New interview and covers for IDW's big crossover event that's setting up a shared universe for all of its Hasbro titles, Revolution.
>CBR News: John, you've been involved on the editorial side of things for these books for a while. How did you feel about bringing the universes together?
>John Barber: I'd always thought if I could go back in time, I'd make sure the IDW G.I. Joe comics took place in the same universe as the Transformers comics.
>I grew up with these big universes from Marvel and DC and Image and Valiant and Wildstorm and everybody. I've always liked the idea that you can have divergent characters interact and bump into each other and be friends and be enemies and all that stuff. AThere was some of that with the classic Transformers and G.I. Joe comics in the 1980s and '90s, but it's, let's say, a little inconsistently applied in those comics.
>In real life, though, the way the IDW Hasbro comics rolled out, IDW did the Transformers comics for a few years before they got the rights to do G.I. Joe, and this was all pre- "universes" being part of the everyday parlance. I mean, all of us entrenched in comics got the idea, but the perception was those comic book universes could alienate casual readers -- and forget about viewers of film and TV in those days! The past 10 years have totally changed cultural perceptions.
>I always really liked that idea, but as a writer and an editor, I was happy to roll on with the status quo of Transformers in one box, and G.I. Joe in another. As we started doing these other Hasbro brands, they were all going in their own boxes -- and that was a lot of boxes.