Story, Colours, Edits - John-Paul Bove
Letters - Bernie Lee
Covers A, D - Tom Parrish
Cover B - Josh Burcham
Cover C - Kent Lin
Cover E - Andrew Wildman
wada sez: Today, I’m re-serialising the entirety of Transformers: War Journal. Click through to the blog to read the whole thing! War Journal was a full 22-page one-shot spin-off from Mosaic (with each individually-titled page approximating the usual format) masterminded by John-Paul Bove and Josh van Reyk, set in a random corner of IDW continuity—in effect, an entire mock IDW issue, complete with variant covers! It featured the Autobot combiner teams as its principal cast, as at the time they hadn’t appeared in the continuity, which treated combiners with a bit more pomp than previous stories had; in Spotlight: Optimus Prime, Monstructor was shown to be the first and only gestalt. However, Silverbolt, the Combaticons, and Hot Spot would all appear officially in a matter of months, in Spotlight issues for Blaster, Arcee, and Wheelie respectively, immediately throwing this fan-project out of continuity; it’s likely the depiction of Superion was conceived before Monstructor was introduced. One imagines that Bove hoped this would lead to official work from IDW, and sure enough he got his first big job colouring Regeneration One a few years later. Cover A here is an homage to Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, an iconic WWII-era photograph. Of particular note here is Andrew Wildman’s sketch cover, branded with the logo of his charity, Draw The World Together. This was referred to as “Cover E” on deviantART, but as “Cover RI A” in the “cover checklist”, the latter implying it’d be a “retailer incentive” cover (sent free to comic stores that order a certain number of issues) if this was actually a real print issue. Released just over a month in advance, a preview image featuring Cover A in silhouette initially teased the project’s release date as 2007/12/31, but so far as I can tell it actually came out on the 30th; perhaps it’s a time-zone thing. That initial preview was followed by four more, revealing the four characters on the cover in turn, associating each with a particular trait—of these, only the first was posted to the main Mosaic account. One of the previews quoted Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Bridgade”, which the final pages’ title riffs on, as you can see on the credits page here. I’ve put all the previews, the cover checklist, and the available clean art below the break.
“Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell...”
