Transformers: Til All Are One - Compendium 3

The Transformers Civil War continues to rage on their homeworld of Cybertron and also Earth, which the Decepticons have identified as ripe for fuel exploitation. New reinforcements have arrived on both planets via the intermediary world of Nebulos, and the Autobots are rejoicing at the return of Optimus Prime, restored to life as a Powermaster. However, the threat of the time-travelling Decepticon warlord Galvatron remains and a new threat has been located in deep space: the mysterious Underbase.

I covered the first two compendium volumes (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 volumes, but it's also annoying that these unified 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. This volume collects together issues #45-80 of the monthly Transformers US Marvel comic, alongside issues #188-254 of the UK comic, for around 1,197 pages of Transformers action, originally published between October 1988 and May 1991.

This volume is pretty much all pay-off, with the storylines and characters established in the first five years of the comic reaching a series of massive climaxes that takes over two-and-a-half years to fully resolve. The early UK storylines in this edition are dedicated to resolving the "Galvatron Saga" that began near the end of Volume 1 with the classic Target: 2006. Having established himself as a threat to the rest of the Transformer species, Galvatron finds himself being hunted by no less than seven factions simultaneously: Optimus Prime, Shockwave and Scorponok's forces on present-day Earth, the Autobot Wreckers and Decepticon Mayhem Attack Squad on present-day Cybertron, and combat teams led by Rodimus Prime and Soundwave from future Earth. It turns out that the prolonged presence of Galvatron, Cyclonus and Scourge in the past and the resulting shifts in the timeline have heavily disrupted the space/time continuum, causing a rift to form in the fabric of the universe that threatens to destroy everything. After a few complications, the final battle takes place in Time Wars, where Simon Furman merrily lays waste to recently-delisted toys and some toys that were never released in the UK in the first place from years earlier (so both hello and goodbye to the Deluxe Insecticons in the space of a few pages).

What should have been the grand finale to over two years of plotting and build-up falls a bit flat. There are some major continuity glitches here, such as the modern-day Autobots completely forgetting about the "mass-displacement" process for time-travelling, leading them to assume Optimus Prime has been killed (again) when fairly obviously he hasn't. It's also a story without much nuance, with a huge running battle with numerous casualties but there isn't really much meat here. The characters have to survive and try to keep Galvatron contained until basically the plot resolves itself without much intervention by anyone (bar arguably Shockwave and Scourge). This means both the huge casualty list was completely unnecessary and Galvatron also ends up looking like a chump: his two years on Earth accomplished absolutely nothing. This may be more down to Furman bringing Galvatron back to present-day Earth because Target: 2006 was so awesome, but then not being able to have him win or take command of the Decepticons because that would have been ignored by Bob Budiansky in the American comics. Still, some good action sequences and the story does bring Ravage back into play after years of being MIA.

The US storyline then brings in its own epic with the "Underbase Saga," where the Decepticons create an island resort to improve their image with the humans (!) but it turns out to be a cover to research the impending arrival of the mysterious Underbase. Although Ratbat initially plots to seize the Underbase for himself, he is surprised - and absolutely nobody else is - when he is betrayed by Starscream, who sets out to seize the Underbase for himself. All of the Autobots and Decepticons on Earth have to join forces to try to stop him, but the result is a total massacre with the better part of fifty Transformers deactivated, some for good.

This is a bit of an oddball story, with Budiansky killing a whole bunch of Transformers but not in a very interesting way. There are some good character moments for Prime and Scorponok, and finally seeing Starscream get everything he ever wanted, only to find you can have too much of a good thing, is quite amusing. There are also some good character moments for the Transformers' long-time human ally Buster Witwicky. It's really also the last hurrah for Budiansky, who manages another five issues of mostly-stand-alone lightweight fare before finally retiring his writing pen. Budiansky created so much of the Transformers lore and characterisation that continues to hold try now, forty years later, that he deserves respect, but his stories were always very hit and miss, and sometimes even his really good ideas were let down by variable dialogue and pacing issues.

Budiansky's retirement means that Simon Furman gets to take over the American comic as well as carrying on his work for the British one, giving him UNLIMITED POWER (kind of). His UK stories from this era suffer from a shift in format in the UK comic, which switched to shorter, black-and-white stories with previously-planned 2-week arcs now unfolding over 4 or 5, completely disrupting both pacing and also his planned efforts to tie together the UK and US storylines more firmly. A new, dystopian future story arc depicting the fate of Rodimus Prime and his team from Time Wars as they return to a completely changed future where Galvatron and Unicron still endure is very promising, but underdeveloped. Another arc where scattered survivors of the Time Wars regroup as a new group that transcends the Autobot-Decepticon division is also intriguing, but again it feels like there's not enough time to do it justice. In the middle of this, Budiansky has to introduce the new Micromasters, which Furman then has to continue, meaning yet another set of interesting storylines is diluted by dozens of new characters suddenly showing up.

However, this chaotic period starts easing up as Furman sets in motion his master plan: a new epic saga spanning two full years of the comic and drawing on his UK time travel epics for inspiration that he can repackage for the US audience without violating UK continuity (which more or less works, if you squint a bit). This arc starts with the revelation that Megatron is alive and now in control of part of Cybertron. He kidnaps Ratchet to have him work on a new secret weapon. This sequence of events results in the resurrection of three classic Autobot warriors - Grimlock, Jazz and Bumblebee (Ratchet cheerfully admits to disliking Goldbug, so rebuilds him in his original form) - and the apparently for-real destruction of Megatron, resulting in the rise of the powerful Thunderwing as the new Decepticon leader. These mid-tier events take a turn for the epic when Grimlock, Jazz and Bumblebee are teleported to the centre of Cybertron to discover the face of Primus, the Transformers "god," etched on the side of its core. Furman gets to canonise his origin myth for the Transformers here (having previously established it in the UK future epic The Legacy of Unicron two years earlier) for the US audience. At the end of a pitched battle, Primus is briefly awoken, his scream of pain revealing the location of Cybertron to Unicron.

With the Chaos-Bringer on his way to destroy Cybertron, the Autobots launch a desperate search for the missing Creation Matrix, which was blasted in space with Optimus Prime's original body a long time earlier. In the Matrix Quest arc, multiple teams of Autobots have to search an entire star system for Prime's corpse and the missing Matrix, getting involved in various local problems along the way. This arc is superb, with some great one-off stories and ideas. One story is a Western, another is heavily influenced by The Maltese Falcon, and another by Moby Dick (with Longtooth as the whale-hunter). One story influenced by Aliens is a bit hamstrung by the level of violence and gore the comic can get away with showing, but the finale to the Quest, with all hell breaking loose on the Ark and an ending drenched in irony, is outstanding. This arc is also enhanced by the arrival of UK artist Geoff Senior, oft-regarded as the franchise's best-ever artist, who adds a lot of dynamism to the storyline.

The subsequent run of stories, with the Autobots and Decepticons preparing to defend Cybertron against Unicron, is also excellent, with Andy Wildman and Stephen Baskerville adding their distinctive techno-organic art style to the comic. Furman is having far too much fun here, with more scheming, more bringing characters back from the dead, and even having a truly disturbing excursion into body-horror. A subplot about G.B. Blackrock forming an anti-Decepticon superhero team known as the Neo-Knights is a bit wince-inducing (with Furman clearly setting up the Neo-Knights for a spin-off that never happens) but it's not the worst idea the comic has ever had, and allows it to bring Circuit Breaker back into the main story. A high point here is Optimus Prime offering Scorponok his surrender in return for uniting their forces against Unicron and Scorponok having to navigate internal Decepticon politics as he decides on whether to honour the deal or not, only to be interrupted by Shockwave trying to seize command from him (again). We also get Grimlock going on an insane solo mission to resurrect his fallen Dinobot companions using a mystical energy source called nucleon, which goes about as well as you'd expect. By this point Furman had been told the comic would be cancelled with its 75th issue, so he was clearly setting things up for a grand finale.

These events culminate in Unicron's final assault on Cybertron in issue #75 (of the US run), which unfolds rather differently to the movie (and with a far higher body count in known characters). From an action and character standpoint, this might be Furman's finest hour, with even some black comedy thrown in for good measure: Grimlock ramming the Ark into Unicron's face and then leading the entire nucleon-resurrected Autobot army of classic characters into battle over Prowl's frantic complaints is an all-timer franchise visual. If this had been where the comic ended, it would have been an undeniably awesome way to go out.

At the eleventh hour, the comic was given a five-month reprieve. Furman puts into motion a series of new, scaled-down plots revolving around the need to evacuate Cybertron (devastated apparently beyond repair by Unicron), whilst reluctant hero Spike Witwicky has to resurrect Fortress Maximus to defeat a renewed Decepticon incursion on Earth. The Autobot-Decepticon Alliance is also on shaky ground following its apparent victory (albeit at a sky-high cost), and there is a superb political storyline as Grimlock and new Decepticon commander Bludgeon realise they have the measure of one another and try to outsmart the other. The final issue is effective but rushed, with maybe a few too many ideas competing for limited page space. Given the business constraints here, the comic's ultimate end is surprisingly satisfying, even if a few loose ends are left aflap. Even that becomes a boon as Furman would later drawn on some of these dangling threads for the Generation 2 mini-series.

This is the strongest of the three collections containing the main Marvel storyline. Although Budiansky has his strengths and his achievements in creating so many characters for Hasbro is worthy of respect, his plotting and storytelling is a bit too variable in quality. Furman certainly isn't perfect - and his worst-ever story about the creation of Arcee is present in this volume and remains horribly cringey - but he has a much firmer grasp of longer-form storytelling, establishing the stakes and executing them well, with a defter touch at humour. His final two-year run on the American comic might be his best-ever sustained burst of storytelling in the franchise. In fact, that run is so highly regarded that Furman himself has twice tried to create a continuation/sequel to it with both the Generation 2 mini-series and, twenty years later, the Regeneration One series for IDW, and neither were successful.

The volume is also helped by a greater variety of stronger artists. The US comic is buoyed by the arrival of UK talent including Geoff Senior and Andy Wildman, and it feels like US mainstay Jose Delbo ups his game in response. With colouring techniques in American publishing improving at the time, these closing issues of the original run finally start looking almost as good as the UK comic did for most of its run.

With Compendium 3 wrapping up the original Marvel run, it falls to Compendium 4 to contain the odds-and-sods. The Transformers Universe mini-series of character profiles, Generation 2 and the errant Earthforce branch of continuity await.

Transformers: Til All Are One - Compendium 3 (****½) contains the strongest succession of stories in the original Marvel comic run, with a lot of inventive use of established lore and characters to bring this huge saga to a close. The art is at its best here, and it's easy to share Furman's frustration that the comic was cancelled whilst it was enjoying a renaissance of quality and still selling over 80,000 copies a month (figures any comic company would easily kill for today). If you can find a copy (or wait for a Kickstarter reprint), this is a very solid compilation of Transformers stories.

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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.