The Transformers and G.I. Joes are joining forces once again, both on the big screen and in comics. A lot has been made about the GI Joe tease at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, but there’s no telling just yet where that will lead. The joint comic effort between the two franchises is already underway, thanks to Image and Skybound. Robert Kirkman and Lorenzo De Felici got the Energon Universe started last month with the debut of Void Rivals. In the coming months, both the Transformers and GI Joe stories will get their own image comics.
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On Sunday, after sharing some details about the new Energon Universe at Comic Con, Skybound Entertainment shared a trailer for the future of the connected franchise, teasing the upcoming series from both Transformers and GI Joe. You can check it out below!
The next step for the Energon Universe is Transformers, an ongoing comic series from Daniel Warren Johnson. That will be followed by a couple of limited series focusing on individual GI Joe characters. Duke, written by Joshua Williamson and illustrated by Tom Reilly, will arrive in December. In January, Williamson will team with Andrea Milana for a solo Cobra Commander series.
“It’s a tremendous honor to be able to reintroduce this world to a new audience under the Skybound banner,” Kirkman said in a press release last month. “I’ve loved these characters for most of my life and to have the opportunity to add to the already rich tapestry Hasbro has built with the all-new Void Rivals is an unbelievable opportunity. If you look at everything done with Transformers and G.I. Joe, you can see the inkling of a vast universe with tremendous potential for crossovers and interaction that will enhance the fan experience while staying true to the individual identities of both concepts. I look forward to exploring that potential for years to come.”
Transformers/GI Joe Movie Crossover
Skybound and Image aren’t the only ones putting a Transformers/GI Joe crossover together. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts hit theaters earlier in the year and surprised fans with its final scene tease about the existence of the GI Joe organization in the universe of the Transformers. In the very last scene of the movie, Noah Diaz thinks he’s going to a job interview, only to be offered a position with GI Joe, setting up a joint story for the next Transformers film.
“We’ve talked about it since the beginning of the franchise because the fans have been like, ‘Come on, when you are going to do Joe?!,’ and the truth of the matter is there’s so many great Transformers characters that we didn’t feel like we needed to rush and do GI Joe,” Transformers producer Lorenzo di Boneventura told ComicBook.com last month. “But you also want an organic way otherwise it feels like a cynical exercise.”
“What happened here was by creating a character, Anthony’s character, that can’t get a job,” he added. “The world is not easy on him and at the end of this movie, he gets offered the greatest job ever. That’s really how it happened, we finally found a way to organically bring it in.”
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which debuted on June 9th, is the seventh movie in the live-action Transformers franchise. Inspired by the fan-favorite reboot of the series, the iconic Beast Wars, the movie is a globetrotting adventure set in the 1990s complete with an era-specific soundtrack. Peter Cullen returns to voice Optimus Prime in the new movie, appearing alongside other Autobots and Decepticons including Bumblebee and Pete Davidson as Mirage. Other factions from the Transformers franchise like the Maximals, Predacons, and Terrorcons will also appear, with Ron Perlman set to voice the gorilla-inspired Optimus Primal. Directed by Creed II‘s Steven Caple Jr. the film stars Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback on the human side with Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh voicing the Maximal Airazor.
