The Corner Box S1Ep24 - The Michael Kelly Interview: A True King of Hasbro Comics

[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where we talk about comics as an industry and an art form. You never know where the discussion will go or who will show up to join host David Hedgecock and John Barber. Between them, they've spent decades writing, drawing, lettering, coloring, editing, editor-in-chiefing, and publishing comics. If you want to know the behind-the-scenes secrets, the highs and lows, the ins and outs of the best artistic medium in the world, then listen in and join us on The Corner Box.

[00:31] John Barber: Hi. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your host, John Barber, and with me as always,

[00:36] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.

[00:37] John: Thanks for joining us again. As promised last time, we had somebody related to what we were talking about going back aways. We've got a very special guest here. Michael Kelly. I’ll let you say your last official title because I don't even know if I had your last official title right. It might have changed since then.

[00:56] David: Was it not Vice President of Global publishing for Hasbro?

[01:00] Michael Kelly: That is correct there.

[01:02] John: Until very recently, as we're recording this, but Michael and I, and David, have known each other for a super long time at this point. If you've been a loyal follower on the show, and most people have in the world, you probably have heard Michael's name come up a couple times. Speaking for myself, Michael is one of my favorite people to work with on that side. He's basically been in charge of Hasbro's publishing programs and working with their partners for quite a while.

[01:29] Michael: 18 years.

[01:31] John: Yeah, 18 years, but since you were actually in charge of it.

[01:33] Michael: Oh, 12.

[01:35] John: That's inclusive of Transformers, GI Joe, Wizards of the Coast stuff, Magic, My Little Pony, Micronauts, Rom, Mask, Visionaries, all the other stuff that we published.

[01:50] Michael: Jem and the Holograms.

[01:51] John: Of course, yes.

[01:55] David: I was just looking at my Jem and the Holograms boxset of issue one just last night and admiring how great that package turned out. I was so happy with that package when it first came out, and I'm still, that thing pops, man. I love it. Great first issue, too. John, your choice of creative on that book was amazing.

[02:17] John: That was one of the highlights. This is how the show goes, Michael. We're just going to talk and not let you say a word.

[02:23] Michael: That’s okay with me.

[02:26] John: True story about Jem and the Holograms. I was cleaning out my office at one point, and I realized, I had two copies of Jem and the Holograms, Volume One, paperback, so I got rid of it, and then I accidentally got rid of it twice, both times thinking I had that other copy sitting around. I bought that a few weeks ago. I actually bought a Jem that I worked on a few weeks ago.

[02:51] David: I refuse to do that. There's no way I'm buying something I worked on. If I don't have it, then that's the end of it. It doesn't exist. It’s dead to me.

[02:58] John: I will cast out the upcoming Bill & Ted trade paperback coming from our fine friends publishing Bill & Ted. That's a comic I lost money on because I bought a copy of it and never got paid for writing it.

[03:09] David: Oh, call it out. Man, are you serious? You haven't been paid?

[03:17] John: Yeah. Well, actually. Yes. Make that its own episode, but anyway, Michael, what is your origin story? How did you come into our lives?

[03:31] Michael: Definitely by a path most people probably wouldn't have expected. I never said this publicly. I've mentioned it to you a couple of times, John, but I never mentioned it publicly, for obvious reasons, but prior to working at Hasbro, I'd never read a comic book.

[03:47] David: I am shocked.

[03:50] Michael: I am too, and it was my life.

[03:55] David: Not even once, even when you were a kid?

[03:58] Michael: No. It's funny, though, and I don't really think it was a judgmental thing, but my dad was a teacher of English literature, and I was being fed things, like the Odyssey of Homer and Shakespearean plays, when most kids were actually enjoying themselves. Anyway, I didn't know that I wanted to be in some form of letters when I got out of that educational mode of thing. So, I ended up graduating from Boston College with an English degree, which is a great degree if you don't want to have a job, and I ended up working at Barnes and Noble for quite a while, and I ended up doing their author events, and that flipped into my first publishing job, because I met some of the marketing and salespeople at a few of the publishing houses, and that ended up being my first job, and I was in publishing for, I'd say, about 15 years, and then a friend of mine had gone over to Hasbro and was working in the licensing division, and he called me up and said, “we’ve got a position in publishing.” So, I went over there, like I just mentioned, 18 years ago. I started out as a senior manager running a small part of the business, and a few years later, just kept moving myself up and eventually became the VP over the whole scene, and around 2008 was when I took over the comic book business.

[05:31] John: What, then, and I guess, part two would be what now, was the majority of the publishing business like from Hasbro?

[05:37] Michael: Before I came on board, in the first couple of years, I'd say it was pretty typical for what most people would think of as a licensing program for books. A lot of adaptations of TV shows that Hasbro was doing, whether it was My Little Pony or Transformers, Color Activity, things of that nature. Not really anything too in depth, and it was a very small business. There were only three people in the publishing department at that time, and it wasn't managed globally. It was managed regionally. So, we had one person in Europe that did Europe, and then we had a couple of people in the US.

[06:10] David: Were you coordinating with them? Sharing materials?

[06:15] Michael: No. We would talk to each other, but that was about it. So, it was a few years later, we had been reordered a few times, and when I took over the department, we started to grow, and a big part of how we grew was focusing on original content. That was really what changed the game for Hasbro publishing, because I think it really elevated the content that we were putting out, and it wasn't just in comics. Obviously, comics was a lot of original content, but we were doing it with children's books. We were doing original content for everything from leveled readers to chapter books. So, it really just expanded those worlds. So, whether it was My Little Pony, Transformers, GI Joe, we were piggybacking off of whatever brand stories or entertainment there might have been, but really expanding those worlds and those characters in ways that hadn't been done before, and that just resonated with our audiences at all ages, and we ended up growing quickly, rapidly, and by the time I left, last week, there were 14 people on the publishing team. It was a global business. We coordinated strategically all of our storytelling to make sure that it was aligned, while at the same time allowing for cultural differences in different countries, and it grew over 10 times, in terms of revenue and production. By the time I finished up, we were publishing over 1000 books a year.

[07:34] David: 1000 products. Man, that's incredible with a team of 14. That's incredible. Michael, you must really got a nasty whip. That whip must have razors on the end of it to get that much product out of that many people. When you took over the publishing arm, was the mandate from above or from the side to go into original content, or was that coming from your own personal mandate? “Hey, this is the direction that I think we're going to go to make this successful,” and which one was it?

[08:10] Michael: Primarily, it was me and my team, and at that point, there were four or five of us. We all had similar backgrounds, in terms of storytelling and publishing, and I think we all realized that that was going to be the difference. There's only so many times you want to read the book about the TV show that you just watched, but if you're getting original content and building out that world, then it brings you back and you're not just going to buy that book, but you want to know the next one, too, because it's sequential storytelling, building that whole ark. So, no, but it came from us. To be really honest, and I think Hasbro wouldn't contest this at all, publishing was an afterthought at that time. It was just, they’re a massive toy company making billions of dollars making toys, and they were just starting to embark on major entertainment with the Transformers movie. The first Transformers movie was the year after I started. So, for me, it was an opportunity to build something with the support of the corporation, but not really the oversight.

[09:12] David: What was one of those early successes? Do you have a specific example where it was “okay, this just poured gasoline on the fire?”

[09:19] Michael: Yeah, one of the first things that we did right out of the gate was the Cobra miniseries with Christos Gage and Mike Costa. So, Chuckles’ story. I think that was the point where we really showed that we could take our brands in a literary and dramatic direction that, prior to that, I don't think people really thought of it that way. It was like “these are toy commercials.” So, that was a big one, and then not long after that, by 2012, we were certainly going deep into My Little Pony as well, in terms of that storytelling. So, those two things really were the catalyst that propelled the rest of the business in that direction.

[09:58] John: You mentioned My Little Pony when you started but that was pretty Friendship is Magic. Were you publishing My Little Pony at the time as well?

[10:05] Michael:

We were but not an awful lot at that point. At the point that I started with Hasbro, that was, I don't even know that we called it, Generation Three at the time, but it looked far more like the Pony from the 80s, and I used to describe it as a bowl of sugar with honey poured over the top of it. Only good things happened in Ponyville. No one was ever angry. Nobody was ever sad, and it's tough to tell a story when there's no conflict, when there's nothing going on really in the world other than tea parties and picnics. So, I think that the advent of Friendship is Magic, and the fact that that brand was allowed to go in a really different direction, that certainly opened a lot of doors for us in publishing.

[10:44] John: Just trying to think of what the landscape was at Hasbro at that point. Pre- first Transformers movie. So, Transformers is probably at a lower point than it was after that, certainly. I don't mean that in an insulting way.

[10:57] Michael: Yeah, when I started, my first year at Hasbro, our biggest brand was Littlest Pet Shop and publishing, pretty much across the board, really. The toy was doing amazingly well, and that was our biggest brand from a publishing perspective, as well, worldwide. After that, it was things, like we had a small Weebles program, some Playskool things, and we were doing some Transformers, but just not a lot. What we were doing was very fan-based, really. Not much for kids.

[11:25] John: Obviously, well aware of what the comic side of it is now, but as of last week, post- the Friendship is Magic world, what’s the breakdown now? What's the biggest stuff out there, inclusive of comics or outside of comics?

[11:39] Michael: Well, Transformers is doing really well, obviously, particularly in comics. Aside from that, Peppa Pig is.

[11:45] John: Oh, right. The catalog of ownership changed dramatically.

[11:49] Michael: Right at the January 1, 2000, we acquired eOne, and suddenly we had Peppa Pig and PJ Masks, and a few other brands that they brought on-board with them. So, yeah, that was a change.

[12:05] David: When did Hasbro pick up Power Rangers? That happened in the last few years as well.

[12:09] Michael: Don't quote me on it, but I'd say it was 2015. Somewhere around that.

[12:15] David: How did that brand perform for you guys? Has it done well?

[12:19] Michael: On the comic book side, it's been phenomenal. Guys over at Boom! Studios really knocked it out of the park, and for a while, actually, right up until the Energon Universe launched from Skybound, Power Rangers was our number one comic at Hasbro. They figured out the whole formula of hitting the nostalgia, but also bringing it to a more modern sensibility and really just creating stories that engaged older fans, but I think, tapped into that, not young kids, to be sure, but certainly the 17+ audience seemed to be really engaged in the Power Rangers comics that were coming out. So, that was a big brand for us.

[12:56] David: I just noticed the Kickstarter for the most recent Power Rangers and what was doing, and I was very impressed. That's a big number. So, take me through it, Michael, if you don't mind. When you came on as the lead for the publishing arm, comic book wise, where were things? Was Dreamwave in the mix, still? Did you make the decisions to move Transformers and GI Joe, in particular, over to IDW? Or was that something that had already happened?

[13:29] Michael: That had already happened. So, I want to say, IDW had Transformers as of 2005, and I started in 2006. I believe that's the history. I was there when the decision to move GI Joe to IDW was made, but it was made by my predecessor on the comic business, and then I picked it up, actually, before IDW published a single title for GI Joe, I had taken that business on at that point. So, for me, GI Joe with IDW was my first real foray into the comic business.

[14:01] David: And in that moment, GI Joe was bigger than Transformers. What is it like working with these licensors? Because Hasbro doesn't publish anything itself. Everything that you guys publishes through a license partner. Is that correct?

[14:16] Michael: The only exception to that is Wizards of the Coast. They publish their game guides themselves. So, they act as publisher of their own, like the Monster Manual, the Dungeon Master's guide, all those things, but any of their fiction is on an out-license basis through Hasbro publishing, and yes, everything else is done through licensed partners.

[14:37] David: Does Wizards of the Coast still have a separate approval system for the publishing stuff? I think, when we were there, they had a separate division for their own approvals. Is that still the case?

[14:48] Michael: Yeah, so, my team would do the business deal. We would negotiate the terms and get the contract all together, and then Wizards handled all the creative themselves on everything, from comics to novels, whatever was in between. That was the only two brands Hasbro-wide that we did not touch from a content perspective, were D&D and Magic.

[15:08] John: There's a way to get Magic stuff approved?

[15:14] David: I mean, it's true.

[15:17] John: I'm not working on Magic. I think a lot of people outside of publishing, a lot of fans or people reading this stuff, have a monolithic opinion of what the company is, like when you send something to a license or something, you're sending it to Hasbro. Sometimes, that's actually the point of view that the licensee has, as well, but that's not the case. IDW and Hasbro worked together for quite a long time. We all knew a lot of people on the Hasbro teams and continue to know a lot of people on the teams. This is true of any publisher. It's made up of individuals making individual decisions, as well as whatever, there might be corporate mandates coming down, but a lot of it comes down to the individual people. What is it like, from your point of view? How does it work on the creative side? Where do you step in? What do you look for and against? And what do you think is important, from your perspective?

[16:13] Michael: So, I think that's probably one way where Hasbro's publishing businesses is a bit unique. I mean, I'm not going to say that there's no other licensor that takes a real interest in creative, but I do know from experience and from hearing from other partners, that there are licensors out there, that it's very much a formula. You're given a style guide. You're given a certain amount of direction, in terms of what characters do, what they don't do, and have to follow that style guide, and you have to follow those prompts, and then you go through multiple rounds of revisions to make sure that you are adhering to those rules. I think, our perspective, and I do think it comes from the fact that no one on my team was ever a licensing person. We all came from publishing houses. So, everyone on my team has a book background.

[17:06] David: That explains so much to me. I did not know that. That explains so much.

[17:15] Michael: So, we come to each project with the view of a couple of things. One is, in my opinion, and this is very much my opinion, but there's no point in hiring licensees. There's no point in hiring an IDW or Boom! Studios, or a Skybound, or Random House, for that matter, if you're not going to use their core competencies. If you're not going to let them do what they do best, then why are you in that business in the first place? So, from my perspective, it's always been, “I'm going to trust the people that I've contracted to do this work, to know more about it than I do, and to bring that professional and creative talent to the table.” Does that mean that we just sit back and watch it happen? No. I mean, we do have responsibilities, obviously, to the company, to the brands. We need to make sure that they aren't damaged in any way, and certainly, sometimes, stories go in directions that we, for whatever reason, don't feel is appropriate or correct, and so, we need to nudge them back or guide them, but, I think, what you would see working with my team would be a far more emphasis on the editorial content itself and less on strictures about what can and can't happen.

[18:26] David: I think that that particular philosophy has served Hasbro incredibly well, and I think, in my 20-plus years of working with licensers, Hasbro is by far and away the best partner that I've ever had the opportunity to work with, and it's exactly that mentality of “do your due diligence upfront.” If you know that you've got a good partner and you've done your research on the partner, and you trust that they know what they're doing, then don't get in the way of them doing that thing, with the understanding being that you are the stewards of the IP, but they are the stewards of the comic books, and I think that explains it. I don't know if our listeners necessarily understand that, but that's what I'm trying to get at, and it just is loud, for when John and I were working on Hasbro IP, I mean, what a fun environment that we got to be in, it’s this fun little toy box that we got to play in all the time.

I completely had a reverence for these IP and the things that we were doing and the long-standing history of these things, and the new stuff that was coming out, too, because of your style of licensors, the way you had your hand in things, it allowed for me to really just love the things that we were making and what the thing was, and the material has never connected with me in anything else I've done, and I think it's because it's more like, “here's the style guide. Here's the three things that you can do. Go do those three things. You didn't do that third thing as correctly as we want you to do it. Do it again and again, and again, and again until you're banging your head against the wall,” and that's never been the case with Hasbro, and it proves out. Hasbro publishing in the comic book space, in particular, probably wildly more. I can't think of any more successful brand in the comic book space for licensing partners. So, kudos to you, Michael. What a great system you built over there. What a great partner you have been, and Hasbro has been through you. Thanks. You've got some really great stuff out of that.

[20:33] Michael: I'd add two things. Like you said, there's a reverence for it. I think one of the things that I've always said to people when they ask is, what's my role? My role really is a caretaker. I mean, we're caretakers for these brands. A lot of them, we grew up with. I mean, I was 10 years old when GI Joe came out. It was my favorite toy in the world. Whether it's Star Wars, Transformers, all of these are things that we grew up with, and for me, my job is to make sure that the kid who's growing up today, their kid is going to play with it, too, and is going to enjoy those stories. So, for me, it's “how do we make sure that these stay alive, not just from a financial standpoint, but from a storytelling standpoint, so that they can grow and evolve in ways that society and kids are growing and evolving, and keep the stories engaging and make sure that that's a big part of it?”

So, it's not enough to just regurgitate the same things over and over again. These are living things, and you need to feed them, and then I think the other thing is that, I think, once we built trust with our licensors, conversations that probably in some other scenarios would have been a yes or no answer become a, “let's figure it out.” So, it becomes a collaboration between my team and the editors, or the creators, figuring out “you want to do this. We don't think we can do that from a brand perspective, but let's figure out what we can do and make sure that the story doesn't suffer for it.” There was always that real, I think, engagement, in terms of taking the time to sit down and say, “let's work out what the plot point is, what the story issue is that we're having, and figure out how to make the story work.”

[22:16] John: From a mechanical perspective, Hasbro has individual teams that work on each of their brands. So, there's a My Little Pony brand team, a Transformers brand team. What's the process of interacting with them? I think it was different on different brands.

[22:29] Michael: Yeah, it was. That's the interesting internal politics of any corporation. You have to work with the people who are controlling the brands, and an important part of it is making sure that they feel informed, that they feel that they're part of the process, if they want to be. Some brands just didn't really have that much interest or time, and so, they trusted us to do it. Others were very hands on and wanted to read every other manuscript, and just make sure things were going in the right direction or look at some key pieces of art. So, it was nice. I mean, I always valued that input, because, again, you don't want to get to the point where there's too many cooks in the kitchen, and you're slowing things down, but also, when you've got people that are experts in different areas, it's nice sometimes to get a perspective that you didn't yourself have. So, I did find it helpful, and certainly, at the beginning, when we were just starting out, and we were saying we're going to do original content, it certainly was a high level of skepticism about that, “who are these people, and we don't trust them,” but you build relationships, and you get to know people, and you show them the quality of your work, time and time again, and eventually, they realize that you are as passionate and as protective of their brands as they are, and that what you're trying to do is expand them and bring in new audiences. Over time, I would say, we just had great relationships with the brand teams.

[24:00] John: Yeah, we've definitely been out there for summits and stuff, meeting up with different teams. I was there when the Ponies comic started, but I didn’t work on them, but my understanding, that was an unusual place for the Ponies team to find themselves, is all of a sudden somebody's trying to do comics, as opposed to GI Joe or Transformers, where for the entire existence of those properties, there have been comics. GI Joe's case, with modern existence of those properties. Again, I wasn't there. Maybe you have a better perspective. It wasn't a conflict situation. It was just, you could see what you just described, that trust growing in real time over a period of years, to the point that eventually had people working on the comics moving on to work on the show, or stuff like that.

[24:43] Michael: Yeah, I mean, that was a really funny one, because, honestly, nobody believed that we could do a My Little Pony comic. I mean, IDW didn't believe we could do My Little Pony.

[24:53] David: You probably don't remember my involvement in that, do you? You and I met, and I know you don't remember it, but I came to you, and I had my own comic book company at that certain time, and I said, “Hey, I want to publish My Little Pony comic books,” and at the time, I told you, “I'm going to sell a ton,” and you told me, “I would love to do this, but you actually have to have a conversation with Ted Adams, who was the CEO of IDW at the time, because he's our main core licensing partner,” and I don't know if technically IDW had the license at the time, but you wanted to make sure that a conversation had been had, essentially, and so, I went to Ted and had the conversation, and Ted said, and I don't think this was true, Ted said, “Oh, we're already doing that,” and then he went to you and said, “let's do My Little Pony.” I'm pretty sure that's exactly how that went down, because right after that, Ponies hit as big as it did, and then Ted started asking me to come work for him.

[25:58] Michael: That's funny. Yeah, no, David, I don't remember that. So, I remember Tony coming out in 2010. That's when Friendship is Magic started with the Hub TV network, and it was two years before we could really get publishing up and running based on Pony, and the funny thing is that I had to structure a very unique deal, and I was pleased that Hasbro actually let me do this, but basically, despite all of that, there were still a lot of hesitance to do a My Little Pony comic, because certainly at the time, I'd say the general consensus would be that comics are for 40-year-old men, they’re for 30-and-up men, and that's pretty much the audience, and you're not going to do a comic for 13-year-old girls and have it successful, or 10-year-old girls, and the thing that I knew, and I think was hard to convey, unless people had watched the show at that point, was that My Little Pony wasn't for girls. I mean, that was the thing.

My Little Pony was a show that happened to have girl characters, female characters, if you will, but they were just strong, awesome characters, and it didn't matter. So, you had this audience that was building, that was both male and female. It was young and old, and so you could see that there was going to be something there that opened things up, but yeah, I basically had to structure one of the weirdest deals that Hasbro has ever done to convince IDW to take the risk and do the first. So, I mean, we basically didn't take payments on the first four issues, and that just gets shoveled back in, but the idea was that if it hits, then that's where we get our lion's share, and I think, well, I don't know about to this day, but certainly for a very long time, Ted Adams was not so happy about that deal, because when My Little Pony really hit, Hasbro's share was much bigger.

[27:57] David: I didn't know that. Nice.

[27:59] Michael: Shared risk reward, and to be fair, I think, everybody was successful.

[28:05] David: Everybody won. I think the fans certainly won, too. That book was great. The editor for that, Bobby Curnow, was fantastic, brought in so much great talent on that book, and what a great comic book and animation.

[28:18] John: Full credit, if I remember right, Tom Waltz, internally at IDW, was a big proponent of doing the Ponies comics. He was definitely of the opinion that it was going to blow up. His daughter,

[28:29] David: She was probably about at that age.

[28:30] John: Yeah, but Tom, he has a radar sense for a lot of that stuff that you can see some of the people that he tried to work with or did work with, that went on to other things as well, some of the properties. That comic prefigured, in a lot of ways, where comics have gone. The idea of saying that “comics aren't for adolescent girls.” That wasn't that long ago that we were saying that. Of course, they are. It was just a Barnes and Noble before I came over here. You weren't there. You don't work there anymore, Michael. I've been in this Barnes and Noble a few times. I had been looking for some graphic novels at one point. So, I went to the graphic novel section. I couldn't find them there. I went over to the kids section. I was looking in the graphic novel section there and I couldn't find them.

This time, I happened to stumble into the YA graphic novel section, which is the third graphic novel section, not counting manga, at Barnes and Noble. Not all of it, but so much of that is aimed at girls, and again, I agree with you that My Little Pony is not, and wasn't then, only watched by or fandomed by girls, but that was a big demographic for the readership of that comic when it came out, and I remember, I mean, I think I've told you this story a million times, I think, but a bunch of the IDW people and I used to go to the comic bookstore. We'd drive off at lunch on Wednesdays and go pick up our comics, and I remember there's this girl that would drag her dad in every week when Ponies was out, and she'd be there to pick up Ponies at the comic bookstore. He had no interest in any of it, and it was so funny to see that reversal because, usually, you see the dads dragging their kids in or whatever.

IDW did a product called the micro comic fun pack. It was a three-inch-tall version of the comic, and had stickers and stuff. The Ponies one super took off, and I think there were just a lot of people that didn't know what to do with that. They were having that in Toys R Us when that was a store. That was unlike other things that were out there. I think that's interesting to see. I think that and Jem, like we were talking about before, both really prefigured a lot of the ways that comics would come to look and feel, even though those are being done in monthly 20-page comics at that point, with collections.

[30:53] David: I'd love to hear a little bit about the peek behind the curtains of the latest transition that you had to manage, which was moving GI Joe and Transformers, in particular, away from a publisher you had been comfortable with for, what, 12/15 years over to this new publisher who really didn't have a lot of experience with licensed comic book work, as far as I can tell. How did all of that come about? What was that like for you? How do you feel about the results?

[31:22] Michael: Obviously, it was not an easy decision. IDW, I had worked with them basically, like I said, 2008 when I took over the comic book business, launched GI Joe with Andy Schmidt and IDW. That was the beginning of my career, in a way, because everything built from that. So, at that point, and certainly by the end, IDW wasn't just a licensee. They were friends. These were people that I had worked with for 10/12 years on some really big and exciting things, and regardless of anything else, the fact remains that books, like More Than Meets the Eye, Robots in Disguise, Cobra, The Last Laugh, Jem and the Holograms, all of those things were huge moments in Hasbro's business and success, huge moments in my career, I think, were really defining, but I think, as with anything, one of the things that Brian Goldner, who was the CEO of Hasbro before he passed away a couple of years ago, used to always say, “brands don't get tired. People get tired. Consumers get tired,” and I think there's a point where you realize that it's hard for readers just to get on board with something.

It’s been going on for so long, and you might be in issue 110, or, in the case of some, even more than that, and it's like, if you have this interest in comics, and you want to get into the story, it's where do you start? Are you going to go back 10 years. Do you go back five? Do you go back 20? How long does it take before you can actually start buying what's new? There's a point where I think you need a fresh set of eyes, you need a new creative vision, and it's not like you get excited about it, because you don't want to be hurting anybody or making people feel badly about their business, because that certainly wasn't the point, but I think we had run our course, and the sales were starting to show that. I think, I would say that we all probably felt that we had told the stories that we were going to tell, and it was time for something new.

As with anything, those decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. I certainly consulted with my team, and then we do what's called an RFP, request for proposals, and we say to people that these are the brands that are open, and we got a lot of proposals from a lot of different publishing houses, and a lot of them were strong, but I think it was really Skybound’s vision for the brands, and I think in particular, Robert Kirkman’s idea for how to launch the whole series, with the big surprise from Floyd Rivals was incredibly intriguing, and I've said this before, but when he told me that's what he wanted to do, my first thought was, “there is no way we're keeping that secret for two years, because it took 18 months to two years to go from concept to when the first book came out and it's going to leak. Somebody's going to figure it out.”

[34:18] David: I think, legitimately, that's one of the biggest success stories of the last five years, in terms of just keeping that thing a secret for as long as you did. Wow.

[34:32] Michael: It was great, too. I mean, I guess, I should feel badly about this, but I loved seeing, on the fan boards, because I would read things, I would go to HissTank, I would go to TFW2005 and cybertron.com, and I would read the boards. People were like, “I don't think there's going to be a new publisher. Hasbro is not going to even be able to get somebody to do it. We thought it was going to be so and so. I thought was going to be Marvel. I thought it was going to be Skybound, whatever it was, but it's taking too long. It's not going to happen.”

[35:05] John: At a certain point, I found out what had happened. I think a lot of people in the industry heard things, but neither you, despite the number of times I talked to you after that, nor Kirkman, who I would text with every once in a while, ever broke and would ever say anything that would acknowledge anything I said, even if I said something directly, because you just ignore it and move on.

[35:30] Michael: Really that idea of “hey, I'm going to come out with a new series from Robert Kirkman, and at the very end, the last page, you're going to see a Transformer,” and it was huge. I mean, it just worked perfectly. It just worked out.

[35:44] David: I mean, marketing wise, it sure did capture everybody's attention. It's more than that. It was more than attention. It's just interest, I guess.

[35:56] Michael: When you look at the numbers, well, that Hasbro was moving, and Skybound is moving on those books now, there are new people reading those books. I mean, that's not the core audience that we had for years and years on those books. They have managed to capture a whole new audience of people, and I think that that's great. That's exactly what I was saying before. The goal is to make sure that people are interested, and that the audience is growing, not shrinking.

[36:21] David: Yeah, I was genuinely shocked that Skybound was able to bring Daniel Warren Johnson on to do this thing, because I've said this on the podcasts, Daniel can write his own ticket.

[36:32] Michael: Yeah, I think there's something to be said, and I mean, his work is phenomenal, and I can't imagine, at this point, a better person to be on this book for this particular relaunch at this time, but one of the things that I've always found over the years working for Hasbro is that people love these brands, and they grew up with them, too, and I think even though it's a licensed title, even though they know there's going to be some restrictions and that there's going to be a giant corporation looking over their shoulder, they want to be part of that. They want to have their shot at being part of the Transformers legacy or the GI Joe legacy, and then they always will be. Once you've done it, you're part of it.

[37:16] John: I think, for a lot of people, me, especially, Transformers was the first comic I read from issue one. GI Joe was the first comic that got me into comics, and when I was whatever I was, at that point, six or something. It wasn't like Spider Man had a comic book and he had a cartoon and he had toys. GI Joe didn't have a cartoon. There were toys and a comic book. That was, if anything, more comic book. I don't know. I think, at this point, the reality is that any of those characters that you grew up with in the comic book world, they're all owned by big corporations. They all have been for a while, and I think that the Hasbro stuff is in a small group of things that I think are, to a large portion of people that are making comics or the group reading comics, are indistinguishable from a Spider Man or Batman or something. I think Ninja Turtles is definitely like that, that it literally came from comic books. I still think that generally holds true, where the comic books can be the real thing, or the thing that you have a personal connection to. I think you'd make a case, Star Wars or Star Trek have that, but it's a little different, because the real Star Wars is the one that you go see on screen, and it's got the actors on it. Where Transformers, not really. That's just another iteration of it. It's no more real than TF animated was for people that grew up with that, or Beast Wars was for people that grew up with that, or whatever. That was another nonquestion. I'm sorry.

[38:42] Michael: One thing that I would come back to, I think, just building on what you just said is, I said at the beginning that I'd never read a comic book until 2008, when I started running comics for Hasbro.

[38:53] John: So, you did read one since that point?

[38:57] Michael: Yes, at that point, I did. Yes, but I think the first reaction most people probably have is “Oh, well, what the hell does that guy know? Etc.” I think that's fair, and to an extent, it's valid, but I also think that I was maybe more open-minded, and more, I think, receptive to really different ideas, because I didn't have any preconceived notions, and I think that if I had come into the business with that mindset of, “I'm going to tell people what to do,” that probably would have been bad. I mean, that wouldn't have worked because I wouldn't really know what I was talking about, but I came to it more with an “I know what good storytelling is. I know what good art looks like because I've been doing that for my whole life. I know how to help craft a story, and that's all that I'm doing. I'm just doing it in a different medium, and as long as I trust the people who know what they're doing to do a good job, then it's going to work out,” and certainly at that point, I started reading a lot of comics and trying to get myself a little bit more immersed in the genre overall and different styles and getting to know some artists and some writers that have personally resonated with me and told the kind of stories that I like. So, at this point, I probably read as much in the graphic storytelling genre as I do in prose.

[40:24] David: You read comic books now?

[40:25] Michael: Yeah.

[40:26] David: Really? I’m shocked. This is fantastic. What’s your thing? Name a creator that you're like, “Oh, that guy's good or that girl is good.”

[40:42] John: Is this in an accusatory way, David? We like to fashion ourselves as gatekeepers here.

[40:54] David: Sorry not sorry. Prove your credentials, Michael.

[41:00] Michael: Well, it's tough. No, but I really like Greg Rucka’s stuff. I love things like Queen & Country and Whiteout, and things like that. I really liked Fables. I think I read the entire series. I love the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, one of my favorite comic books.

[41:24] David: I really liked that book.

[41:26] Michael: And Miss Marvel, for that matter. To be really honest, superheroes aren't really my thing, but I really the storytelling that can be done. I don't know. There's a depth of graphic storytelling that I never knew existed before I took this job, and I find it really fascinating, and I love it.

[41:47] David: This is the best story ever. Little Michael Kelly coming into the comic book publishing world not knowing anything about comics. Now, look at him. The king of comic media, reading stuff by Greg Rucka. Knowing all about Squirrel Girl. This is the best feel good podcast of all time. Welcome, everybody. You're welcome. Once again, John’s shaking his head. Every single podcast, at some point, John is shaking his head and looking down and around, just like “why am I doing this with this absolute moron?”

[42:27] John: No.

[42:32] Michael: Other book, Transmetropolitan. I would read that book and I'd say if I hadn't got my job at Hasbro, I would have ended up like this.

[42:46] David: Oh, man. I'm pretty good friends with Darick Robertson, and anytime he gives me a Transmetropolitan story, he's got a few, I just eat that stuff up, man. I love that book so much. Well, John, anything else?

[42:58] John: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we could keep going on forever. Thank you very much for joining us, Michael. Great working with you in the past. It was great talking with you here. I can't wait to see what comes up next.

[43:08] David: I’m excited for what you're going to do next, Michael. I know that it's going to be stellar, whatever it is, unless you just retire and go off and read more Greg Rucka comics. Well, I guess, that's pretty cool, too.

[43:20] Michael: I appreciate it. It was fun, and yeah, I'm definitely not going to retire. I’ve just got to figure out what I'm doing next, but I'm going to take a couple of weeks off before I do that.

[43:28] John: Thanks, all of you, for joining us again, and we'll be back here next week with another special guest.

[43:33] David: Oh, yeah. That's right. Back-to-back-to-back. We really did get tired of talking to each other really fast, didn't we?

[43:39] John: Yes. See you next week. Thanks for joining us.

[43:45] David: Thanks, everybody.

[43:46] Michael: Take care. Thanks, guys.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.