Cybertron, the metallic homeworld of the peace-loving Autobots for untold millennia. A brutal civil war is unleashed when the maniacal Megatron forms an army of power-hungry Decepticons and tries to convert Cybertron into a mobile battle station to conquer the galaxy. Although he is stopped, Cybertron is shaken loose from its orbit and sent hurtling through space. A thousand years later, the planet is threatened with destruction in an asteroid field. The Autobot leader, Optimus Prime, leads a crack squad on a starship, the Ark, in eliminating the asteroid threat, but a Decepticon attack threatens to wipe out the Autobots' best warriors. In desperation, Prime sends their ship plummeting into the atmosphere of a nearby planet, where it crashes into the base of a volcano.
Four million years later, the Ark is reactivated by a freak volcanic eruption. Its repair systems kick in and bring both the Autobots and Decepticons back online, now reconfigured to transform into various native vehicles. They discover that organic creatures have become the dominant lifeform on this planet and achieved a basic level of technological civilisation. Megatron plans to steal their energy and send it back to Cybertron, whilst Prime vows to protect this world and its inhabitants...no matter the cost.
When Hasbro created the Transformers franchise in late 1983, borrowing a large number of toys from Takara's pre-existing Diaclone and Microchange lines, they knew they needed a compelling backstory to explain what the hell was going on. Repeating the approach that had worked so well for G.I. Joe almost two years earlier, they called upon Marvel Comics to develop a backstory and ongoing storyline for the franchise, as well as giving names and characters to the entire cast. Jim Shooter at Marvel quickly established the basic idea of a resource war, whilst Daredevil alum Denny O'Neill came up with the name "Optimus Prime." However, his further suggestions did not excite Hasbro and he was quickly replaced by artist-editor Bob Budiansky, who famously spent the 1983 Thanksgiving weekend coming up with over two dozen Transformer names, abilities, tech specs and personalities, effectively creating a bible from which everything else, including the Sunbow cartoon that debuted a year later, was derived.
The Marvel Transformers comic launched in May 1984 in a blaze of publicity, accompanied by TV promos and, of course, the original twenty-four toys themselves. Industry-watchers thought that the project was too late, as Tonka and Japanese company Bandai had joined forces the preceding year to launch GoBots, getting the line onto shelves just before Christmas. Retailing at a cheaper price-point, the expectation was that GoBots would see off Transformers. However, they were wrong. Transformers became a decade-defining toy phenomenon that kept going all the way until, well, now, whilst GoBots would effectively disappear in 1987 after running out of ideas (culminating in the range of robots that transformed into, er, rocks).
One of the key reasons Transformers won was its comic book. The Sunbow TV show helped when it launched five months later, but that aired alongside the Hanna-Barbera GoBots cartoon and both suffered from mass produced, cheap animation and a "relaxed" (aka "non-existent") approach to continuity and character consistency, though the Transformers voice cast was undeniably superb (RIP Peter Cullen). But the Marvel Comic delivered fresh Transformers stories to fans almost every month from early 1984 to summer 1991 (early 1992 in the UK), creating an ongoing saga that kids could enjoy continuously. Sales peaked at a reported third-of-a-million copies per issue, and reportedly the comic was still selling 80,000 a month when it was cancelled, figures any comic company would kill for today.
Over in the UK, the comic launched a little later (in September 1984) and initially reprinted the US material, splitting one US issue over two UK ones, printed fortnightly. The comic was likewise a big hit and Marvel UK moved the title to a weekly release schedule, which meant they needed a lot more material, stat. To cover the gap, they started producing their own stories with top UK artistic talent (some 2000AD veterans, some up-and-comers) and their own writers. After a brief rotation of different writers, they settled on Simon Furman as their main guy. Furman weaved a narrative that maintained continuity with the US stories but focused on different groups of characters, or sometimes on characters the US comic had introduced and then dropped. Furman made excellent use of the mysterious disappearance of the Dinobots just two issues after their introduction in the States to weave an impressive storyline expanding on their personalities and desire to be different to the other Autobots, effectively turning Grimlock into the robot Wolverine we all know and love today. The superb quality of the UK comic later saw the team take over the US comic after Budiansky's departure in 1989, with the final two years of the US comic attracting rave reviews before the unwarranted cancellation.
Of course, sitting down to read the Marvel Generation 1 Transformers comic has ended up being more of a faff than it should be. Titan Comics released a scattershot number of collected editions in the early 2000s, followed up by IDW releasing their own collections about a decade later. The former were helped by Marvel granting them permission to use their own copyrighted characters (like Spider-Man, Circuit Breaker and Death's Head), but the latter couldn't afford the increased fees by then, so had to omit some stories or change artwork. Hachette released a full collection in the late 2010s which included everything, but was only available in limited qualities in the UK. Skybound, an imprint of Image Comics headed up by The Walking Dead and Invincible's Robert Kirkman, snapped up the licence in 2023 and have spent the last three years publishing their own original stories, but were also able to get the reprint rights to the Marvel comics collection, eventually publishing them in four gigantic compendiums.
Unfortunately, Skybound missed a trick by dividing the commercial compendiums between the UK and US stories, rather than merging them into a single continuity as was originally the case. To read the stories in order, you need some kind of reference guide and have to flip back and forth between Compendium One and UK Compendium One at different points, a decidedly suboptimal reading experience. Skybound did come up with a better answer, publishing a joint edition with the stories included in the correct order, known as Transformers: Til All Are One. Of course, they immediately shot themselves in the foot with a fusion cannon but making this edition, which should have been definitive, a Kickstarter-exclusive (develops spontaneous migraine). We can only hope for future mass-market reprints because Til All Are One is, by far, the best way to experience the original Transformers Marvel Comics story.
Till All Are One: Compendium 1 is a shelf-destroying hardcover volume totalling some 1200 pages, and is only the first of four volumes collecting the entire UK and US Marvel run together. For those who want the stats, this volume collects editions #1-23 of the monthly US comic and #1-93 of the fortnightly/weekly UK comic (though about half of those UK comics were just reprints of the US comic, so in reality the compendium is split roughly 50-50), running between them from May 1984 to December 1986. It also throws in the three-part Marvel comic adaptation of Transformers: The Movie towards the end, and a few of the UK hardcover annual and text stories as well.
Now, obviously, this is a toy tie-in-comic from the mid-1980s, aimed at 5-10-year-old kids to encourage them to annoy their parents enough to buy them a jet that can turn into a robot with lots of accessories that they would immediately lose (cough). The early issues in particular are prone to extreme bouts of exposition - the huge text boxes in issue #1 to explain who these twenty-four robot characters and multiple human ones are, remains a thing of legend - and attempts at nuanced characterisation are basic, at best. The artists also did not have access to the animation models that Sunbow Studios were developing until the third and fourth issues, so initially the characters all look like their toys and then shift into something closer to their more familiar cartoon appearance by the end of the fourth issue, which can be weird for those not ready for it.
The early issues also feel a bit odd as Marvel briefly tried to include the events of the comic in the mainstream Marvel comic continuity of the time, hence Spider-Man showing up in the third issue in his then-new black suit, and brief cameos from SHIELD as they try to figure out what's going on. By around issue 5 or 6 Marvel had realised the permanent presence of dozens of giant transforming robots in the Marvel universe would be just way too distracting so dropped the idea, to the point of the Marvel Comics in New York themselves actually appearing and one of its writers turning into a (somewhat) major human character! It's a bit odd for the unprepared.
Still, the collection kicks off with the initial four-issue arc that was supposed to be a mini-series until Marvel looked at the (stupendous) sales and quickly turned it into an ongoing title. This arc has to introduce the initial characters, establish their origins on Cybertron, their battle in space that marooned them on Earth and their reactivation on Earth. Bob Budiansky sort-of orchestrates things from afar, but it's left to Ralph Macchio, Bill Mantlo and Jim Salicrup to actually write the scripts and it's a bit of a thankless task. The first issue is particularly clunky as hell, though one can't also feel slightly nostalgic for the broad strokes talking about the backstory, rather than the modern, exhaustively-detailed mythos that has much less space for mystery. The arc improves as it goes along, and there are some surprisingly deft touches, such as Sparkplug Witwicky's coma-induced flashbacks to the Korean War mirroring the Autobot-Decepticon conflict on Earth. It's only at the end that the story kicks into gear as the arrival of new Transformers causes major problems for the established players.
The next arc introduces the UK storylines, and it's initially a very strong effort. Steve Parkhouse's script for Man of Iron is not afraid to be weird and poetic, casting the Transformers as aliens with a very strange (even surreal) vibe. John Ridgway and Mike Collins's art remains impressive. Simon Furman, who has (almost certainly) written more Transformers stories than any other human, then makes his entrance with the bold and action-packed Enemy Within, in which both the Autobots and Decepticons have to deal with traitors in their midst (albeit one of them unwilling). This story is nicely-written and basically covers the now-overly-familiar "treacherous Starscream" arc in just one story, with it ending in such a way that it'll be some time before Starscream tries his BS again. Unfortunately, the follow-up Raiders of the Last Ark story is poor, mishandling the depiction of the Ark's controlling AI, Auntie (in a rare admission, I think I prefer "Teletraan-1," clunky as it is), and being too short to flesh out the idea of an Autobot-Decepticon truce against the Ark's raging Guardian robots. At least we get to see Windcharger having a brief moment in the sun.
Returning to the US stories, now written by Budiansky directly (and better for it), the next arc is downright bizarre. Shockwave, newly-awoken from four million years in a tar pit (long story), following a battle with the Dinobots shortly after their arrival on Earth on the Ark (okay, not that long), has taken over command from Megatron, knocked out almost all the Autobots and, er, decapitated Optimus Prime. For the next seven issues or so, Shockwave regularly chats with Prime's detached head (pure nightmare fuel for the 4-year-olds out there), which he is probing to try to steal the fabled Autobot Matrix so he can create new Transformer warriors, unaware that Prime has transferred it to his human ally Buster Witwicky. Shockwave is able to do enough to create the Constructicons, whilst Buster is able to reinforce the Autobots with the powerful Jetfire. Ratchet, the only Autobot at large, is able to rescue the Dinobots and defeat Megatron, with a splendid UK-original story depicting the Dinobots' return to the Ark and a battle with a nuke-equipped suicide robot that apparently results in one of the Dinobots being atomised and the rest, upset at the perceived ingratitude of the Autobots, storming off in a huff (neatly explaining their otherwise bemusing absence from the next few US stories).
These early stories are pretty decent with both Budiansky and Furman trading attempts to be as dark as they can get away with. Alongside Optimus Prime's detached head and our apparently first proper Autobot KIA, we have a story arc exploring Prime's PTSD at his own impotence and failure (made more interesting by the artistic debut of Geoff Senior, one of the best artists the franchise has ever known), Buster's own near-mental breakdown from carrying the Autobot Matrix and the visions of the future it has planted in his brain, and Bumblebee getting captured and shot up by the Decepticons as part of some elaborate stratagem, twice. We also have our first super-powered human properly entering the fray, with crippled computer programmer Josie Beller turning herself into the vengeance-obsessed, electricity-disrupting Circuit Breaker and doing surprisingly well at taking down some of the Transformers. Unfortunately, her inability - shared by the US military and government - to distinguish between Autobot and Decepticon becomes a major problem.
So far, so okay. There's some entertaining stuff here but, aside from being somewhat darker than you'd be fully comfortable letting a 4 to 6-year-old read, the early material is pretty middling. But Simon Furman levels up with Dinobot Hunt, a clever story that sees the Dinobots reverting to a savage state due to neural degradation from spending four million years in a tar pit. The Autobots have to split into multiple small teams to find each Dinobot and bring them down in different locations. This is the structure Furman would repeat years later on a much bigger scale with his Matrix Quest arc, but the shorter, sharper focus here works extremely well. It also shows the Decepticons (temporarily commanded by the brutally effective Soundwave) expertly manipulating Optimus Prime into a no-win scenario, to his own fury, restoring some menace and threat to the Decepticons over their more standard bumbling antics. A sequel, In the National Interest, pitting the now-repaired Dinobots against Megatron and the Constructicons, with a human-built super-mechanoid waiting in the wings, is almost as good.
Not to be outdone, Budiansky shoots back with an arc that returns the story to Cybertron and we get to find out how the Autobot-Decepticon War on the homeworld has gone in the intervening four million years (the answer is...not well for the Autobots). We get a whole bunch of new characters, including Blaster. A happy go-lucky party bot in the cartoon series, Blaster in the comics is a glummer, grimmer warrior prepared to the right thing no matter the cost, and is easily Budiansky's best-written character. We also get a notable comic-original character, the menacing Decepticon overlord of Cybertron, Straxus. Some excellent stuff here.
At the end of the collection, the impending release of Transformers: The Movie finally gives Furman the material he needs to really go for broke. Target: 2006, still sometimes cited as the best Transformers comics story of them all (peak IDW might want a word, but even then it's close), is a huge epic spanning time and space. A mass-uprising on Cybertron spearheaded by the Autobots' most powerful, newest warrior, Ultra Magnus, and the elite commando unit known as the Wreckers, is thrown off-track when Optimus Prime abruptly vanishes without trace on Earth, and, with him, the Matrix, the only way of creating new Transformer life. Magnus travels to Earth to investigate, only to find the local Autobots and Decepticons distracted by the arrival of Galvatron, an ultra-powerful warrior who claims to have come from twenty years in the future on a mission of great importance. The result, as you may expect, is complete mayhem as Megatron joins forces with the leaderless Autobots, Ultra Magnus makes a series of bad choices, some Autobots also show up from the future and it turns out that events are being orchestrated from the unimaginably powerful entity Unicron (the character voiced by Orson Welles in the movie) from the future. A whole bunch of new characters are introduced, and we get some surprisingly complex Cybertronian worldbuilding and politics (A Game of Chromes anyone?). Along the way we also get a whole ton of superb artwork from Geoff Senior, Jeff Anderson and Will Simpson (who would later become one of the main concept artists for Game of Thrones, and share a convention panel or two with myself; small world). This is a story operating simply on a totally different level from the US stories and, sure, it's not exactly Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, but it is both smarter and more creative than any glorified toy advert has a right to be. The concluding turn into hard-SF as the characters ruminate on how the effectiveness of time travel can be negated if the experience creates a parallel universe, is also unexpectedly excellent (and sets up a plot point that takes three years to pay off properly).
The collection rounds off with some more disposable storylines involving Runabout and Runamuck turning into graffiti artists (!) and the introduction of the Aerialbots going badly wrong for the Autobots. Can't they ever catch a break?
This first Marvel Compendium is all over the shop tonally and in terms of quality to start with, but settles down, more quickly than I remembered honestly, to deliver some entertaining stories. Nothing here is going to be competing for an Eisner, but the action intercut with musings on the nature of war and limited resources, with a cast of colourful and memorable characters, is better than it has any right to be, and things only get better through the succeeding volumes.
Transformers: Til All Are One - Compendium 1 (***½) is fun but difficult to acquire. It was only ever published in the Skybound Kickstarter set, which is now out of print and goes for absurd prices on eBay. Skybound have ruled out a mass-market edition, but a Kickstarter reprint is fully possible, as Skybound recently did one for their original G.I. Joe comic set. For everyone else, the alternative is to get the respective US and UK compendium sets in paperback and flip between them, which is suboptimal, but at least possible.
Technical note: this edition uses the IDW scans from the early 2010s as its base film, which is problematic, especially for the US issues. The image reproduction is mostly good and sometimes excellent, but a few (and fortunately only a few) times it can get a little vague or smeary. Not enough to disrupt the reading experience, but it is mildly irritating given the existence of the superior scans from the Titan Comics collection of the early 2000s. Reproduction of the (mostly better) UK artwork is generally much better throughout, though some busy panels can risk being a little on the dark side. I'd say, given the source material is over forty years old, the presentation is at least acceptable.
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