IDW are planning a wide variety of Transformers titles leading up the release of next summer's Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen<.em> movie, amongst them Transformers: The Thirteen, a series written by longtime TF writer Simon Furman that promises to tell the secret origin of the thirteen original Transformers. Also on the schedule are Maximum Dinobots, Transformers: Revelation and, most importantly for movie fans, Transformers: Destiny, which bridges the first Shia LeBeouf vehicle with Revenge of The Fallen.

For toy fans, however, the big news of the panel was the introduction of new character Drift from the new All Hail Megatron series; not only is Drift - a robot that transforms into a tricked out Japanese drift car - going to crossover into the regular "G1" Transformers continuity, he will also become the first character created for the comics to be made into a toy by Hasbro. Hopefully, that'll make up for the fact that Megatron's writer, Shane McCarthy, is gleefully killing off fan-favorite Autobots throughout his dystopic What If? series, although even that bloodthirst - well, oilthirst, really - seems to meet with the approval of fans; IDW's Chris Ryall told the crowd that the first issue of All Hail Megatron was the first Transformers title from the publisher to completely sell-out from distributors. Hopefully Michael Bay is paying attention, and Revenge of The Fallen will end with a similar downbeat ending for the heroic Autobots. I mean, who doesn't want to see Bumblebee get his metal ass handed to him?

SDCC '08 - IDW's GI Joe/Transformers Panel [Newsarama]

Here's how Morgan described Black Man in an interview:

Black Man is set in the aftermath of a century of ill-advised and poorly regulated genetic experimentation, where an otherwise fairly successful global (and extra-global) community is struggling to come to terms with the legacy of the human damage done over the previous hundred years. I suppose you could draw a parallel with the way in which we now struggle with the human consequences of previous centuries of colonialism.

Carl Marsalis, the black man of the title is one of a series of engineered humans, in his case engineered for combat, who have been modified not so much in any physical aspect as in the way they think and feel. It's a specialism based on designed aptitude, and the book aims to show, among other things, that the aptitudes required or desired by our society are often very frightening things.

In tone, Black Man is quite similar to my Kovacs novels, in that it's a fairly high velocity crime-and-conspiracy thriller with a noirish lack of obvious good or bad guys - but the book addresses issues that the Kovacs series could only ever really meet obliquely because of the sleeving technology. Simply put, in the Kovacs universe physicality and death are problems that can be sidestepped. In the world of Black Man, as in our own, they aren't. You have to meet them head on.