What's the deal with me and Transformers? Pt. 4

All right, get comfortable. This is a big one.

I've had old hand-me-down computers before, but they were always older machines that barely ran Windows 3.1, and NEVER internet activity. My friend Moser had the internet at his house, but it always seemed like that thing you could go and look up neat things on, but nothing really useful. (No wonder we had the dot com bubble burst.) So it was late 1999, and I had gotten my first computer. Sure I had internet access at school, but I mainly used that to look up show times, and look at hamsters dancing. But when I got my new computer, it was a new outlet of creativity. For one, I could use Photoshop at home. Yes, Photoshop, where my coloring skills consisted of mainly select the blank area and fill it with a paint bucket. Layers? What were those? Yeah, I had quite a ways to go with this stuff, and I slowly learned and got better, but talking about my coloring comes up next time. For now, since I had just gotten the internet with my massive 56k modem, on my supercomputer with 6 gigs of hard drive space and 32 megs of ram. (Wooooo!) I had started to go around to various places online to see what I could see in the day and age of Angelfire and Geocities pages, loaded with spinning gifs and broken red Xs. So while screwing around, I decided to check out Ben Yee's Beast Wars page, and just explored there a bit on my own time, since I wasn't on anyone else's time frame or bandwidth. Eventually I stumbled upon the Beast Wars Discussion Forum...

Now... I need to take a moment here and explain something. Try to remember, I had limited internet access. When you wanted to send artwork to someone, you still did it via postal carrier. (Sure couldn't do it though Hotmail, as they only had a 2 meg limit with file sizes.) When you sent someone a portfolio, you literally sent them a portfolio full of hard copies of artwork, you had to go up to Kinko's and get printed out, paying sometimes up to $50 for a full color art submission. If you wanted music, you had to go to the store and buy the CDs, as downloading it was just about unheard of. If you needed to make a phone call, you had to carry around a couple of quarters for the payphones, and forget about long-distance calls if you didn't want to be paying out the ass regularly. It's easy to say “you kids have it easy today” but even I forget at times just how different it was, compared to now. So with that in mind... We had no idea how big the world was from our point of view. The idea that I'm sitting here typing this to you guys, who are spread out all over the world, was a completely 'Star Trek' notion back at this time. Certainly, I was unfamiliar with internet discussion forums.

So try to imagine how blown away I was, when I found out not only were there other grown up Transformers fans like me, all across the world... But we also weren't small in numbers. There were hundreds of thousands of us. All of us, just as passionate and caring about this franchise as the next. We were “Stealth Trekkies”, a cult of nerds that hadn't gotten that mainstream exposure. At first it was BWTF's Beast Wars forum, but then it grew to the Beast Machines forum, and then I found out about other sites too, like Bottalk and some others who's names eludes me. (Usually these were Sitepowerup forums, because they were free and easy to customize. They were the Runboards of the day.) And from here I found out that the writers of Beast Wars actually listened to the fans and used them as resources to write the show. Yesterday, it was a happy childhood memory. And today, it was a big underground cult movement. I logged in under the name “Machina” from a conversation I had once about the Creation Matrix being kind of a 'deus ex machina', where it just sort of popped in outta nowhere. And I met some other fans, all going by internet handles as well, usually of existing names and some others original names like my own. (And before you ask, yes I went through a vast amount of issues where people had mistaken me for a girl.) Many of these fellow fans were kinda cool... But I also discovered for the first time in my life, the internet troll, flame wars, and my personal favorite “True fans”... Gah!

Not to be honest, I'm going to be skipping a LOT here. Some of it is because it's just too much to take in. But I'll try to hit the big points. There's quite a few smaller points that were pretty important that'll just have to remain 'stories for later'.

But one of my favorite moments was how early on during Beast Machines, a group of us on another forum made friends with one of the producers from the show. I won't say his name, to respect his privacy, but he's a really nice guy who I really like. (Still talk to him occasionally on Facebook.) The producer friend also taught me an interested lesson about creativity, something that still sticks with me to this day: Nobody goes out of their way to do a bad job. They may be short on time or they may just be not skilled enough, but no one sets out to purposely do a bad job. And this resonated with me like crazy. I thought back to all the bad comic books and movies and TV shows and cartoons I've seen and read over my lifetime, about all the bad ideas they had, and I realized that they made those choices not because they didn't care... Because if they didn't care, they wouldn't take the job. They did the bad idea, because they really thought it was a good idea. Maybe they didn't understand what the audience wanted, or maybe they misinterpreted it. Think back to every single bad story you ever read or seen. It's true. We may be pissed off about the DC Universe, or direction of the Star Trek movies, or whatever THAT THING is going on in Spider-Man right now... But even in strange cases like Rob Liefeld, they always thought they were doing a good idea. They may have been wrong, but they tried. Even Micheal Bay, as much as some of us hated those movies... He tried. He may have failed or he may have succeeded, but he TRIED. And that, my friends, is the origin of why I have problems hating things. Because deep down, I know someone was trying to do the right thing. Yes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but we're not talking about turmoil in the Middle East, but about cartoons and comics. I don't have to like it, but I just can't justify hating it. And that was taught to me by a producer of a Transformers cartoon show.

While being part of the online community, my friend Moser and I tried our hands at making a few webcomics. Digital Print on Demand wasn't quite there yet and Webcomics weren't as common place as they are today. Jason had just gotten into doing his artwork through CGI models, and while looking back, it's rather primitive looking, for 2000, it was pretty good looking. We formed a studio called “Genome Studios” and we decided to make a comic book depicting the lost Beast Wars episode Dark Glass. (You can read it here. ) We thought it was just gonna be us putting out some silly fancomic and that was it. But it surprised the hell out of us when it was kind of popular. We had people writing to us, admiring what we did. This was the first time we both had done something that not only was popular, but had gotten majorly positive feedback. All over a fancomic based on Beast Wars. (Hell, a few years later I found out that Scott McNeil, voice of Rattrap, Waspinator and Dinobot had even read it and LIKED it! Dude, holy shit!) Later on, I would do a Beast Machines fancomic on my own called Generation's End. I will not link you to that, because the artwork is awful... But it was fun to dip my feet into the robotic waters there.

Also around this time, I met this girl on a Transformers forum, who went by the name “Daffney”. (Not her real name of course.) She was actually an awesome chick. While not a huge Transformers geek like us, she was a big Star Wars nerdette and that was cool. We started talking a little bit, and then a little bit became a lot of bit. And the next thing I knew, we were talking every single night. She lived in Australia, so I was staying up until 4am in the morning to talk to her and I didn't mind it at all. Hey, we actually loved each other. She had a great sense of humor and I could be 100% honest with her about things and vice versa. It was awesome. And in time, it grew pretty serious. I got a passport and we visited each other, I got to go to Sydney, Australia and it is beautiful there. (I've always wanted to base a comic book there.) It was a fun adventure for me, and I got to see a part of the world I thought I'd see. We almost got married, but well... We were young and idealistic. When the time came, she just couldn't uproot her entire life and move here and in time, I realized I couldn't do the same either. Essentially, it was the fate of all long distance relationships, but it was awesome and WE were awesome, and I will always remember it fondly forever. And I met her on a Transformers forum, and met her in person as a Botcon convention.

Are you beginning to see how this franchise has affected my life for the better? Well, let's get away from the personal stuff that can get a touch emotional and get into my history with the fandom.

Around 1999-2000, the show Beast Machines was on the air, and for those unfamiliar with it, it was kinda controversial. It took the Beast Wars concepts and essentially make a darker show out of it. It was one of those “took itself too seriously” kind of shows. (You've seen the type, I'm sure.) It meant well, but it suffered from the problems that curses many follow ups to great shows. It wasn't a bad show, but it wasn't as strong of a show as it could have been. It probably could have used a few more revisions. But there's a forum called Bottalk, which had one of the show's producers there for feedback. And there was some controversy over some bannings. And the banned individuals went and formed a new site called The Allspark. I have friends who were part of that circle of banned individuals, so I got to hear the controversy second-hand. I wasn't involved. (In a way, I'm kinda like Rung. I was always there, but never involved. Later, some members of the Allspark split and formed a new board called Iacon Harbor... I really liked that one. That was probably my favorite of all the forums.) There's almost always some egos being bruised and some favoritism going on and people getting banned over the stupidest of things. Of course when it happens to you, it's a big deal. This is a repeated cycle that happened over and over again during the courses of the many follow up shows after Beast Machines. I often thought someone should have wrote an in-depth history of the TF fandom, but whenever someone did that, it always ended up hurting feelings and people rage-quitting or something. Long story short: Transformer fans can be temperamental at times.

Each of these were pretty much done for someone
on the site, done more toward the end here, when I was
getting more confident. A couple of them I regret doing.

At the time, I was a team member on an online e-zine call the Matrix, which was a neat idea of an editorial online magazine for the Transformers community. Honestly, something that wasn't done before and I don't know if it's been done since. I was not only a writer, but also the occasional artist for it. (Some of my really, REALLY early TF stuff in my gallery was actually artwork done for the e-zine. And there was a couple of covers I did that I really liked, and really should recreate sometime, like the Override picture at the top.) Sometime in 2001, The Matrix teamed up with TFW2005 and some other news site I can't remember and they formed a site known as Transfandom.com. It was, at the time, a pretty big deal. For a while there, if you typed “Transformers” into Google, it was the first hit that's come up, even before Hasbro's official site. It was a pretty cool thing, and obviously since I'm sure most of you never even heard of the Transfandom.com, you can figure out that it failed. There was a lot of work put into that site that's now gone to the digital afterlife where dead sites go, and it's actually kind of tragic. I was pretty involved with that site, and there's quite a few people from it I still keep in touch with and are close to. (And there's quite a few people from there that pretty much would spit on me if they met me in person again.) I was there first hand and I could go into EXPLICIT details about what happened and who did what and where and when. I was there from the very beginning to the very end, and I could elaborate for hours and hours on why it died, but it's best to sum it up in two words: Bruised egos.

There's some people in this world who love something with a passion, and then there's some people who just love feeling important. (By the way, in the wake of that nonsense, I had changed my name from Machina to MachSabre to distance myself from that crap. Everyone called me Mach anyway, so it didn't matter too much.)

It's a lesson I learned the hard way. I was the same way once as I had an undeserved ego at one time. During early 2001, there was a few Transformers fancomics made on the web. The Dark Glass and the Generation's End comic were just two of them. There were many more. Some CGI and some hand drawn. Some were good and some were awful. Some people just wanted the attention and some people just did it for fun. Problem is, you could never tell who was who... And sometimes it was hard to tell which one you were. There's this one guy I remember (can't remember his online handle) but he did a Beast Wars fan comic as well, but not to get egotistical... He didn't really understand the fundamentals of comic book layouts and lettering. And you couldn't give him any advice, because he was the type that would turn the advice back around on you, nitpickng apart your own mistakes and eventually falling back on the typical “this is my style” excuse. It was frustrating, and disheartening, because I knew he meant well and tried hard... But it always seemed to me more that he was someone who wanted to popular as opposed to just doing something because it was a good idea. As anyone who's ever done a comic knows, it's not as easy as just putting the art to the page and putting some words down. There's a lot of planning that needs to go into it. Which brings me to a certain big influence in my life, in a way he never really knew: Don Figueroa.

I met Don when he was doing his fan comic, Macromasters. (I believe if you do a Google search for Macromasters, you'll find a full color cover of his art. I was the colorist and I got the characters' colors wrong. Heh!) I got to explain something about my life at this time... I was ready to quit being a cartoonist. You see, I was drawing in an extremely cartoony style... And not like I do now, but... Well, you know how there's those people who draw in an anime style, and they do so because in reality, they just don't understand how to pull the art together properly, but they'll use the excuse of drawing in an style to cover their flaws? That was me. At this time, I felt I was cheating myself and I didn't see the point in pursuing it farther. The comic industry was changing, and I couldn't keep up. And I wasn't alone. There were artists out there... Some of them may even be reading this... And they felt the same way. Comics in the late 90s and early 2000s were depressing for aspiring creators. So was a lot of mainstream books at the time. They couldn't decide what they wanted to do with their properties. Joe Quesada just took over Marvel and Dan Didio was coming into DC, 9/11 just happened, so everything got unbearably political. There was a manga backlash at the time (still is in some places) so if you drew in a style that was somewhat cartoony, even if you're influences were Disney or Don Bluth, you got called out on being a wannabe. Essentially, my own artwork... I was too manga to be mainstream, I was too artsy to be manga, and I was too mainstream to be artsy. (This is a plague that's haunted me to this day.) One editor even said “It's not even worth trying to encourage you.” (That one pisses me off still, because he was so dispassionate about it. It's like he didn't care about doing his job. He just wanted me to go away. That'll be a big talking point in Part Five, coming up.) I was literally feeling that there's no point in torturing myself with this. Also at this time, I should point out that me and that girl I was engaged to had broken up, and at the same time, the last of my college friends, James, had moved away, and my only two remaining friends were involved in major relationships that would eventually lead to marriage. I was starting down a depressing road. I felt... Horrible.

And then here comes Don Figueroa, and he kicks all of our asses. And he didn't use CGI, fancy coloring, or even painted artwork. He used pencil and crow quill ink. He even hand lettered it and pasted on the word balloons. This guy who worked in a supermarket, produced what is still considered one of the greatest bit of fan fictions our fandom has ever seen. And he did it for fun. I thought this was awesome. It was some of the best artwork I've seen in years. I contacted him and asked him a bunch of questions about how he did things and stuff... He happily replied back and just explained to be what he did and he even pointed out his own flaws and laughed about them. And he looked at my stuff and gave actual honest advice. He was talented AND friendly. (Still is, but this is a retrospective so I have to speak in the past tense. =P )

Remember when I said, there was some people who just loved feeling important? That was me. It wasn't about being passionate about comics, but feeling like I was “being a somebody”, and that's a surefire, one-way road to depression in a bottle. (If you're lucky. Sadly enough, this is an entire society that we live in.) If you don't enjoy doing it and you're not getting paid enough, why do it? Just by doing what he did, Don really made me realize that it's not about being popular, but about enjoying what you do. If you don't enjoy it, then you need to change it. I enjoy drawing, but I had spent so much obsessing over the ends that I forgot about the means. So I sat down and tried to draw more detailed and complex Transformers... And I was not able to come near the level of quality that Don and some of the others like Guido Guidi and James Raiz obtained... But I was able to improve my own work. I learned patience and a steady hand. And I learned that art's not about getting to a point and you're there, but that it's a constant climb that never ends. There may be a few plateaus, but for the most part... It's a never ending climb, until the day you croak. None of us were surprised when Dreamwave got the TF license that Don was one of the first new artists brought on board.

I feel like I should redraw this again.

Truth be told, I had always wanted to get into Dreamwave ever since I saw Shidima and Dark Minds. I was always really impressed with how Dark Minds looked. (Even if I thought the story was less than inspiring than the Masamune Shirow comic it was ripping off.) I've always fond of that “anime cel” look, as they were kind of the first people to pull it off. (You know, since I've always loved animation. You might have noticed that in my own artwork.) I didn't think I could be a good colorist for it, but I might pull off the penciller bit. Maybe not on Transformers, but one of their other projects. (Please bear in mind, this was before the fallout with their poor business practices. And yes, I do know I'm being overly kind here.) So I practiced and I busted my ass off to get to a level that I thought I would be ready for them. You see, with Dreamwave, I will never take away the fact that Pat Lee screwed some good people out of time and money, but I have to say... They gave real chances and opportunities to people at a time in comics when people were getting doors slammed in their faces. In many ways, Dreamwave inspired a lot of hope for us aspiring artists of the 'Extreme Era' of comics. It doesn't make what happened with Dreamwave better, it just makes it more tragic. There was so much potential that company had, and failed to meet. (Something I think everyone would agree to.)

I attempted a few submissions with them, including a failed Machine Wars pitch at OTFCC in 2004, which I believe was cursed as I had gotten food poisoning from a bad spicy chicken sandwich at Denny's. But it didn't matter, because Dreamwave was going under. (Though no one knew at the time.) And I had a project I had on the back burner for a few years called Shadowgirls that I figured it was time to start working on. I felt my art was good enough to start it. And, that took a while to feel up to the task, but I got there I believe. And a lot of my encouragement came from this community.

But that leads into the next and last part with the entire point of this retrospective.