Jeffrey Brown: Change-Bots is my tribute/nostalgic reverie of the Transformers and their ilk. I'm aiming for three audiences with this one - people who already like my comics, people who are really into the Transformers, and people who see the movie and don't know any better than to buy this book.
NRAMA: Transformers! My God, I never would have guessed. A cunning scheme, Brown. A cunning scheme.
Who are the Change-Bots, and what are their personalities like?
JB: The Change-Bots are a race of shape-changing robots. They're composed of two factions, the Awesomebots and Fantasticons. While you may think the Awesomebots would be largely noble and good and the Fantasticons would be evil and power hungry, overall all of the Change-Bots are a bit flawed – a little self involved, a little careless, and often cynical. Except Balls, who can incredible-change into a golf cart. He's kind of nice.
NRAMA: Who are some of the other individual Change-Bots, and do you have any favorites?
JB: The leader of the Awesomebots is BigRig, an orange semi-truck, naturally, and the leader of the Fantasticons is Shootertron. My favorites are Racey, a red car, and Rusty, a van. And Balls, the golf cart. I didn't end up with as much space for character development as I'd originally planned, but not all of the characters get killed off, so there's still the possibility I can come back and do a sequel.
NRAAM: Now, you've done superhero-type stuff before with Bighead, but this is a bit of a departure from your more realistic books. Why did you decide to do a story like this, aside from the tie-in with a certain major motion picture?
JB: I've had the idea for a while, at first inspired by growing up with Transformers toys, comics and cartoons and then thinking it'd be a fun idea to explore. When I found out the motion picture was coming out I figured I should just go ahead and do it, because it's the perfect time to piggyback on some of that movie hype.
