yes, stuff that you don’t think you’re going to be able to get back to, but should be wrapped up.
JR: I think it’s all going to plan. I mean it’s important to me, you know, there’s a lot of questions in MTMTE, but I’m not one to (or at least I hope I don’t) drag all those questions out interminably and then either forget to answer them or rush to an answer or give a full answer, but which by that point has become unsatisfactory. Because there’s a risk that if you drag things out too-too much it’s going to be an anticlimax. And you know, there’s Brainstorm’s briefcase, we’re not quite through that yet and maybe there’s a risk around that. But I think to keep readers’ trust you’ve got to periodically answer some questions.
TM (Jeremy): You got to have some pay off.
JR: Yeah, you got to have a good pay off. You’ve got to close things off, otherwise it just gets too cluttered and so, yeah, with the Dawn of the Autobots we answered a mystery which goes back to issue #8 – the Necrobot and his list. And so, lest there be any doubt, I will say now that you were looking at a Necrobot that had visited the alternate Lost Light and recorded the deaths of the alternate crew. So that’s put a bow on that one. I’m sure there’s more.
TM (Jeremy): The coffin.
JR: The coffin, yeah. So that harks back to the warning of issue #1 about not opening it. So that’s that one wrapped up.
TM (Jeremy): Did you have all these payoffs planned from the very beginning?
JR: Yes, generally the bigger questions I do know the answer to and have a rough idea of when we’re going to get there, but I discover new opportunities to ask new questions as we go along and I never want to turn them down just because they weren’t there at the beginning. So if I can incorporate new questions as I go, great, but I’ve got a rough idea of when certain things need to be answered because as I say, because otherwise it just becomes too open ended. And I think we were talking a little bit about this before we started the recording, but I do like a good mystery in MTMTE and I think readers do as well, but this is the age of speculation and I love that MTMTE gets people talking, I love the way readers descend on the latest issue and sort of piece it apart and deconstruct it and I would do exactly the same thing, but it’s proving difficult for me to put a mystery out there, which isn’t often solved, or nearly solved through the mass application of brain power and speculation.
I’ve got to phrase this very carefully because I’m not comparing anybody to monkeys, but it’s like that. You’re not monkeys at typewriters that will end up writing Shakespeare. I just mean that if you’ve got enough committed people together and they’re bouncing ideas off each other, then if I’ve done the decent thing and played a descent hand and given clues that are genuine, it turns out people can pretty much work it out. (laughs)
And the duplicate Lost Light, the quantum duplicate thing, was, as I understand it, that code was cracked pretty early on. And my problem there was that I started building to that, well I started building to the resolution of that mystery from issue #28 with things disappearing, issue #29 with a bit more of that and Rewind coming back, issue #30 with the ship itself disappearing and then #31, the ship in a bottle episode where they’re confined to the Rodpod. In the days after that I was being told, you know people on the forums are having a pretty good guess at what you’re doing, and I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have another issue to come which further builds on this mystery. You know it’s two months away from the resolution here so in hindsight maybe I’d have parceled out the clues a bit differently or brought the resolution earlier, but I have learned my lesson; people are very smart! (laughs)
TM (Jeremy): I remember listening to the Underbase review of the bottle episode and by the end of the book they’d figured it out.
JR: Yeah, and like I said, I don’t like mysteries where- You’ve got to give people a fair crack. This is the problem, where you can’t- I think it’s cheating if you just, if the resolution to the mystery involves things which nobody knew about and had no way of knowing-
TM (Jeremy): That’s cheating.
JR: Yeah, that is cheating. But it turns out, you put a single morsel of information on the table, on that plate and the masters of extrapolation come out and do their work. And the other thing is, you know, the Internet and so on. Someone gets the answer and everyone gets the answer. Or someone thinks they’ve got the answer, even if it’s not confirmed for a couple of months, it’s out there for two months and everybody, except the most spoiler-phobic, have read it. And so the risk is mass anti-climax.
TM (Jeremy): Conversely, you can have someone come up with an idea that was wrong, but people like it so much and then they’re disappointed.
JR: (laughs) Yeah, thanks for pointing out another downside to these issues.
There’ll always be mysteries in MTMTE. I don’t think there’s going to be any like – let’s call it the quantum doppelganger thing. Well that was a mystery which was played out over pretty much four consecutive issues if not six in a way. I don’t know, and this isn’t in response to people guessing, but I don’t think I’ve got any of those lined up in that format for a while.
TM (Charles): In my line of work they call it crowd sourcing.
JR: Yeah, I think I’ve used that term in this context, a bit earlier in a different interview possibly, but yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And I know it’s part of the fun and I’m not down on it as an activity. As I say I do it myself. But sitting in the writer’s seat, hearing people have guessed what you wanted to be a slow build and you wanted people to scratch their head about it – it’s a little bit – I think it’s a shame. It’s a shame people got it. But as long as it didn’t diminish the joy of it too much. And of course I knew that I had Brainstorm in my back pocket.
TM (Charles): Ah, yes! (laughs)
TM (Jeremy): And you also had Rewind sticking around.
JR: Yeah. That’s true, yeah. Some people would say that was another fake out death, but let’s not go there (laughs). That’s called tension, that’s called rug pull, that’s called misdirect, whatever.
TM (Charles): Yeah, I think you earned Rewind coming back.
JR: Thank you.
TM (Charles): Yeah, I think that whole arc earned it. It’s not a cheat, the other Rewind did die.
JR: Yeah, I’m glad you said it, I mean I expected there to be a bit of a backlash against that. I knew not everybody would be happy with that and there were times when I wondered if it was the right thing to do. I mean I know where I’m going with this so, you know, I’ve got other things to consider. But funnily enough I did, in my head, I rationalized it saying it’s not the same Rewind. And there needed to be a lasting, positive or negative, but a lasting repercussion of the Lost Light 2 adventure, otherwise it would just be an exercise in wrapping up mysteries.
TM (Jeremy): And there’s a big emotional story there with both Chromedome having essentially killed Rewind and then the other Rewind witnessing all of the carnage.
JR: Yes, absolutely. So that symmetry, if you want to call it that, was necessarily at the forefront. What I didn’t want was for there to be this, what essentially is (include the Rodpod issue so it’s) a three parter with the Lost Light 2 [where] they stumble upon it, they work out what’s happened— And because the other risk of course is we’ve seen – and this is why I’m a little bit wary of hyping up the death thing or deaths thing too much; and genuinely this is done to me – people have given me this reputation. Which is partly founded, but not entirely.
TM (Charles): (laughs)
JR: But I didn’t want us to be going into this Lost Light 2 storyline and for everyone to think, oh my god, tons of people are going to die or are dead and then you find out they’re not dead and then they solve the mystery and then they leave the ship or they go back to the first ship and nothing’s different. Because that would be a wasted story.
And so by story’s end we’ve got the return of another Rewind and we’ve set up Brainstorm’s defection. So, as with all the MTMTE stories I hope, it ripples into the next one. You pick up something along the way, put it in your narrative satchel and carry it with you to the next story.
TM (Jeremy): Would it be possible to have another story of the Lost Light 2, like you know, in the past?
JR: You’d have to ask yourself why you’re doing it. You know the fate of everybody on that ship now and even if somebody has had escaped from it, they’ve been wiped out.
TM (Jeremy): Maybe in flashbacks seen through Rewind.
JR: Yeah, and certainly if I can use it, if I need to use it in furtherance of a different story then, yeah, we’ll go there. But as things stand, it’s pretty much closed off.
TM (Charles): One of the things I like in MTMTE in general is you do a lot of work on building dynamics between characters and you also do some world building so like with the ship in a bottle episode, in addition to moving the story forward with a larger mystery, you have a little bit of backstory about the M.T.O.’s and what happened to the Autobots as their military became more and more militarized.
JR: And determined to win.
TM (Charles): Yeah and I asked you about that in your panel earlier. The other thing I was curious about was some of the relationships. We see a little bit of Nightbeat and Nautica having some interaction. Also there’s an odd triangle going on with Cyclonus, Tailgate, and Getaway. Something’s going on there, so just curious if you can you say a little bit about what’s happening there.
JR: We all know that characterization has always been my effort. The efforts I’ve made are generally focused on creating distinct or memorable characters. Characterization has been at the forefront of most of the stories and I believe in investing in the people. And I think if you do that and it works then you’re more than half way there in terms of telling a story. You’ve got people to care about the characters that they’re reading about. And I think I said actually in answer to a different question at the panel that I always think of the Lost Light crew in pairings and threesomes and combinations of characters and how their interactions with each other work to the advantage of the story. So that’s all the backdrop to this.
And if you put in the time and if you’re lucky, and I hope this has happened with MTMTE, you’ve got six, seven, eight or more pretty much well defined, three dimensional characters. With three years into this series now you can always put any of them together and a lot of the work is done for you really, because the audience brings their knowledge of the character to the party and fills in the blanks really or reads between the lines often. Which is sort of what happened with the Nautica and Nightbeat thing.
This is a complicated discussion, because what I never wanted to do and never want to do is, because Nautica is female, have a situation where whoever she has a conversation with, because they’re going to be male, whoever she shares a panel with then ‘ah, I see, Roberts is suggesting that there’s going to be a spark here, there’s going to be a relationship forming…’
Nautica and Nightbeat, they got a lot of time together, they recognize each other as smart people and they like that. There’s a Mulder and Scully vibe to it, to the context in which they’re having this conversation. They’re investigating the unknown; it’s a dangerous situation. I heard somebody talk about the very awkward flirting that goes on. I didn’t set out to write it as flirting. I can see how people would see some of it as flirting, possibly, because you know Nightbeat’s asking her about, essentially, previous relationships that she’s got, but I don’t have a plan to ‘ship’ Nautica with anybody. Let’s just cut to that chase really. (laughs)
TM (Charles): (Laughing) Tumblr will take care of it, don’t worry about it.
JR: I mean, there’s relationships. Nautica is in a relationship or has a relationship with Brainstorm. She has a relationship with Nightbeat. They may be like in real life with the same sex or the opposite sex. There’s lots of different flavors of relationships and that’s what I hope you see on the Lost Light, but I don’t think anybody would respect me and I wouldn’t respect myself if it was a case of Nautica’s a woman, everyone else is a man, let’s see what combinations work and then go from there. It’d be a little bit insulting to Nautica’s character.
TM (Charles): So, I guess I noticed that Getaway is showing an interest in Tailgate. And Tailgate, of course, he’s…
TM (Jeremy): Clueless.
TM (Charles): He’s clueless and he’s also really enjoying some of the attention that the rest of the crew is giving him. He’s the hero of the hour.
JR: He’s puffing his chest.
TM (Charles): Yeah.
JR: I was interested to hear about some of that and I actually read some of the response to that. What is essentially quite a small… There’s been two scenes to date; there’s one in issue #30 and one in #31. A couple of panels, maybe a bit more in #30. Tailgate is the old conquering hero as he sees it. His place in the world, he’s re-evaluated it, as I said he’s puffing his chest out and Getaway is a friendly guy as we saw in Remain in Light. A lot of them are pleased to see Tailgate’s back on the scene after 6 months and it’s their first opportunity to talk to him about what he did. So people are reading things into that. What can I say, Tailgate likes being bigged up and getting a pat on the back. Getaway’s a friendly guy.
TM (Charles): I also see Cyclonus’s stonefaced looks as other people are befriending Tailgate. He’s a little possessive? Protective?
JR: And really that was the point of that scene. The principal point of that scene was that until now, Cyclonus and Tailgate were at a pretty insular… Actually, Tailgate’s made a better fist of it. Tailgate and his movie nights with the others. He had some bit of friendship and an affinity with some of the other characters, much more than Cyclonus did. But Cylconus has just got Tailgate back as well after six months. Essentially, Tailgate’s back on his feet, they’ve gone to the pub and Tailgate has a newfound status which is getting noticed. And Getaway, being a gregarious and pretty full-on fellow, is sort of crowding out other people. So Cyclonus isn’t quite sure how he feels about that and decides it’s best to back away. But you’ve directly identified, a shifting dynamic between those three so I won’t be surprised if we got back to that.
TM (Charles): Yeah, I guess another thing, and I think you’ve talked about this before, is that in each season you envision shifting the focus on different characters and I think maybe some people like that and some people don’t like it. At least I’ve heard a little bit of people saying I miss the old Lost Light crew that was the focus in Season 1 and now with a lot of the new members and the having the focus on them it’s a bit of a shift.
JR: Season 1 essentially was 22 issues and the annual and the Hoist & Trailcutter spotlights. So if you’re counting those two issues, you’re probably talking 25 issues worth plus a couple of very short stories. So the season 1 crew had a lot of air time, necessarily. We were building them up, we were exploring their own characters so they had a lot of time in the sun. And because we have Megatron coming along, because I was taking the opportunity to shake things up a little bit in Season 2, as you do, we brought in the principle, but new, characters. The ones that we’ve paid attention to, obviously Nautica, Nightbeat, Ravage (eventually we got to Ravage) and Megatron of course. And then we’ve got at the moment the second tier of newbies, so Bluestreak and Riptide’s in there too.
I thought I’ve got to, certainly with Megatron. I mean Megatron’s a constant presence in Season 2, because you can’t overestimate the significance of what he’s done, obviously. In the context of the Transformers universe it’s absolutely massive. You can’t just have him attach an Autobot badge and no one mentions it again. So he’s obviously front and center.
But I needed to be able to do to these new characters what I’d done more or less with the Season 1 characters and give them some space and time and give readers an opportunity to learn about them and get to know them. So we did that most of all with the Lost Light 2 theme. My authorial desire to spend some time with these new guys and the need to help the reader get to know these new guys and the reason why everyone else is disappearing from the Rodpod; those two things knitted together very neatly. So that was good fun.
Now we’ve done that. That’s the most focus at the exclusion of others you’re ever going to get on those guys. And issue #34, which is out on Wednesday [29 October 2014], is a good example as a spotlight shift, because now we’re looking at Bluestreak, we’re looking at First Aid again and, who else have we got there, we got Trailcutter as well and Mainframe.
And then after that, the next four issues are focusing on the Season 1 crowd. So we’re getting back to Rodimus, Whirl, all the old favorites. I’m trying to be even handed, I’m trying to, like I said imagine a spotlight raking around the cast, dwelling on a few people or a cluster of people and moving on; lets everyone get, hopefully, in the end equal air time. I understand if people have… I got very attached to the Season 1 crew, but they’re not dead, they are around.
TM (Jeremy): Most of them.
TM (Charles): (laughing)
JR: Most of them. They’re not dead yet. So they’ll be cropping up.
But you wouldn’t see as much segregation as we’ve seen in the first six/seven issues of this season. Because, like I said, it was necessary to put the older characters to the side for a bit [and] focus on the new ones: the ship in a bottle episode and the two parter on the Lost Light 2.
We learn Riptide’s background and a lot about Nautica. What makes her tick and her efforts to fit in, her vague intellectual snobbery and so on. Her evolving relationship with Nightbeat and Brainstorm. Megatron’s obviously there as well. Riptide in the ship in a bottle episode; we learned about his academic anxiety and we learn he’s not that bright. So I’m hoping I’ve sort of put some more meat on those bones. But that now having been done it is time we switched back to the originals for a bit and see what they’re up to.
TM (Charles): We haven’t talked a lot about Megatron. I think you’ve already in previous interviews talked a lot about Megatron’s motivation and I think we’re going back to that in future issues a little bit. But I was curious about the rest of the crew’s reaction to Megatron being on the ship, because in the first three issues we get a sense of the new status quo and we have the whole Lost Light newspaper.
JR: Oh yes, the Lost Light Insider.
TM (Charles): Yeah, the Lost Light Insider. And there’s a little undercurrent of animosity towards Megatron, but on the surface it seems like everyone’s treating him as the captain. Specifically Ultra Magnus, who is someone who I think is very focused on protocol and doing things properly and I think he even perversely appreciates Megatron’s presence there as a stabilizing influence since Rodimus is much less about that. (laughs)
JR: Megatron’s arrival has knocked Rodimus sideways and I sympathize with the guy to be honest. For all Rodimus’s faults, it was his quest. He picked his crew. OK, there were some problems along the way, but he helped them get to the end of Stage 1 of the quest before Dark Cybertron came along and took them on a different adventure. He was ready to go back and pick up where he left off and Prime has decided rather high-handedly, ‘Yeah, you are going to take Megatron with you and I’m going to put him in a position of responsibility and power on your ship whether you like it or not.’
I think, had that not happened, Rodimus would have more readily learned the lessons that he was learning in Remain in Light and in Dark Cybertron. In Remain in Light with his candid conversation with Magnus and his confession about Overlord, the vote that happened off screen, so to speak, about his leadership which he narrowly won, all that stuff. I think he would have built more upon those foundations had this ex-Decepticon not turned up and if anything, whether he realizes it or not, forced Rodimus to become more of the immature, reckless… In the face of Megatron’s stern disciplined position, Rodimus has sort of reverted to type a bit, I think, at this stage in Season 2.
The fact that we haven’t seen much obvious reaction or rebellion against Megatron’s position is largely because we jump forward six months. And where we did have flashbacks, they were to the immediate aftermath of Dark Cybertron where they were having the trial. If we’d picked up six months later and the resistance to Megatron is manifesting in them refusing to listen to him or lamping him one or a max exodus from the Lost Light, you’d have thought, oh my God, six months on, why haven’t they resolved this issue. Why haven’t they said, well OK, this isn’t going to work, Megatron you’re going back or we’re going to lock you up or everyone that doesn’t like it can go. And for all we know, in my head, there have been people that abandoned ship, and said I can’t do it any more. But we’re jumping forward six months and in doing so we missed the opportunity to look at more detail at how people adjusted over the first few days and weeks. And we also wanted to get to the point where we could dive back into the stories again and the external threats and the Season 1 type adventures, as well.
TM (Charles): And we do see Whirl at least as one person talking also to someone else about Megatron and they’re trying to provoke a reaction from him.
TM (Jeremy): And if there’s anyone that you would expect that wouldn’t be able to let go even after six months, it’s Whirl.
JR: Yes, exactly.
TM (Charles): Also, I guess, now that we have Ravage I was curious. I’ve heard before that you had originally planned for Ravage to be a stowaway on the Lost Light, so I was curious what your original conception was if Ravage was discovered on the ship if Megatron was not there, if he would have been integrated or if he would have just been…
JR: As I recall, I wanted Ravage on the ship as another post-cast Decepticon who was going to give things a try. At one stage half of the Lost Light were going to be Decepticons and half were going to be Autobots. It was just going to reflect the post-war melting pot of factions. And then it became what it was, which was almost exclusively Autobots with a pseudo-Decepticon in Cyclonus. So I think the Ravage thing with that went. So OK, it wasn’t half and half, but there would have been a handful more Decepticons of which Ravage would have been one, so he wasn’t there as a stowaway. I think somebody actually suggested to me or someone said he’d make an ideal stowaway, I don’t know. So the circumstances of his arrival changed with Megatron.
TM (Charles): I particularly like Nautica’s interaction with him. She treats him like he’s a cute and cuddly pet.
TM (Jeremy): Awkward.
TM (Charles): (laughs) And when she pats him on the head and Ravage says “Touch me again and I’ll kill you.”
JR: It’s funny you said that, because a lot of people have mentioned that and it was a happy accident that bit. I wanted Nautica to mistake him as sort of a sub species and perhaps it reflects the way they do things differently on Caminus. And I wanted her to also assume that he was a she as well. A little nod to the fact that things are a little different out in the colonies or the colonized worlds. So we had that anyway, that was always in the script.
But when Alex drew that panel – originally the panel was just she standing between Rewind and Ravage and she was saying “Look guys, yes you are the right size, sorry Ravage…” I think the original line was she was saying, “…your lack of manual dexterity means you can’t help,” and he said, “Damn these paws of mine,” or something like that in a very sarcastic way. Which wasn’t actually very Ravage-y anyway, but that was the line. And then when the art came back (and I didn’t actually see this particular page until we were doing the final read-through at printer-proof stage, which is the last opportunity we get to make changes), something came through and Alex had drawn Nautica patting Ravage on the head in an affectionate way. Which was a cute shot, but it didn’t fit the line from my perspective. And I also thought, they just met, a few panels earlier Ravage went for Nautica’s face. Ravage will hate that. So I improvised the line, “Touch me again and I’ll kill you.” And that’s the line actually, more than anything else in the issue, that people keep quoting back to me. (laughs)
TM (Jeremy): It’s very much a Ravage line.
JR: And I was much happier with that being a Ravage-y line than the original one. So it worked out.
TM (Charles): So I think we should inform the listeners that we’re going into spoiler territory a little bit. This episode should be out after issue #34 comes out so –
JR: Will be out.
TM (Charles): Yes (laughs).
JR: Don’t make me panic!
TM (Charles): Yeah, we will not release this before issue #34 is out. So if you have not bought issue #34, stop now. Go out, get it, read it, then come back.
TM (Jeremy): Buy it print and digital.
TM (Charles): Yes (laughs).
JR: Double dip whatever you need to do (laughs).
TM (Charles): So we have gotten a chance to see issue #34 and we just talked a little bit about how you’ve gotten a certain reputation and you think it’s not necessarily earned, but this issue might- (laughs)
JR: Might cement that reputation (laughs).
TM (Charles): -Might contradict that. So in issue 33, we had- I’d say it was, except for the Brainstorm bit, it was an unqualified happy ending.
JR: mmm-hmm.
TM (Charles): We have Chromedome and Rewind reunited. And, James Roberts gives, and in this issue James Roberts taketh away (laughs).
TM (Jeremy): Is there a quota- (laughs)
JR: It’s funny you should say that because the working title for this issue was, “He giveth with one hand,” because I just thought that’s gonna get quoted back at me. Someone’s gonna say that.
TM (Charles): Yeah, so issue #34 is another kind of standalone issue where we deal with some of the Autobots who have been stranded after the whole Lost Light disappearing and reappearing and so the focus is on as we said earlier Bluestreak, Mainframe, First Aid, and Trailcutter. So they land on this planet Ofsted XVII, which is where the Lost Light 2 had been destroyed and they are trying to regroup, trying to reconnect with the rest of the Lost Light. And… things happen (laughs). So actually there’s also I think the other part of the story where we go back into Megatron’s motivation and I think this is a follow-on from Shadowplay?
JR: Yeah, chronologically it takes place after Shadowplay.
TM (Charles): Yeah, cause I think in Shadowplay Senator Shockwave told Orion Pax that they had sent Megatron to Messatine?
JR: Yeah.
TM (Charles): And, here we see Megatron at Messatine, doing his mining duties and writing his Decepticon Manifesto. (laughs)
JR: Yep, exactly.
TM (Jeremy): Do you actually have that written out? We see a page of it…
JR: Yeah, that’s as much as I’ve written. I mean I wrote more than a page in the end, and I edited, I left some bits out. But that’s your free gift. That’s page 23 of the story this month, is a page of text.
TM (Charles): mmm-hmm.
JR: An extract from- well actually I say an extract- That’s what Megatron’s writing in the issue. He may have edited it slightly before it was published in the end, but at the moment that’s the closest you’re gonna get to seeing Towards Peace. Not the least because it takes, as I’ve discovered, it takes a lot of time and effort to put together a functional political treatise (laughs). I didn’t just dash that one off! (laughs)
TM (Charles): Did you break out a little Karl Marx for inspiration there? (laughs)
JR: Yeah, it’s quite, um, it has sort of Soviet shades to it, yeah. (laughs)
TM (Charles): Yeah, so, I think this issue deals a lot with a little bit of I guess moral choices here, and-
JR: Well, if you remember, we first learned about Ofsted XVII in issue #31.
TM (Charles): Right.
JR: And it’s specialist subject was ethics, if you recall.
TM (Charles): Ah, Yes.
JR: Yeah, so, um, I didn’t mention it this issue, cause that really would be too on the nose, but it’s sort of like a flash- a call forward in issue #31 to events here. So yeah it’s very much built around, um, shades of morality and difficult decisions and difficult circumstances. And each of the characters, bar one, has a breaking point, or has a threshold, a moral threshold, beyond which they’re not prepared to go. And they reach that at different points. Now, I’ll be interested to see readers’ reading of this situation and who they side with in this and it may not necessarily be the- I know we’re going to be naming names in a minute (laughs), but it may not necessarily be the person that is there til the end. They may feel that that person was wrong to offer up what he did, given the body. (laughs)
TM (Charles): Yeah, so, I think it really does a good job of building this question of what are your choices. How do you make moral decisions? One thing I liked is that First Aid appears at first to be the one who is – he’s a medic, so he has-
TM (Jeremy): Yeah, it doesn’t matter if it was a Decepticon or Autobot he was gonna try to save the person’s life.
TM (Charles): Right. But then as soon as he finds out – member of the DJD – That changes his – and we do have – I think First Aid, he’s had a breaking point before –
JR: Yeah, this is important actually. I’m glad you went there. First Aid is, with Remain in Light he blew off Pharma’s head (laughs). And I was having a conversation with somebody earlier today about that, and there’s a lot of people that want Pharma to come back, a lot of people want Ambulon, which is nice, but it wasn’t so much that he killed his friend, or ex-friend. It was the fact that he’d – largely he’s got strong pacifistic tendencies – I wouldn’t say he’s quite the pure G1 pacifist of old, but he’s a doctor, he avoids killing. Here, he killed in anger. He didn’t need to kill Pharma, but he killed in anger. And that knocked him. And there’s a comment when we see him again in issue #30, when he comes out to inspect Rodimus’ body, and Ratchet and Megatron in conversation allude to the fact that maybe he’s not seen very much. And I think if you look at the art, I asked Alex to draw him with sort of – streaked with oil and stuff, He’s a bit chipped, he’s been neglecting himself. He’s not in the best place. He’s still functioning as a medic, he’d doing his bit, he carried out the autopsy on Prime [I think he means the Rodimus body in the coffin], but, yeah as you say, he’s not bobbing happily along. And so this comes at a very bad time for him. And as you say he takes the moral high ground – I think he adopts the right position actually for most of this issue. If we’re really going to get into spoiler territory, then we find out that a little bit, he lied by omission. He withheld information to avoid the arguments about whether to help or not and to persuade the others to donate the active Energon, so that was underhand. He would’ve said he did it for the right reasons. So that was his first little stumble. And then he reaches his own threshold, which is I’ll help anybody, except I won’t help them [the DJD]. Now I know and longer term readers will know about Agent 113 and about the fact that First Aid was one of the very few people to know that there was a secret agent, an Autobot mole, in the DJD. But the way this issue is set up it goes right back to issue #29 in that clearly the Vos, our Vos, the Vos we met back in the Scavengers two-parter, that’s a different Vos to the one that everyone else is familiar with. If you remember the conversation between Rodimus and Atomizer, the Vos that they had footage of was their Vos – he had hooks, he was clearly different. So, First Aid knows that this DJD guy can’t be Agent 113 because he doesn’t recognize him. He’s new to the team. And so, I guess that’s my preemptive way of saying, although First Aid says, “Enough’s enough, I’m not going to help him,” in First Aid’s mind there wasn’t a risk that he was potentially killing the Autobot mole. He knew that this guy couldn’t be him. So that’s his moral event horizon, that he crosses there. Obviously Bluestreak’s and Mainframe’s come earlier than that.
TM (Charles): Yeah, and then Trailcutter, of course, he makes what most people would say is the completely moral, altruistic decision to donate his Energon, and of course, he is rewarded for that. (laughs)
JR: Yes, he gets a DJD reward for that one.
TM (Charles): Yes. (laughs)
TM (Jeremy): And he did just have his, what should we call it?
TM (Charles): Redemption arc?
TM (Jeremy): -Character redemption, with the whole Megatron-
JR: Yeah, he turned a corner.
TM (Jeremy): -preventing him from being able to get drunk again.
JR: Yeah, so he’d had his – I mean I didn’t skip and giggle gleefully as I typed out these scenes- (laughs) -and I’m sad he’s dead. You know, I don’t- Well, I like to tell myself, like a serial killer, I kill only for good reason. (laughs) I justified the killings. But seriously, I don’t throw away characters willfully, or flippantly rather. And with Trailcutter, he wasn’t necessarily an A-list character in More Than Meets The Eye, but he was close to it. He had his Spotlight, he’s cropped up intermittently in Season 1, he was on the cover of #28, he was elevated or promoted to a main cast member in Season 2, and as you say, he’d had his thing where Megatron cured him. Now, there was a lot of groundwork that had to be laid for this issue. We’ve talked about how we established that there was another Vos, or an earlier Vos, that these guys wouldn’t been familiar with, otherwise they would’ve recognized this guy, straightaway. We had to introduce Trailbreaker’s new force field that he himself couldn’t shut down.
TM (Charles): Oh yes, that’s right.
TM (Jeremy): Panic bubble.
JR: Yeah, so that needed to be set up too. Even the fact that it was a lectureworld. All the backstory about lectureworlds and curricula, and commodification of knowledge, all that stuff. And I’m glad it’s there, and it’s my intention was to enrich the Transformers universe with it, but it all started because I needed to be able to hide Kaon in a bunch of chairs!
(laughs)
And I think that’s the ultimate for me, in the context of MTMTE, that’s the ultimate example of deciding that you want to do something and then working your way backwards from that. I wanted a situation where Trailcutter was trapped in an environment the couldn’t escape and unbeknownst to him there was – what’s the worst thing that can happen if you’re in that environment? – There’s a threat to your life also in that environment. So all the other details were retro-engineered, if you like, from that setup.
TM (Charles): And I guess there’s an implication that there’s a little bit of backstory with- so we know that the DJD destroyed the Lost Light 2, but apparently there was also a larger battle going on there to the point where-
TM (Jeremy): Yeah, three factions involved, it says.
JR: Yeah, so there’s a little bit of deliberate white noise around the events. We haven’t had a nice, neat timeline saying- we know how events played out up to the end of Rewind’s documentary, we know the DJD attacked, Rewind was out of commission for a number of months. He was lying inside, hiding inside the Magnus armor for a number of months. He didn’t see the DJD leave. As you say, we know that at some point, for some reason, the Galactic Council were involved, and the Black Block Consortia were involved. So yeah, there’s threads that have been left hanging there for good reasons.
TM (Charles): One question I have about the DJD – they’re kind of shown as boogie men themselves. We don’t really go into their morality, in the sense. You know, I wonder if there was any question in Vos’ or Kaon’s mind, “Well, these Autobots saved our lives,” Is there any consideration to letting them live or giving them a choice or anything?
JR: Yeah, I mean it certainly is – as of this issue Vos is blacker than black, isn’t he, blackhearted and just so dark in his thoughts that- I don’t think- He just acts out of utter spite. He knows his life has been saved by this character. And he still does what he does and he does it gleefully. Actually, sorry it’s not Vos, it’s Kaon, isn’t it? It’s Kaon that’s trapped inside with him. But Kaon knows that he owes his resurrection if you like, being recharged, to Trailcutter. He wouldn’t have borne witness to the morality play that unfolded and that preceded Trailcutter’s sacrifice of Energon. But none the less, he’s got the brain up against the side of the force field, he’s being told the war’s over, he knows he can teleport out – he chooses to teleport out when he’s murdered Trailcutter, so he’s an ass (laughs). So, sorry, yeah, I transposed those names. Kaon is the murderer that certainly showed no consideration.
TM (Charles): Well, Vos didn’t show much mercy – I mean, as soon as he had enough energy he immediately attacked-
JR: He did, he did, and you could say that was just sort of a-
TM (Charles): A gut reaction?
JR: Yeah, on some level, or was it just-
TM (Jeremy): Like Optimus Prime in Age of Extinction, when he’s first reawakened. (laughs)
JR: Yeah, exactly. And Vos gets shot, doesn’t he, by the others when they arrive.
TM (Charles): Yeah, well Trailcutter’s leg cannons-
JR: Yeah, the [he’s] first to shoot him, and then the others come in and blast him away from the force field. And of course Vos doesn’t understand, I mean he can make out what’s going on, but he can’t understand any of what First Aid and Bluestreak are talking about.
TM (Jeremy): Did you want to talk about the Rung and Froid bits?
TM (Charles): Yeah, so we have two parallel stories going on, and we don’t really see why they’re interweaving until the end. We get a little hint, but we still don’t know what’s going on there, but I thought it was interesting that you have two Cybertronian psychiatrists named Rung and Froid, and I’m assuming it’s Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud-
JR: Yes.
TM (Charles): -are the callbacks there. And you have a line here where they say we never agree on anything, and the real psychiatrists, I think they had competing theories of psychiatry?
JR: They did, yeah they were responsible for the two sort of principle- a bit like quantum theory and classical physics, you know, Theory of Relativity. They hope to be combined but they don’t quite- So yes, that’s right, that’s riffing on their real life counterparts. I will credit Nick Roche for the Froid name. He threw it out there, I can’t remember what context- he said it as a joke but it’s- Froid’s been mentioned before in The Sound of Breaking Glass I think, one of the text stories.
TM (Charles): Yeah, and we get another view of Trepan and his- I guess he was about to do Shadowplay on Megatron, or some other kind of-
JR: Yeah, either Shadowplay or a very subtle variation on that. He was about to rewrite things, and the words as they disappear are meant to symbolize elements of Megatron’s thought processes or memory, just starting to be tampered with. It was good to bring Trepan back in actually. I was satisfied with both halves of the issue, actually, because- and certainly the Messatine one. It’s like an oblique sequel to Shadowplay in a way, cause you’ve got this sort of Shadowplay, I think we have a proper name for it. Is it Personality Adjustment- PA?
TM (Charles & Jeremy): Yes.
JR: So there’s something akin to Shadowplay which Rung, perhaps surprisingly, is aware of and recognizes. In Rung’s world it’s a very, very medical procedure.
TM (Jeremy): It’s an accepted procedure.
JR: Yeah, so to be able to bring Rung into it, and to have Senator Shockwave’s amendment- I mean, that amendment would have been debated after Shockwave had been got to, and Shadowplayed. That was intended as sort of Shockwave’s legacy, if you like, that in his absence the- because there was always- I mean the Senate isn’t entirely corrupt, you know, we established in Shadowplay there’s a core of people around Sentinel that are the bad guys, if you like, and maybe those numbers are growing. And so, as I see it, one of Senator Shockwave’s last pre-Shadowplay acts was to have lodged this amendment for debate, and it was carried by a majority. And the impact is that, for a time at least, it takes- you need two people to sign off on personality adjustments.
TM (Jeremy): You also kind of see Rung’s ethical choice, trying to rush there so he could co-sign before it happens, without even really knowing anything about the- just to help protect Froid but it’s still kind of unethical-
JR: Yeah-
TM (Jeremy): Just go ahead and blindly sign-
JR: Yeah, that’s right, yeah. Rung is scrupulously moral in this story really. And maybe he’s- as I wrote it, my suspicion is, if you like- I think Rung thinks that Froid would- (laughs) would go ahead and [authorize the personality adjustment of Megatron], even if Froid knew about the change of law, so Rung’s physical presence here is where, “I kind of bear witness now, so I’m here now, I’ll work alongside you, I’ll carry out an assessment, and I’ll either countersign it, or I will, effectively, veto it, by refusing to.”
TM (Charles): And before that we have, as Megatron [is] writing his treatise, we are introduced to Terminus, who is name-checked in #28-
JR: Yep, in #28, yep.
TM (Charles): -and so now we see he’s another miner, I guess an older miner who’s been around a lot longer than Megatron, a mentor to Megatron-
JR: That’s right.
TM (Charles): -and it’s interesting to see how- I guess this takes place after Megatron’s encounter with Whirl in his prison cell-
JR: Yes, that’s right, the storyline- the chronology would be Megatron and Impactor are miners, they have a drink, they have a fight, Megatron’s arrested, and gets beaten up by Whirl, gets released by Pax. At some point after that gets exiled, effectively, to Messatine, which Shockwave knows about, and tells Prime about, and this happens before- there’s a reference to C-12, which is where Megatron: Origins is set. It’s another mining outpost and Rolt mentions it, I think. So this is in between Shadowplay and Megatron: Origins.
TM (Charles): Okay. So it’s interesting to see that Megatron is still- even though we have the dramatic end of that issue from the ongoing [Issue #22 of the Transformers Ongoing (2009-2011) Chaos Theory Part 1] where he throws his datapad into the window, when his treatise is talking about nonviolent revolution, but he’s still not completely-
JR: He’s not fully committed to it, no, and I think it’s because it’s- I mean, if we look at pivotal events in Megatron’s life then being beaten up by Whirl is still there. Megatron was an avowed pacifist up to that point, and Whirl’s beating introduces him to the world of violence and it’s application, as we see in Chaos Theory. So you add that ingredient to Megatron’s theories, he’s not advocating a pacifism at this stage in his political journey, if you like, but he is now- this is more about- this is focusing on Megatron being prepared to be a figurehead or not- being the one that leads, as opposed to the one which incites revolution. And Terminus is very much encouraging him to say, “You’re the one, you need to- group action is fine, but there needs to be someone to take point and you are that person.” And so it’s about steering Megatron- and the next thing is, again chronologically, is when he hurts the guard at the beginning of [Megatron:] Origins. So if it works as I intended it to, then all the ducks are now lined up to create the Megatron that he was for the majority of his life – the Megatron we know best.
TM (Charles): Also around when they’re talking about Terminus and miners and lower class and upper class, and how it seems like, of course, just like, I think, in some human societies, people at the top, their lives are more valuable than people at the bottom, and-
JR: Yeah.
TM (Charles): Terminus, he’s- they don’t want to spend the resources to repair him, Megatron seems to be the only one who’s looking after him, and when the planet’s evacuated they don’t allow Megatron to go and take him with them, and-
JR: Yeah.
TM (Charles): I’m sure that had a huge impact on Megatron.
JR: Of course, absolutely. I was trying to make this all about- You know the beginning of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade? That’s undoubtedly entertaining, but there is something faintly ludicrous about how every single one of Indy’s quirks, and character-defining phobias and things, happen in the space of about three minutes-
(laughs)
JR: And so with Megatron things are a bit more spaced out at least. This issue accounts for his terror of Shadowplay, which, remember in that scene in the cell?
TM (Charles): Ah, yes.
TM (Jeremy): Right.
JR: -When Chromedome came in, and his sort of aversion to needles, I suppose, as I said in issue #30. And also with the Rung scene in issue #28 we have the conversation about Terminus- Who is he, and why did you remove the dedication? And he said he taught me not to get attached and essentially to do things- he doesn’t say this explicitly, but the other lesson learned was- sometimes you’ve got to take matters into your own hands. So, again it’s trying to sort of account for a lot of Megatron’s motivations by the time we reach Megatron: Origin, we sort of set things up.
TM (Charles): And, of course, we have the last panel, which is-
JR: Did it surprise you?
TM (Charles): Yes! (laughs)
JR: Good, good.
TM (Jeremy): Making the Brainstorm just stealing the scene at the end.
TM (Charles): Yeah. That’s twice in a row! Two issues in a row! (laughs)
JR: (laughs) Well, I know, actually, and I’m a little bit- If I’m honest, yeah, that niggled me a little bit where we had two issues in a row where the ending was essentially-
TM (Jeremy): You can just tell an entire story with just one page in each book of Brainstorm.
(laughs)
JR: Yeah, I would’ve liked to have found a way to differentiate them a bit more, but in the end I thought, what the hell, I thought it was a strong ending.
TM (Jeremy): Yeah.
JR: So yeah, there we go. Brainstorm has traveled in time.
TM (Charles): Yes, and that ties nicely back to when Nightbeat and Nautica were opening the briefcase and time got wibbly-wobbly when they opened the briefcase so-
JR: This is it. It’s-
TM (Jeremy): Yeah, I think you did say on Twitter that everything about the briefcase can be known by that one elevator scene.
JR: Yeah, so, yeah. But anyway tampering with it, like an uncalibrated, or raw, or disconnected briefcase, it was- scrambled time. And here we have Brainstorm putting it to a more focused- our Brainstorm putting it to it’s proper use.
TM (Charles): And- If you can’t- if you don’t want to say anything that’s fine, but I do remember at the end of Remain in Light we had Brainstorm harvesting a spark.
TM (Jeremy): A green spark.
TM (Charles): Yes, so I’m wondering if that’s coming into play here, or that’s-
JR: Yeah, well, that’s- this is the thing with, sort of, multiple storylines, and multiple threads. Things will get resolved at different speeds.
TM (Charles): Okay.
(laughs)
TM (Charles): And so I guess, we can maybe just get a small preview for Days of Deception, the next arc that’s coming. And it looks like Brainstorm going into the past is maybe the framing device for this?
JR: Yeah, I think that’s a fair thing to say. I’ve been really- I’ve found the solicits for the last few issues really difficult to write, because I didn’t want to give the game away. But yeah, clearly, by the end of issue #34 we’ve got a time traveling Brainstorm, and we’ve established he’s a Decepticon, and he’s got a plan, and that plan plays out over the next three issues, yeah, or four issues, actually, that is the Days of Deception storyline, yeah. But you’d have seen already through the solicits that we’ve got Orion Pax coming in, and we’ve got Roller coming in, we’ve got the Functionists coming into play, so, yeah, he’s running amok, really.
(laughs)
TM (Jeremy): One more thing. In the panel this afternoon- this is not related to #34, you mentioned you know how MTMTE’s gonna end. Is that just a general, when you get the word from IDW that the series needs to come to a close, you know how you’re gonna do it, or do you have a definite length of the series?
JR: Well, I’ve always- this always sounds insanely ambitious, so I know it’s dependent on lots and lots of things, but in my head I’ve always thought, four seasons, roughly 25 issues a season, wrapping up with issue #100. Just something I said in issue #1 in the author’s note in the back, we said wouldn’t it be great if we could get to 1-0-0, so, until someone tells me that’s mad, I’m sort of working on those parameters. If IDW said, look, plans have changed, we’re gonna stop it and launch another book, or whatever, or you need to wrap it up more quickly, then I can take a lot of stuff out and get to that ending quicker, but I’ve conditioned myself to think in seasons. Now, if the ideas keep coming, and the readership is there, and IDW are happy and Hasbro are happy, and the rest of it, and we’re getting into Season 4, 75 plus, and there’s no end in sight, then maybe I’ll revise that, and it’ll be 125 issues, or something. But, it’s hard to say. It’s scary to think that, we’re nearly in November, beginning of 2015 it’ll be year four of MTMTE and RID as well, or the title formerly known as Robots in Disguise. Year four, and, as I said at the panel, plots, Season 2 runs into the mid-50s, and then we’re over half way, either to the end of that whole series, or to that milestone that we set as a target from issue #1. So, yeah, I just keep my head down, and keep writing the stories, until people tell me, either through- (laughs) IDW change their plans or readers [have] had enough, or whatever. I’ll keep plowing away at the mega-arc. I would love to be able to say that, there you go, it’s a hundred issues, it tells one huge story, that’s my statement on Transformers, there we go.
TM (Charles): Nice. Before we wrap up, I just wanted to get your quick thoughts on- We started a little petition about trying to convince IDW to start a new comic series based on the G1 cartoon, and I just wanted to get your thoughts on it real quick. We talked a little bit to John-Paul Bove about that. [It’s] something that he’s really interested in and we’re trying to talk to David Wise, one of the original writers on the G1 cartoon, and in the panel you mentioned that in the UK they didn’t get the cartoon as much as we did here in the States, so just curious what your thoughts were on that.
JR: Well, I’m all for more Transformers content, and anything which makes, this sounds really cheesy, but anything that makes the fandom happy is a good thing, isn’t it? Whether, and this is me as an outsider, I’m not part of the editorial team, I’m not party to IDW’s thoughts in this regard, but just looking in from the outside thinking, we’ve got a couple of continuities running at the moment, the other one being Transformers vs. G.I. Joe. Part of me thinks, is there an appetite for a third continuity? Because it would have to be a third one, and then I think to myself, Regen One, that was a third continuity, maybe it could be done. I don’t know. I’ve certainly, and this was something I did allude to in the panel, I certainly sense a much- the cartoon was a huge part of the American Transformers experience in the 80’s, arguably more that the comic. So, maybe it’s a really potent and fertile untapped seam that the comics can revisit and celebrate, I don’t know. You’re the guys behind the petition, so you must sense there’s a groundswell of, you must sense there’s a demand for this type of stuff.
TM (Charles): Well, I mean, it’s personally our demand, (laughs) but we’re trying to see if other people agree with us.
TM (Jeremy): In particular we see the 20-year gap between the end of Season 2 and when the Movie takes place-
JR: Oh, okay, yeah.
TM (Jeremy): Yeah, there’s a lot of stories there can be told, like, where did Autobot City come from? Who are these new characters? What are their backgrounds?
JR: Yeah, yeah. If you could choose between that and a Beast Wars comic or, again, this isn’t me (laughs). I’m just thinking, because, you never get a greater sense of this than when you’re at a convention like this one, but so many iterations of Transformers. My huge blind spot is the Armada, Energon, Cybertron stuff, and there’re so many toys of those things. And there’s fans, you know, and each year those fans get older, and their love of that era is just actually, if anything, it solidifies, so yeah, ten years time people will be calling for the resurrection of the Dreamwave Energon stuff.
TM (Jeremy): It’s when that era of fans-
JR: Yeah! Comes of age-
TM (Jeremy): – gets into it and they get their disposable income.
JR: Yes, absolutely. So, yeah, maybe this is your best chance to- (laughs) -to get the [G1] cartoon finished. Why don’t you petition for a cartoon to fill in the-
TM (Charles): Yeah, I think our thoughts with the comic was that at least, I feel like, Transformers comics is the place that is maybe the most, you’re most able to tell a story without a lot of constraints put on you. I think a cartoon requires- you’d require a lot more people to have interest in it, it would be-
JR: Yeah, it’s far harder to get that off the ground, absolutely.
TM (Jeremy): Well, and then you’d have to deal with the voices, a lot of the people aren’t here anymore and have passed on.
JR: But I mean, the Mars Attacks! issue that Shane wrote, was really well received, it was really fun.
TM (Charles): Yeah, and we referenced that as a model for something that we would like to see, so- It’s a little- We got a little bit discouraged because we did get a lot of the feedback, negative feedback, we got was, “Well, I think it’s interesting but I don’t want to talk about the years between the movie, I want to talk about after Rebirth, or I want to talk about something else-”
JR: Oh, really?
TM (Charles): -and my perspective is, we’re just putting a petition out there. The creative team will do whatever they want with it. I just want to see something that’s in that realm, in that continuity.
JR: Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that, in a wonderful way, nothing’s ever dead forever, nothing’s ever written off. You can resurrect anything. I mean, who’d have thought Regen One would happen? And that’s incredible. I don’t know, just look at some of the new Generations toys. And you can buy a Cosmos again, you can by a Nightbeat and stuff. I think if nothing else, the people – the creatives and the decision makers involved in Transformers, are well aware of this very rich backstory they’ve got. Whether it’s the toys or the characters themselves. And I just think virtually every era could, at some point could be revisited, resurrected, and given a new lease of life. And G1 the cartoon, for many, many people, is where it all started, so [it has a] very strong nostalgia pull.
TM (Charles): Yeah. Well thank you so much for your time. We took about an hour of your con time here (laughs) so thanks so much for giving us all that feedback, and I’m sure our listeners will be really interested to hear about-
JR: It’s good to talk to you, and just one last comment on the issue we were talking about. The other big repercussion from that is of course that now the DJD know about Megatron, you know?
TM (Charles): That’s right.
JR: So, we’ll see where that goes.
TM (Charles): Yeah.
JR: Thank you, yeah, good to talk.
TM (Charles): Yeah, alright, thank you.
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