Transformers: Til All Are One - Compendium 2

The Autobot-Decepticon War is now raging on two planets, their homeworld of Cybertron and the organic world of Earth, which the half-stranded Decepticons plan to loot for its energy resources. Both sides are battered the loss of their leaders. Decepticon fuel auditor Ratbat arrives to oversee operations, to the despair of the overly-logical Shockwave. Meanwhile, the Autobots elect Dinobot leader Grimlock as their new commander, praising his single-minded devotion to getting them off the planet and fighting the Decepticons. But Grimlock's ruthless leadership style and disdain for human casualties soon has multiple Autobots considering their loyalties. Elsewhere in space, the conflict has spread to the peaceful planet Nebulos, and even through time, with future Decepticon commander Galvatron running riot on modern-day Earth, and Ultra Magnus vowing to stop him.

I covered the first compendium volume (of four) of Transformers: Til All Are One previously, noting both that it's great that Skybound and Image Comics have brought the Marvel Transformers run back into print in four, easy-to-collect volumes, but it's also annoying that these volumes were only available in a Kickstarter campaign. The mass-market paperback editions split the UK and US stories apart from one another, an act of editorial madness that will long live in infamy. This should be the definitive way the comics are collected from now on.

For the stats, Compendium 2 collects issues #24-44 of the monthly Transformers US comic, the four-part Transformers: Headmasters mini-series and issues #96-187 of the weekly Marvel UK comic, noting that half of those reprint the US comic anyway, so it's not quite as impressive as it sounds. However, this is still almost 1,250 pages of Transformers action, published from approximately October 1986 to October 1988.

This is dumb.

The collection kicks off with the "kill the leaders!" story arc that both the UK and US comics followed for a while. Everyone knows that Transformers: The Movie killed off Optimus Prime and replaced Megatron with the even more powerful Galvatron in a storyline set twenty years in the future, but for the comic book, American writer Bob Budiansky was tasked with likewise getting rid of them in a completely different story. Prime's death - getting blown up after losing a video game duel with Megatron (!) - is infamously stupid, so British writer Simon Furman tried to make it resonate a bit more with a UK-original story beforehand showing Optimus Prime wanting the Autobots to carry on and thrive in his absence. As usual, the British story arc, which also incorporates Megatron's battle of wits with the disembodied head of Lord Straxus and both Prime and Megatron returning to Cybertron, is well-written, better-characterised and milks the situation for pathos, action and even a little bit of comedy. The American storyline is borderline nonsensical in comparison. It's clear Furman didn't quite have the full outline for what Budiansky was planning, resulting in some awkward plotting (the Predacons showing up in both storylines requires some cheesy rewriting of American speech panels to give Megatron amnesia).

After Prime and Megatron return to Earth and promptly die (it will not shock you to learn they will return, eventually), Budiansky develops one of his better notions, namely making Grimlock commander of the Autobots. This is one of those ideas that initially seems insane, but Budiansky makes it work: none of the other Autobots is really a viable candidate, and Grimlock is both the most powerful Autobot at large after Prime's dispatch, and shows a determined level-headedness in stopping an attack on the Ark by Trypticon, the largest single Decepticon warrior ever created. Grimlock secures his election when he turns down the job after realising his own selfish motives, in a very rare moment of self-reflection. The Autobots, moved by his wholly uncharacteristic selflessness, make him leader anyway and about three weeks later realise they've made a horrendous mistake when he makes himself a crown and starts referring to himself in the third person. Grimlock sends Goldbug and Blaster on a mission to apprehend a rogue human villain who has stolen Autobot equipment and order them to kill the squishy human with prejudice. After having him arrested by the police instead, Blaster and Goldbug realise their new leader is too barmy and go AWOL, which Grimlock predictably does not take well.

Literally the only reason Goldbug and Wreck-Gar survive this is because Galvatron is so bewildered that they'd even think they were any kind of threat to him.

You may be asking, "who the hell is Goldbug?" At this point we have to rewind a little bit and follow what will the dominant strand of the UK comics in this collection: the return of Galvatron from the future. Having previously visited contemporary Earth in the classic Target: 2006 arc, Galvatron secretly kept hold of his time travel device and, after being booted into space by Rodimus Prime at the end of the movie, triggered it. His arrival on present-day Earth is not well-received by anyone, as he beats the hell out of Perceptor's newly-arrived resistance cell from Cybertron and even bests the Dinobots in combat. When Shockwave joins the fight, fearful that Galvatron will usurp him, Galvatron is forced to retreat, since there are so many Transformers present that he knows will survive until his time, he can't just kill them without disrupting the timestream (that ship has already sailed, but nobody knows that yet).

With Galvatron MIA and the war on Cybertron resuming in the year 2007, Rodimus Prime puts a bounty on Galvatron's head. The incredibly resourceful mechanoid bounty-hunter freelance peacekeeping agent Death's Head conducts a subtle investigation (by finding Cyclonus and Scourge and beating them up) that concludes Galvatron probably returned to the past, so Death's Head goes after him. He immediately meets Bumblebee and immediately blows him into a thousand pieces, to show he's not messing around. Rodimus Prime, aware of the threats he has unleashed on Earth's past, time travels back to solve the problem, and Wreck-Gar takes it upon himself to rebuild Bumblebee as Goldbug. After some more shenanigans, the Autobots and Death's Head engage Galvatron in combat and fail to stop him before being forcibly returned to their own time. It falls to Goldbug and present-day Ultra Magnus to, at least temporarily, halt Galvatron by burying him in lava (as you do). Unfortunately, Magnus suffers the same fate.

American readers may vaguely recall Bumblebee being instead killed by the human counter-terrorist organisation G.I. Joe and rebuilt as Goldbug. However, Simon Furman and the UK editors took one look at the G.I. Joe and the Transformers mini-series, realised it was possibly the worst-ever comic about either franchise that could possibly be published (the passage of forty years has only solidified this impression) and ejected it from their continuity. The replacement story is much better and Wreck-Gar being able to rebuild a basically-dead Transformer is something that was already established in the movie with future Ultra Magnus, so it makes more sense than G.I. Joe somehow being able to rebuild a Transformer from scratch. There will be many more crossovers between the two franchises and absolutely all of them will be much better than the initial one (although, for the sake of completionists, Compendium 4 does include that story).

The Transformers equivalent of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode Move Along Home. Yes, its dumb, but it's also aware it's dumb, and does some funny things with it.

The volume continues to flip between stories on contemporary and future Earth and Cybertron. The present-day US stories focus on Goldbug and Blaster in exile, during which time they find new allies like the Throttlebots and new enemies like the Scraplets, who threaten to destroy all mechanical life on Earth until it turns out they have a very dumb weakness. Grimlock's relentless pursuit of the exiles, to the point of ignoring the Decepticons moving to a new base of operations in the Florida Keys, continues to gnaw away at the loyalty of his Autobots, eventually resulting in Wheeljack calling in his friend Sky Lynx from Cybertron to help resolve the situation which, predictably, goes sideways. Meanwhile, the ignored Decepticons, now jointly commanded by Shockwave and Ratbat, whose pedantic budget calculations for Decepticon fuel expenditures threaten to drive the usually coldly logical Shockwave completely insane in one of Budiansky's more amusing double-acts, are allowed to run riot on Earth, leading to the Autobots' human allies having to fight them instead (with mixed results).

The UK stories divide into two groups. One continues to entwine around the American stories, providing better rationales for what the hell is going on in the American strip. For example, Furman has a story about the Throttlebots fighting the Combaticons and even defeating them (albeit with help), which better explains why the Combaticons are so incessant in chasing the Throttlebots down in the American stories. The other is largely set in the future, with the big-ticket story being The Legacy of Unicron.

It's a bit mind-boggling that this creation myth is still being expanded on almost forty years later.

This story is a genuinely impressive epic, in which we learn that, after the events of Transformers: The Movie, Unicron's head didn't go into orbit around Cybertron but instead flew through space and crashed on the planet of Junk. Unicron has mind-controlled the Junkions into rebuilding his body. Using his mental powers to reassert control of his creations Cyclonus and Scourge, Unicron has them usurp command from future Shockwave and unleash a massive assault on the Autobots which, with both sides so evenly-matched, threatens to wipe out both sides, leaving Cybertron ripe for Unicron's return. Obviously this plan does not work out. The story is impressively epic and give Furman the chance to his give own origin story for the entire Transformers franchise, here casting the Transformers as the creations of the light god Primus, designed to stand as the last line of defence against Unicron, the Chaos-Bringer. Furman had apparently seen the "the Transformers are the creations of the Quintessons, despite the Quintessons having no idea who they are in the movie," idea and roundly rejected it.

However, the story is also a nice piece of continuity-straightening. At its conclusion, Death's Head is ejected from the Transformers universe altogether and into his own comic, whilst Cyclonus and Scourage end up in Cybertron's distant past, where they come under the command of Scorponok.

The story then switches to a completely new - and enormous - cast of Transformers in the four-part Headmasters mini-series. An Autobot resistance cell led by Fortress Maximus and including the contemporary versions of Hot Rod, Kup and Blurr (so far all their appearances in the comic have been of their future selves from the movie timeline) tire of the war and flees to the planet Nebulos, hoping to live in peace alongside its inhabitants. The power-hungry Nebulan Lord Zarak constantly disrupts their attempts to make peaceful contact, forcing Fortress Maximus, Highbrow, Hardhead, Chromedome and Brainstorm to remove their heads as a sign of goodwill, which the Nebulan leader Galen accepts. Frustrated, Zarak contacts Maximus's nemesis Scorponok, whose Decepticon army quickly reaches Nebulous and starts laying waste to the planet. Galen and several friends "binary-bond" to the Autobots, replacing their heads and becoming the titular Headmasters. The Decepticons rapidly copy the trick and capture the Autobot Headmasters, reducing Nebulous to a dystopia under Zarak's rule. The remaining Autobots come up with the Targetmaster concept, turning Nebulan companions into powerful weapons, and are able to rescue the Headmasters. Aware they are laying waste to the planet, the Autobots flee on their starship, the Steelhaven, and the Decepticons follow.

Beware the pitiless gaze of hundreds of thousands of 8-year-old kids collectively saying, "what kind of fresh gimmick hell is this now?"

This isn't the best mini-series ever (though it wipes the floor with the G.I. Joe crossover) and Budiansky struggles with the mind-boggling weight of the size of the cast. As well as the Autobot and Decepticon Headmasters and Targetmasters, we also meet the Monsterbots, Terrorcons, Horrorcons, Technobots and, er, Sixshot (who makes his only Marvel G1 appearance in one panel, has one line of dialogue, and is never seen or head from again). Nebulos and its people, who are basically just human (not even green, as the cartoon suggests), are also fairly undeveloped. What does make the story work is its better-than-normal musings on the price of peace, how pacifism can be sustained in the face of mindless hate, and wouldn't it be awesome to turn into a giant robot's head or gun? Thoughtful stuff indeed.

Having fled from Nebulous, it's not a surprise that the two groups find their way to Earth, responding to a distress call sent by Goldbug. There's some creaky continuity-twitching as we meet Buster's somehow-never-before-mentioned (remember the comic was over four years old by this point) older brother Spike, who promptly replaces Galen as Fortress Maximus's companion. The cast somehow immediately gets bigger as both sides invent the Pretenders, Transformers clad inside bio-genetic shells for...reasons that are never entirely made clear. You can see Budiansky struggling here as even he can't introduce twelve new Transformers in one issue and give any of them more than the most cursory characterisation (in his defence, he does try again later on, and manages to give at least Cloudburst, Landmine and Skullgrin a bit more to do).

Not for the first time, Optimus Prime makes a shocking (note: not that shocking) return from the dead.

He does rally to the occasion, however, as he brings together the arrival of the Headmasters, their first stormy meeting with Grimlock (who has really lost the plot by this point, despite his success in getting the Ark back into space again) and a full-scale battle with the Decepticons as the catalyst for the return of Optimus Prime. There is some very nice plotting here as Goldbug travels to Nebulos to rebuild Prime only to find the planet's fuel sources poisoned to defeat any future Transformer incursion. However, the villainous Hi-Test has created the Powermaster process to negate the poison, empowering two Decepticon warriors in causing havoc on the planet. Hi-Test's angry former mento, Hi-Q, agrees to undergo the Powermaster process to save Optimus Prime. I think Budiansky put more thought into this storyline than he did the Headmaster mini. Anyway, Prime's back and the first thing he does is...visit the circus? It's to rescue Sky Lynx, but still, some odd decisions there.

The volume is rounded off by another future Furman epic. Set wholly in 2008 (future time is advancing at the same rate as in the present), the comic sees the Quintesson homeworld on the verge of total annihilation, sparking their decision to invade Cybertron to use it as a replacement. They also attack Autobot City on Earth to split the Transformers' attention between the two planets. This is a pretty good story, even finding a way of incorporating the otherwise inexplicable American adaptation of the (awful) TV episode The Big Broadcast of 2006 into the main continuity. The characterisation given to the various Quintesson characters like Lord Kledji and General Ghyrik is surprisingly good, and it feels like this is Furman redeeming both the Quintessons and Rodimus Prime as characters (Rodimus gets demoted to Hot Rod for a bit here, allowing him to reflect on what elements the Matrix draws out of him to make him a better leader). We get some of the best battles seen to date, and the sole appearance of Metroplex in the entire G1 Marvel continuity. The main mike-drop is left for the end, however, when we discover that Quintesson was destroyed by a growing rift in the fabric of space and time, one that may threaten the entire universe. What I really like about this is that the astute reader probably already knows what is causing this, and what may be able to fix it, but that's for Compendium 3.

This Transformers homage to zombie movies is surprisingly good.

This volume does cover a lot of ground and there's a lot going on outside of these main arcs. There's a solid stand-alone Christmas story about Starscream being brought back online and joining forces with a human to "do good," though in reality it's just a way of pettily annoying Streetwise, who keeps expecting him to do something evil instead. A team-up of various female human characters encountered during the saga so far feels like it could be complete cringe, but surprisingly it works reasonably well (though Swindle's repair bill may disagree). There's even a whole mini-Furman epic arc set on Cybertron with the Wreckers discovering that Megatron got a lot further in his plan to turn Cybertron into a mobile battle station than anyone thought possible, and a mad Autobot scientist now wants to complete his work. And also raise an army of Transformer zombies because...why not? Some very nice characterisation for Ultra Magnus, Xaaron and Springer here. We also have Furman's own G.I. Joe crossover as the Joes' UK branch, Action Force, comes face-to-face with Megatron in London. This is a bit of a throwaway action story, but it's fine, with some nice Geoff Senior artwork.

This compendium is mostly very good stuff. The absolute insanity of putting Grimlock in charge of the Autobots is one of those great ideas that almost writes itself, and Budiansky does some of his best-ever work see the consequences play out. Furman remains the stronger writer, though his Galvatron arc feels a little unfocused here. Target: 2006 was phenomenal because of how it was really epic and quite tightly-written at the same time, but the arc here drags out too long (bearing in mind Galvatron returns to Earth in the opening issues of this compendium and is still skulking around, not doing that much, at the end). Galvatron is such a powerful character, it's hard to use him and have him not just win instantly, and I'm not sure Furman does his best work here in having Galvatron in stealth mode instead. However, The Legacy of Unicron and Space Pirates, both future epics without much interaction with Galvatron, are both all-timer classic stories. Also, this compendium handily collects all of Death's Head's appearances in Transformers, making it clear what a great character he is.

Where the compendium suffers is the sheer, unrelenting avalanche of new characters it constantly introduces. You can see Budiansky railing against the dying of the light, having a strong arc focused on Blaster and Goldbug (formerly Bumblebee) and even throwing some bones to old favourites like Ratchet and Wheeljack, whilst trying to fob off the entire Headmasters and related cast to a mini-series, but eventually it gets a bit much for him. Modern Transformers fans may be completely bemused to see big-hitters like Trypticon appear in all of two issues, Metroplex in one, and Sixshot in one panel, whilst characters like the Throttlebots, Sparkabots, Flywheels and Sandstorm get much more substantial appearances.

Transformers: Til All Are One - Compendium 2 (****) is still pretty decent stuff. The growing pains of the first compendium are gone, and the consistency is much better. The constant appearances of new characters may get wearying after a while, even if both the primary writers are adept at using them in interesting ways. But there is some fun action here, and the totally unhinged deliciousness of Grimlock as Autobot leader cannot be overstated. If you can find a copy without pawning a kidney (or waiting an indeterminate amount of time for the near-inevitable Kickstarter reprint), this is reasonably recommended to any Transformers fan.

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TRANSFORMERS fuels sales of the ENERGON UNIVERSE project to over 7.5 million copies

Robert Kirkman and his imprint Skybound Comics (a subsidiary of Image) have reported on the enormous sales success of their Energon Universe project of interrelated comic book series. Three years and three months into the project, cumulative sales of individual comics and collected editions have reached a very impressive 7.6 million.

The Energon Universe is a collaboration between Skybound and toy company Hasbro, and involves new, original characters and Hasbro's existing properties coexisting in a shared universe, similar to the Marvel and DC Comics multiverses. The project launched with the original title Void Rivals in June 2023, which tells the story of two soldiers from the opposing sides on a war forced to work together to survive being marooned on a remote planetoid. The first clues that this universe was bigger than it first appeared was when they stumbled across the Transformer Jetfire and helped him get back on his feet. Later issues revealed that the war between the two sides was a side-effect of the ancient struggle between the Transformers and the Quintessons, with the mysterious Cobra-La species also involved.

The project expanded with Transformers, launching in October 2023, and then a series of G.I. Joe mini-series launched across 2023 and 2024. These comics established both the G.I. Joe and COBRA organisations being founded in response to the Transformers' presence on contemporary Earth, a marked difference from previous iterations where the two franchises awkwardly coexist on the same world but forget about each other for 95% of the time. An ongoing G.I. Joe comic began in November 2024, with the Autobot Hound becoming an honorary member of the G.I. Joe organisation. A further Marvel property, M.A.S.K., launched as a new comic in June 2026. The robot character Rom the Space Knight has guested in several issues of Void Rivals, with a possible eye to launching his own series later on.

According to Kirkman, the entire Energon Universe project has sold 7.6 million copies to date, with Transformers accounting for about 3.5 million of the total. Issue #1 of the Transformers line is the most-reprinted comic in the line, knocking up 15 printings since 2023 and selling over 350,000 copies, possibly rivalling the original Marvel #1 from 1984 as the best-selling Transformers comic of them all. Kirkman also confirmed that Transformers is now Skybound's second-biggest-seller in collected editions, behind only Invincible.

Kirkman has paid tribute to Daniel Warren Johnson, who launched the Transformers line by penning the first 24 issues and drawing the first six. This may be a vague nod to increasing fan complaints that the comic's storyline has developed pacing issues since Kirkman himself took over writing with the 25th issue.

An animated adaptation of the Energon Universe is in the planning stages, following the huge success of Kirkman's Invincible animated series at Amazon.

TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE surges into profitability at the box office forty years after release

The 1986 animated film Transformers: The Movie has hit cinemas again as part of a limited re-release to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The film, which famously kills off a number of fan-favourite Transformers characters in a massive, opening battle, only made around $5.5 million during its original release against a $6 million production budget and was deemed a failure by Hasbro. However, the film has remained a cult favourite amongst fans thanks to its straightforward, action-oriented storyline, hard-rocking soundtrack and, obviously, its ludicrous death count.

The re-release has so far notched up another $5 million worldwide, with its theatrical run extended into October. The film's success has been put down to a popular toy line - Studio Series 86 - released over the past few years with ultra-screen-accurate versions of the movie characters (apart from Astrotrain, no idea what they were thinking there), but also the sad passing of voice actor Peter Cullen last month. Cullen voices both Optimus Prime and Ironhide in the movie. The franchise has also had a huge comeback success in comics recently, with Skybound Entertainment releasing massive compendiums of the original 1980s Marvel Comics run (including an adaptation of the movie and multiple tie-in stories, like the classic Target: 2006 and The Legacy of Unicron) and launching its own comic book in "the Energon Universe," which has become the biggest-selling Transformers comic since the 1980s and is now being developed as an animated series for television.

These successes, moderate though they are, may revitalise Hasbro's interest in the brand, which has flagged slightly after the disappointing performance of the last two theatrical movies in the franchise, Rise of the Beasts in 2023 and Transformers: One in 2024, despite the latter being very good and the best Transformers film since Bumblebee in 2017.

Transformers: Til All Are One - Compendium 1

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.

"So, Spider-Man is canon in the Transformers universe?" "I CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT NOW!"

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.

Everyone at Marvel and Hasbro signed off on this, and thought it was a great idea to keep it going for the next eight months. The eighties, man.

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.

John Higgins' original poster art for the Dinobots still slaps hard forty-two years later.

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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RIP Jim Shooter

Legendary - or perhaps infamous - comics writer and editor Jim Shooter has sadly passed away at the age of 73. Shooter was best-known for his divisive stewardship of Marvel Comic as editor-in-chief from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, and his involvement in the creation of the Transformers franchise.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1951, Shooter started reading comics at age eight, but fell off quickly, feeling the stories were uninteresting. Whilst recovering from surgery at the age of twelve, he started reading Marvel Comics and became a huge fan. He realised that DC Comics were looking boring in comparison, and resolved to "help." Shooter started writing stories for DC characters and teams and sent them in sight unseen. To his surprise, DC replied positively and hired him as a freelance writer at the mind-boggling age of fourteen. Shooter created a variety of minor characters (including the Superman villain Parasite) and set up the idea of Superman and the Flash having occasional races to see who was faster. Shooter briefly worked for Marvel in 1969 but found the renumeration did not cover the cost of living in New York and returned to Pittsburgh. A brief second stint at DC led to an editorial job at Marvel in 1975, this time on a more reasonable salary.

High turnover in Marvel's top ranks saw Shooter rise rapidly through the ranks, becoming Marvel's new editor-in-chief in 1978. He oversaw such projects as Chris Claremont's run on X-Men (though that was already underway), Frank Miller's take on Daredevil and John Byrne's work on Fantastic Four.

Shooter developed a mixed reputation. On the one hand, he stringently imposed deadlines and made writers and artists work to them, sometimes ruthlessly pruning those unable to do so. Marvel's reputation for missing deadlines and sometimes skipping entire months had become quite acute in the mid-1970s, but this ended under Shooter's reign and predictability returned. Shooter initially won over artists and readers by insisting that artists be treated with more respect, paying for them to travel in better conditions to conventions, and giving them a wide leash of creativity. However, after a few years Shooter developed a more restrictive attitude, insisting that comics be written and draw according to his design. Some of the biggest-selling books were left alone, but middling ones saw greater editorial oversight or intervention.

Many writers and artists at Marvel claimed that Shooter's downfall was caused by the runaway success of his Secret Wars storyline in 1985, which he ascribed to his own writing and planning rather than the massive commercial appeal of seeing almost every Marvel character combined into one mega-saga. Shooter became less tolerant of other writers' ideas after this point. With grumbling about Shooter's policies reaching fever pitch, despite his commercial success (Marvel's market share grew to an estimated 80% under his watch)w, he was fired in 1987. He subsequently founded Valiant Comics in 1989, Defiant Comics in 1993 and Broadway Comics in 1995. He returned to work for DC in 2007, and then Dark Horse Comics in 2009.

Shooter also played a key role in the development of Transformers. Hasbro struck a deal with Takara Toys in mid-1983 to bring their Diaclone and Microchange lines of transforming robots to the international market, but found that the Japanese toy lines had little or no expository fiction about what these robots were or what they doing. Some of the toys appeared to be mecha (complete with little pilots), but others did not. Hasbro themselves came up with the names "Transformers" (after some minor controversy worrying about if kids would confuse the name with real-life electrical transformers and somehow fry themselves), "Autobots" and "Decepticons," but realised they didn't have time or storytelling expertise to develop more ideas. They contacted Marvel, noting their successful toy-comic-cartoon collaboration on GI Joe several years earlier.

Shooter looked for a Marvel writer to work on the project, but an early collaboration with Denny O'Neill resulted in little more than the name of the Autobot leader, "Optimus Prime." Shooter himself then briefly took over, developing a design document that contains the first mention of the name "Cybertron" (Shooter himself is often credited with creating the name). Shooter also developed the basic idea of the Autobots and Decepticons fighting a war over resources, particularly energy, and coming to Earth to find more energy, only to crash into Mount St. Hillary (originally Mount St. Helens, until he realised the real-life recent eruption might make that in poor taste) and lie dormant for four million years. Shooter's treatment also features the first appearances of the name "the Ark" for the Autobot ship, and "Aunty" for its computer (Aunty was originally the name of the ship itself but moved to the computer when Shooter decided it was too whimsical). Shooter himself didn't claim to have created all of these ideas, noting some came from conversations he'd been having with O'Neill, and maybe some early conversations with Bob Budiansky. Budiansky then took over the day-to-day work on the franchise, coming with the names of almost all the other Transformers from Shockwave, Megatron and Mirage, right through the 1989 line of Micromasters and Pretenders. Budiansky also became the main writer on the Transformers Marvel comic, which began publication in May 1984, with Shooter editing.

Shooter was something of a divisive figure, respected for his practical trouble-solving skills, his recognition of talent, and fighting for better recognition of Marvel Comics within the wider industry (noting a screaming match with one of the people involved in the Transformers animated series who was trying to pass off Shooter's original design document as his own, since he thought nobody would care about the comics people) but derided for his top-down and sometimes micro-management approach to editing. Secret Wars was enormously popular - and is serving as the primary inspiration for the upcoming next two Avengers films - and may have firmly cemented the idea of the "big crossover mega-event" which would go on to dominate the comics industry (for good and ill).

Transformers: War for Cybertron - Earthrise

The battle for Cybertron has ended with Optimus Prime hurling the Allspark, the key to his dying world's salvation, through a space bridge portal and into deep space. He pursues in the Autobot starship, the Ark. Back on Cybertron the last remnants of the Autobot Resistance mount what seem like increasingly futile attacks on Deception bases, with Megatron finally victorious in his goal to conquer the planet, only to find it on the brink of destruction.

War for Cybertron is a new, cross-media instalment of the venerable Transformers franchise, consisting of a toyline and a three-part Netflix TV show, consisting of the sub-series Siege, Earthrise and Kingdom. One of the goals of this series has been to create a "greatest hits" of the Transformers franchise, packaged into an easy-to-digest single storyline spanning a modest eighteen episodes in total. Given the sheer expanse of the Transformers universe - more than 300 individual characters appeared over seven years in the first generation period alone with numerous takes on the basic premise stretching back almost forty years - this is theoretically a good way of making the property approachable for newcomers.

That said, I'm not sure War for Cybertron entirely works as a stepping-on point for newcomers in practice. This second season in particular seems obsessed with fanservice, so we get nods to the Creation Matrix, the Quintessons, Galvatron, Unicron and other elements that aren't actually the focus of the series, so probably shouldn't have been brought in at all. As a result, a streamlined and focused narrative, one of the key benefits of the first season, gets bogged down in mostly irrelevant trivia.

There's also the fact that not very much happens in the second season. Prime and his Autobots pursue the Allspark through space and find a space bridge portal that might help speed them to their destination. However, the portal is jammed by a space station that's gotten stuck in it. This leads to some very cool imagery but also fairly interminable scenes as the Autobots get bogged down fighting Scorponok (whose presence in the story is fairly random). A subplot revolving around mercenaries led by Doubledealer but in the employ of a deranged five-times-schizophrenic Quintesson is also potentially entertaining but under-serviced.

Instead we get more of what Siege handled awkwardly: lots of introspection. Optimus Prime second-guessing his decisions is a common trait of the character, but appearing indecisive and audibly doubting himself is not. The Prime of Siege is less of a confident military commander and more of an awkward politician who can't seem to make a single decision without having an existential crisis. This is a mistake writers have made before with the character, but never in such a high-profile instalment of the franchise. It's hard to see why anyone would follow this guy into battle when he can't seem to get up in the morning without pangs of self-doubt.

Much better-handled is War for Cybertron's best idea (so far), namely that Megatron began the war because of class struggle. The Decepticons arose from Cybertron's downtrodden worker underclass, who were tired of being exploited, under-paid and under-appreciated. Megatron, himself a low-class bruiser with unusual intelligence who came to fame and fortune in the fighting arena, helped lead them in a revolution against the Autobot intelligentsia and nobility. This idea - on the surface somewhat barmy (Megatron as a version of Lenin) - is actually rather interesting and explains some of the oddities of the Transformers backstory, like how the majority of the population rallied to his banner and why the Autobots are such a tiny minority. Earthrise expands on this in a sequence where Megatron visits a district due to be shut down so its power can be diverted elsewhere and encounters a band of true believers in the Decepticon cause as a just one against elitist tyranny. This leads to some brief character introspection for Megatron as he has to consider whether he has been corrupted by power. This story works well, especially as it is handled relatively concisely and Megatron emerges from it more confident and surer of his motivations (unlike Prime).

In six relatively short episodes the show covers a lot of ground but not much of it seems to propel the story forward in any meaningful way. In fact, a lot of it feels like filler designed to keep things in a holding pattern until we finally get to Earth, where the third and concluding season (due later in 2021) will take place.

Earthrise (***½) eschews the first season's focus and better (though imperfect) pacing to deliver a lot of side-quests and filler, but for the most part it is entertaining. A more thoughtful and meaningfully-motivated Megatron is the show's greatest success in characterisation, but a much more hesitant and tremulous Optimus Prime is its biggest weakness. Overall, the show is watchable, if a bit too obviously treading water. It is available to watch on Netflix now. The final season should follow later in 2021.

Transformers: War for Cybertron - Siege

The planet Cybertron is wracked by war between its sentient, robotic inhabitants. The Decepticons, a former indentured underclass fighting a guerrilla war against the noble class, the Autobots, have won their struggle, but have become a militaristic, authoritarian force under the command of the dictatorial Megatron. The Autobots have been reduced to a few resistance cells fighting for "freedom," but perhaps not having fully taken on board the problems that led to the war. Caught in between are a whole ton of neutrals, civilians trying to survive by trading with both sides, or medics treating anyone in need of help regardless of allegiance. When Megatron declares his intent to weaponise one of Cybertron's greatest treasures to wipe out the Autobots, he forces his enemies into a last-ditch, desperate battle for survival and causes some of his allies to question their own loyalties.

Transformers started life as a kid's toyline, comic book and cartoon series in 1984. Since then it has experienced lulls of obscurity and, since 2007, the highs of being a world-famous mega-franchise, albeit one resting on the shoulders of some pretty shoddy live-action movies (and the surprisingly great Bumblebee spin-off film). This new TV series from Netflix marks arguably the highest-profile Transformers project since the movie series began and clearly one that's going to get a ton of new viewers, so it's interesting to see how the production studio has approached it.

The answer is that they've taken a lot of influence and input from the 1980s comics, particularly Simon Furman's UK (and later US) Marvel run which introduced a lot of detailed, moral complexity to the franchise. Fans of Furman's epic Target: 2006 storyline will be well-catered here, particularly in the depiction of life on war-torn Cybertron, with neutral "Cybertronians" trying to survive in the crossfire of the two warring sides. Fan-favourite character Impactor even shows up from that storyline. There's also a lot of influence from Furman's later War Within storyline for Dreamwave and the superb War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron video games of a decade ago.

All of that said, Netflix's War for Cybertron is a wholly original story that does not require any familiarity with the existing franchise. It's also the first TV series in the franchise which seems to be aimed at a more adult audience. Given the sheer size of the thirty and forty-something Transformers fanbase (the kind of fans willing to drop £500 on a Unicron toy and £200 on the Jetfire toy for this show), it's surprising it's taken this long. That's not to say that kids won't also enjoy the show, but the more morally murky reasons for the war and the large number of talking heads scenes may make them tap out.

War for Cybertron is a trilogy of seasons - subtitled Siege, Earthrise and Kingdom - which will retell the classic Transformers narrative as a limited series spanning the three distinct eras of the original Transformers storyline (Cybertron, Earth and Beast Wars). As such it's a good way of getting across the "complete" Transformers experience in a very short timeframe; the entire saga is only supposed to span 18 25-minute episodes (barely a third the length of the original cartoon's second season alone). This first season of six episodes shows the strengths of this idea, as you can watch the whole thing in barely more time than it takes to watch a Michael Bay movie and get a pretty good and mostly complete experience. However, some problems do turn up.

One of these is that the pacing feels rather off. The last three episodes have so much going on that they trip over themselves by throwing in ideas and not really explaining them. Soundwave's clone Soundblaster seems ripe for greater exploration, but it's nothing more than a cameo from a fairly obscure character from the mythos (and extremely confusing for more casual fans, who were wondering if he was supposed to be the far better-known Blaster), and the stuff with the Guardians is cool but a little confusing: why does Omega Supreme decide to join forces with Prime? He has pretty much zero explanation or exploration of his storyline or character. The first three episodes, by contrast, have a much more relaxed, talky pace with it taking a long time for the plot to get going. It feels like some of the later story points would have made more sense if they'd been set up further in advance rather than getting tons of shots of characters arguing with one another over minor plot points.

Still, the characters are a lot better defined this time around. Some characters have pretty different characterisation to their more familiar incarnations, with Bumblebee as a hard-bitten loner mercenary being particularly tough to swallow (as well as raising questions about why Outback, who has exactly Bumblebee's personality in this show, was not used for that role instead), but Ratchet as a healer who helps everyone brought to him in need of help, regardless of allegiance, being a particularly solid change. A less confident Optimus Prime, unwilling to explain his decisions and more brittle in the face of adversity before finding his courage, is another change, although not without precedent. Fans of the franchise will also know that Jetfire and Impactor are not destined to remain Decepticons forever, but the reasons for them changing sides are extremely well set-up and provide some solid drama.

Some fans will also have their arguments over which characters appear and which don't, particularly as some prominent G1 characters are missing altogether (Jazz, Sunstreaker, Trailbreaker), some are present but having almost nothing to do (Ironhide, Hound) and some show up only to die almost immediately. Siege also does a solid job of bringing in the female Transformers early and giving them prominent roles - particularly Alita - but this plays into one of the show's more irksome elements. Having set itself up as a story newcomers can enjoy, it then leaves out a ton of backstory revolving around Prime, Megatron, Ultra Magnus, Alita and Alpha Trion but then refers to it consistently. It feels like there should really be a prequel season exploring these elements to remove the need to talk about it vaguely in the show, particularly as the show's biggest innovation to the franchise - that the Autobots may have caused the war and the Decepticons were justified in their rebellion - is left a bit flat without it (since Megatron is already in full-on dictator mode when the show begins).

Still, if the Siege season of War for Cybertron (****) has some pacing and premise issues, they are mostly overcome by the excellent animation, strong characterisation and deeper look at some of the underlying premise behind the entire franchise. The show is available to stream on Netflix now, with two more seasons to follow.

Netflix release first trailer for TRANSFORMERS: WAR FOR CYBERTRON

Netflix have released the first trailer for their collaboration with Hasbro on the Transformers franchise. War for Cybertron is a fresh take on the venerable property (which turns 36 this year), although it draws on the 2010 video game of the same name for inspiration.

War for Cybertron will consist of three arcs, united by the quest for a mcguffin known as the Allspark. It is unclear if these will be distinct seasons, or several seasons will be grouped to form one arc. The first arc, Siege, takes place on Cybertron and chronicles the beginning of the war between the Autobots and Decepticons. The storyline seems to follow the initial Decepticon attack and the determination of Autobot leader Optimus Prime to win the war, despite the advice of his own lieutenants to consider abandoning the conflict once it becomes clear that Cybertron itself is in danger.

The second arc, Earthrise, is in the planning stages and will see the war move from Cybertron to Earth.

The series is being produced by Rooster Teeth for Netflix and the first season will air later in 2020.

TRANSFORMERS finally gets a movie-accurate Unicron toy

It's taken thirty-three years, but finally a movie-accurate Transformers toy of Unicron, the Chaos-Bringer, is set for release...if Hasbro can drum up enough interest.

Introduced in Transformers: The Movie (1986) and improbably voiced by Orson Welles (in his last cinematic appearance), Unicron is a planet-sized robot which consumes entire worlds for fuel. Destroyed in the film but brought back numerous times in different continuities, Unicron is one of the most popular characters in the Transformers mythology. In 1988 his backstory was expanded upon by writer Simon Furman to make him a key part of the origin myth for the entire franchise.

A prototype Unicron toy made in the late 1980s for release as part of the original toyline. Rather fortunately, "Beer Belly Unicron" never made it to the shelves.

The only problem with Unicron is that his size, bulk and shape has made it extremely difficult to base actual toys on him...which for a franchise originally built around selling toys is a bit of a problem. A toy was prototyped to tie in with the release of the original movie, but it ended up looking a bit ridiculous and was shelved.

The first Unicron you could actually buy with real Earth money.

In 2003 Unicron finally did get a toy, albeit one based on his considerably more toy-friendly redesign from the Transformers: Armada animated series. This was re-released with a new colour scheme a year later for the sequel series, Transformers: Energon. This toy has subsequently been re-released several times with a colour scheme and different head design to be more reminiscent of the original Unicron design.

Apart from these, there have been a few non-transforming statues of the character, but never before has anyone attempted an actual, original movie-accurate, transforming Unicron toy. Until now.

"I have summoned you here for a purpose."

Takara and Hasbro have joined forces and created a monster of a toy. This new Unicron, released as part of the War for Cybertron range, is 27" tall in robot mode and 30" in diameter, making him comfortably the largest Transformers toy ever created in the entire history of the franchise. He features over 50 points of articulation and comes mounted on a large stand in planet-killer mode (a necessity given that mode's spherical shape). The toy weighs a whopping 19 pounds (8.61kg).

"Destroy the Matrix. And your bank balance."

If this sounds expensive, you would not be wrong. Hasbro are not mass-producing this toy for the mass market. Instead they are seeking funding it through their Hasbro Pulse initiative. To make the toy practical, they require 8,000 backers to pledge $574.99 apiece (that's about £463) by the end of August. Even given the fanaticism of the Transformers collectors' market, that may be a big ask but we'll see how it gets on.

If funded, the toy would be released in 2021.

Happy 35th Birthday to TRANSFORMERS

The mighty Transformers franchise turned 35 years young this month. The original Transformers toys and comic books hit shelves in May 1984 and began a run that has continued with only brief interruptions ever since.

Transformers began life at the 1983 Tokyo Toy Fair (held in June). Representatives from Hasbro in the United States were checking out what was hot in Japan and saw a big boom in transforming robots and mecha (human-piloted transformable vehicles). Takara was one of the most prolific toy companies in this space, working on two separate lines: Diaclone Car-Robots, which consisted of (very roughly) 1/60th scale recreations of contemporary cars and jet fighters which could transform into robots, and Micro-Change, which consisted of 1/1 scale mini-robots that could disguise themselves as household objects, such as tape decks, cassettes, a handgun, a camera, a microscope and deformed toy cars.

Hasbro purchased the licensing rights to both lines and brought them back to the USA to combine into one new toy range. The name Transformers came up early on (despite concerns that people might get confused with electrical transformers) and stuck, as did the taglines "More Than Meets the Eye" and "Robots in Disguise." Hasbro had benefited from a strong working relationship with Marvel Comics on their G.I. Joe relaunch a couple of years earlier and brought them on board to help develop a comic adaptation.

Hasbro also realised it might be better for actual writers to work on the franchise's premise and backstory. Senior editor Jim Shooter came up with the faction names (Autobots and Decepticons) and the idea that the Transformers were sentient alien robots from the mechanical planet Cybertron who had come to Earth in search of resources. Shooter then assigned Dennis "Denny" O'Neil, who'd had a hit run on Wonder Woman and Justice League of America for DC before moving to Marvel, to work on the property. O'Neil wasn't too keen on working on a "toy comic" and decided to move on, although he did come up with the name of Optimus Prime for the Autobot leader before quitting. A slightly desperate Shooter found a new collaborator in the form of Bob Budiansky, an artist-editor who'd wanted to branch into writing. Budiansky created the names and personalities for almost all of the other launch Transformers (starting with Megatron and Starscream) in a single weekend, before plotting out the first four-issue comic storyline in the next few days.

Battle Convoy from Takara's 1982 Diaclone Car-Robots line. With a slight redesign, he became Optimus Prime, leader of the heroic Autobots, in Hasbro's Transformers franchise.

With Budiansky's basic work in hand, work proceeded in tandem on both the comic and also a cartoon series, to be produced by Sunbow Studios (owned by Hasbro's advertising arm). Hasbro wanted a full-scale, multi-media launch consisting of the toys themselves (backed up by a huge TV ad campaign), the Marvel comic and the cartoon series, so that kids and their parents couldn't turn around without seeing the word Transformers somewhere.

Unfortunately, this multi-pronged approach meant a bit of a delay before all the pieces were ready, which allowed Tonka Toys to steal a march on Hasbro. Tonka had also been at the same toy fair and seen the explosion in popularity and quality of transforming robots. They teamed up with Takara's arch-rivals, Bandai, who were producing their own transforming robot range under the name Machine Robo. Tonka launched the range in the US and Europe under the name GoBots in late 1983, a full six months before Transformers got to market, and initially achieved a significant level of success.

Tonka's gazumping of the idea caused discontent at Hasbro but, having spent a fortune on the project, they decided to continue. Transformers launched with a blaze of publicity in May 1984 and was an immediate huge success. The launch was helped by the Transformers comic - a media form which GoBots had unwisely ignored - launching at the same time, getting the story out there as well as the toys. GoBots also had an accompanying animated series, but for various reasons this was delayed until September 1984, launching at the same time as Transformers' and immediately suffering from being apparently pitched at a younger audience. There was also the matter of the quality of the toys: GoBots were at a much smaller scale than the Transformers and although this made them significantly cheaper, they were also considerably lacking in build quality, not really withstanding the punishment of play from young children (whilst Transformers could take comparably greater damage and keep trucking). Bandai were also unable to provide Tonka with new product, whilst Takara were churning out designs by the dozen that Hasbro could pick up. After two years or so, Transformers comfortably outpaced GoBots, with the latter line being discontinued in 1987 after a failed attempt to relaunch it with the Rock Lords spin-off line.

The first release line of Autobots. From left to right: (back row) Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, Ratchet, Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Trailbreaker; (middle row) Bluestreak, Wheeljack, Jazz, Prowl, Hound, Mirage; (bottom row) Gears, Brawn, Bumblebee, Windcharger, Cliffjumper and Huffer.

The initial Transformers run - now referred to as "Generation One" - lasted a startling seven years, reaching its end only in 1991 after steadily dropping sales. The Transformers comic also run for this entire time period and was still selling over 100,000 copies a month (outclassing many Marvel original lines) when it was cancelled, to the annoyance of both fans and creators. After an aborted 1993 relaunch as Transformers: Generation Two (which was merely a revamp of the existing toys with a few new ones), a considerably more thorough rethink was required. This resulted in Transformers: Beast Wars, a toy, comic and TV line which ran from 1996 to 1998 and was a huge success. It was followed by Beast Machines (1999-2000) and then, in 2001 and 2002, a relaunch of the more familiar concept with the Transformers: Robots in Disguise line and new comics focusing on the Generation One characters from Dreamwave.

Between 2002 and 2007 Transformers underwent a resurgence in popularity, propelled by both nostalgia for the original run and also by a trilogy of successful toylines and animated series: Armada, Energon and Cyberton. Just as these were winding up, Paramount Pictures released the first-ever live-action Transformers movie in 2007. Produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Michael Bay, the movie was a smash hit financial success, despite a patchy critical reception. It was followed by no less than four sequels and a prequel: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Dark is the Moon (2011), Age of Extinction (2014), The Last Knight (2017) and Bumblebee (2018). Notably, only Bumblebee (the first film in the series not directed by Michael Bay) was well-received critically. Further movies are planned, although plans appear varied over where they will serve as a reboot of the series or a continuation of the "Bayverse".

The first release line of Decepticons. From left to right: (back row) Megatron, Soundwave; (middle row) Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp; (front row) Rumble, Frenzy (or vice versa), Buzzsaw, Ravage and Laserbeak.

In addition to the franchise's long history on screen, in print and on toy shelves, Netflix recently celebrated the franchise in their original series, The Toys That Made Us, which is well worth a look for insights into the origin of the phenomenon.

Netflix are also developing War for Cybertron, a fresh animated series which will serve as a prequel to the story so far and will, apparently, be the first Transformers project to be aimed primarily at the adult fans of the franchise. This is expected to debut in late 2020.

So Happy Birthday to the Robots in Disguise, and here's to the very strong possibility they will still be around in another 35 years.