During a roundtable interview with Robert Kirkman after the Energon Universe panel at New York Comic Con, I asked him if Energon Universe ongoing titles would remain $3.99 throughout 2027. He replied, “Yeah, That’s important to us. We’re starting to see cover prices creep up again. It’s always been crazy to me. Traditionally the indie comics are the the ones that had the higher price, because traditionally they sold less. At a certain point, the big companies were like “No, no. We can charge more because people buy our books anyway. I think there is a thing in the industry where people maybe aren’t recognizing how much the rise of variant covers and the fact that every book has multiple covers is hiding that there is a diminished overall readership. There’s fewer readers buying more copies of every book. I think some of that is that some people have been priced out. When you’re looking at $4.99 a month, $5.99 a month just to read a comic book, and you’ve got Netflix and everyone else raising their prices too. Inflation is a big thing. I understand that companies have to do what companies have to do to stay solvent. Anything we can do to make our books as affordable as possible for as long as possible, Image and Skybound are very committed to that. I would go every Wednesday to buy 6 comics, 8 comics, 10 comics. That’s kind of the core of being a comic book reader. You want people to be able to do that. We do try to keep the prices as low as we actually can.”
He then explained how Skybound treats blind bags differently than other companies. “I don’t ever want to do a blind bag where everything in the bag is expected. I feel like that’s kind of wasting the potential. Blind bags have been a tremendous tool for companies to get books out in the market in an exciting way, and excite the fan base about it. When you have Battle Beast where you’re geting Marvel Team-Up #14, and you have MASK where you’re getting ROM. You get issue 10, issue 7, issue 2 with Terminal. I like the idea of, I’m a fan, I went into a store, I bought this blind bag, and it blew my mind. How is it possible that I have issue 10 drawn by Arthur Adams in my hands right on the day that issue 1 launches. This is not possible. This does not compute. This is the most exciting thing that has happened to me in comics. That’s the goal, to give people that feeling. We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time to make sure that whatever we do is going to have that kind of an impact and is going to benefit the retail outlets, and benefit us in launching the book and keeping the book going. It’s a lot of work but I feel that it’s worth it.”
Kirkman was then asked about the recent addition of ROM into the Energon Universe. Kirkman responded, “It’s been a lot of fun. It was something that happened organically. We were putting together MASK, and we talked about doing a blind bag. I think it’s clear now that we’ve been given the green light to play around with Micronauts a little bit, play around with ROM. We knew we had those in our back pocket. We were talking about “How do we make this blind bag cool?” Because we did the blind bag for Battle Beast, and it had a reprint of Marvel Team-Up #14 in it, which was like “There’s a Spider-Man comic in this bag? This is insane!” We were trying to come up with what we can do. Lorenzo [De Felici] had stepped off the book, and Conner had taken over. Lorenzo was kind of floating out in the either. I thought, “Wait, if I call Lorenzo, could he do 20 pages of ROM really quick to put in MASK?” Well, I then thought I don’t want to do a ROM book that doesn’t go anywhere. I was constucting “What could we do with ROM? What kind of role could he play in the Energon universe?” We did this one shot that was in MASK. Then we rolled it into Void Rivals. It was fun because it came together in a day. I was writing a script, and then three days later I sent it to Lorenzo in Italy, and he was working away on it. It’s fun having a secret book that nobody knows about. I wasn’t that familiar with the ROM characters. There was a lot of pressure. There’s this grand tradition of ROM comics. Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema, so many people have contributed to this character. He had an absolutely historic Marvel run. At the same time, that stuff came out before I even started reading comics. So I wasn’t all that familar with the character. I did a ton of research and tried to figure out new angles into characters, and things we could do visually to change them up, and make him fit in the Energon Universe. I’m also partial to Carpet. He’s a lot of fun. Incorporating them into Void Rivals and into this recent arc that we did was an absolute blast.”
When asked about how he reconciles ROM’s Marvel past with his Energon present, Kirkman had this to say: “There are certain things that are cleared and certain things that are not cleared, so it’s difficult to navigate at times. ROM as a character exists outside of that Marvel stuff pretty clearly. While there are some aspects that are locked away in the vault because of how that deal was done in the ’70s, there’s still a tremendous amount of things to play with. We’re going to be weaving through things. One of the cool things about the Energon Universe is that we can put our own spin on things. Where there are any gaps that may exist because of the old Marvel deal, I see those as new opportunities. We can inject new ideas into the character, and give him new, exciting things like a big, crazy, alien arm, a sidekick that’s an alien. And we can give him some memory loss of things. He just doesn’t remember. Who knows what his backstory was? Who knows who his supporting cast was? We’ll be playing with that sort of stuff as he shows up from time to time.”
I then asked Robert, “Now that Micronauts are in and ROM is in, when are Visionaries fans going to be made happy? When are Visionaries getting introduced into the Energon Universe like they deserve to be?”
Kirkman replied, “Only time will tell. We don’t want to expand to so many different characters that you can’t keep track of things. It’s nice to have a cool playground where we can do stuff like that. I think the Visionaries characters are really cool and have a lot of potential. Whether or not they are ever incorporated into this remains to be seen. Who knows?”
At the panel before the interview, it was revealed that the Dinobots would soon make their Energon Universe debut. What went into this decision to bring them in now?
Kirkman explained, “I think that there are all these characters that are part of the Transformers universe. And if you haven’t done them, you kind of haven’t done Transformers yet. It’s exciting to me to have a universe that is so robust that you’re not introducing the Dinobots until issue #42. The fact that we haven’t gotten to He Who Shall Not Be Named in G.I. Joe yet is just something that I could not be more proud of. The fact that we’ve made the books interesting and compelling, the fanbase is enjoying them without leaning on the marquee characters that drove the fanbase in the past? It’s kind of cool. Evenutually you’re like, it’s time to do the Dinobots. There is so much intrigue and cool about their personalities, their origins, and incorporate them into the Energon Universe to see how they mix things up between the Autobots and Decepticons. There’s going to be some really cool stuff that comes from this. It’s going to be a whole new era of things in an exciting way.”
Howard Porter is joining the Energon Universe stable of creators, handling art duties on Transformers #40 in January. When asked about how this came about, Kirkman gave credit to the editor of the line. “Ben Abernathy has the best rolodex in comics. He’s like ‘We could get this guy for this, we could get that guy for that.’ He has a relationship with Howard Porter, I’ve been a fan of Howard Porter for as long I can remember. His historic run on JLA with Grant Morrison, stuff that he did with Mark Waid later on. He did so much stuff for the New 52 and other things with DC. To get him on something that’s not a DC comic, so he’s not drawing boring characters like Batman and Superman, is very exciting to me. He’s been great to work with. It’s a very emotional story. It’s very fun to have people come in so that I don’t have to do. Every. Single. Issue. With. Jason. Howard. Geez.” (laughs)
Will Porter be back after this issue? According to Kirkman, “We had a great time. The hope is he’ll able to do more. He’s absolutely great. There’s not anything we can talk about just yet.”
How does Kirkman decide which characters to focus on in Transformers? The Transformers and Void Rivals writer said, “It’s all story dependant. How do the characters fit in the story that we’re doing? As we’re cutting to different subplots, and showing different characters, it’s all like we’re building to this so that we can later do this and later do this. It’s a large cast. Especially on Transformers. We have to balance the Cybertron story with the Earth story. We lean way more towards the Earth story than the Cybertron story, but it is something that is happening in tandem and you want to check in from time to time. I think trying to limit that Cybertron story to just hitting the high points as they happen as their conflict erupts, that allows us to keep that contained so that we can focus more on the core stuff hapening on Earth with the core characters. It’s a weird balancing act, but it’s making sure we tell the best story and are setting things up for the future that we need to.”
Does he have as hard a time keeping track of characters on Transformers as he did on the Walking Dead? “I’m better at things now. It didn’t happen that often in The Walking Dead. But it did happen.”
I asked Robert, “If we can’t get a Skuxxoid ongoing, can we get a Skuxxoid Annual once a year? A Skuxxoid 80 page giant? Give the fans what they want!” He gleefully responded, “Now you’re talking! I’ll just say right now that if we ever do another Energon Universe blind bag, it’s going to be real hard not to put a Skuxxoid comic in there.”
Stay tuned to The Beat for more news from NYCC ’26.
Glad to hear Kirkman is for a Skuxxoid Annual now. I asked him around Year 1-2 of EU if he’d plan a Skuxxoid and Slizardo one-shot, and he wasn’t exactly feeling it. Probably because I said “Lizardo” by accident.