Image credit: Marvel/Images/Hasbro
1984 was a big year for pop culture icons, especially characters whose names, for some reason, started with T or G. Among other big franchises, The Terminator, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, and Gremlins all debuted in 1984 and are still around 40 years later.
And of course, there’s another creation that starts with a T: Transformers. Hasbro brought Transformers to the West, a repackaging of several different Japanese toy lines, and asked Marvel to help with naming the characters and creating a legend that would tie the different characters together.
Although the Transformers animated series is often derided as nothing more than a long advertisement to sell toys, it was hugely popular and has since been expanded and rebooted several times, with varying degrees of success.
Similarly, Marvel’s comic series started out as a four-issue limited series but was so successful that it eventually ran for 80 issues (with the cover of the final issue jokingly reading “80 issues of a four-issue limited series”). Marvel UK published their own Transformers story, which spun off into its own series. Numerous publishers have since created their own stories, building on or revising aspects of the important foundation that Marvel laid with their earlier series.
This comic is a reprint of the entire first issue of Transformers, and while it’s not particularly great (by modern standards), it covers a lot of ground, introduces a lot of familiar concepts to readers for the first time, and features a very large (but overly ambitious) cast of characters.
The story begins on Cybertron, a machine planet where the Autobots live in peace and harmony. However, a robot named Megatron tries to take over the world and forms the Decepticons. The Decepticons rally to Megatron’s side and start a war with the Autobots. The war is so devastating that the planet is thrown out of orbit and drifts into space.
With the planet facing a potential collision with an asteroid, the intrepid Autobot Optimus Prime leads a mission to cut a safe path to Cybertron, only to be thwarted by Decepticons who board the Autobot ship.
To prevent the ship from falling into Decepticon hands, Optimus sets it on a collision course with an uninhabited planet, where it crashes and seemingly kills everyone.
But that planet is Earth, and four million years later, in 1984, life springs up all around, and the ship itself is awakened by volcanic activity, reviving its inhabitants. Scanning for local mechanical “life”, it gives new shapes and forms to the Autobots and Decepticons, with the latter soon seeking to conquer the new world they find themselves on.
It’s an incredibly ambitious and somewhat convoluted first issue, overstuffed with too many cast members to properly introduce both sides of the Battle for Cybertron.
Still, writer Ralph Macchio (with Bill Mantlo handling the “plot”) manages to give it a go, with some laughably awful pages in which the Transformers introduce themselves one by one in horribly awkward expository dialogue.
This does no one any favors. Frank Springer’s perfectly functional art is drowned out by endless speech bubbles in some of the worst pages I’ve ever seen in comics. Seriously, just look at this page where the Decepticons introduce themselves one by one:
Image credit: Marvel/Images/Hasbro
If that wasn’t enough, the next page features a version of the Autobots, but at least a version of them appears for two pages.
Image credit: Marvel/Images/Hasbro
This is awful. It shows how far comics have come. IDW’s and now Skybound/Image’s Transformers have given characters and concepts time to breathe, but this is a general evolution of comic storytelling and a general familiarity with the Transformers themselves. It’s clunky, sure, but the fact that every toy from the first line is included in this comic means that no matter which Transformer you have in your hands while avidly reading this issue, you’ll get a quick rundown of their personality and abilities here.
So, much like the animated show (which follows a loosely similar storyline, but not exactly the same), the comic at times seems like little more than a toy commercial.
Characters like the Witwickies also make their first appearance in a scene where a conflict occurs at a drive-in movie theater, and it’s hilarious how the humans don’t seem to be fazed when vehicles suddenly start fighting each other or transforming into giant robots.
This cover by renowned cartoonist Bill Sienkiewicz is a fantastic piece of art, even if it bears absolutely no resemblance to any of the characters or events featured in this issue (apart from Optimus Prime).
In terms of interior art, the characters are drawn to look almost identical to their toy counterparts, though the animated series successfully avoided this, settling for a simplified look for the Autobots and Decepticons that didn’t faithfully replicate every aspect of their toys. This was gradually avoided in the comics, which brought the look of the animated characters to the page as the series developed.
It’s a very awkward start, but keep in mind that this was aimed at kids just discovering the toys for the first time. It covers a lot of ground for a first issue, and although it walks a fine line on things like character motivations (Megatron’s reasons for creating the Decepticons and his desire to destroy peace on Cybertron are nonexistent), by the end of the issue it manages to set up a modern-day conflict on Earth involving some of the more sympathetic human characters.
But it’s really fascinating to know where this story began, and it’s also fun to see which elements have remained and which have been revised or dropped entirely as the series has evolved or been rebooted or, er, morphed.
