As a tie-in with its wildly successful Energon Universe line of comic books, Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment has also licensed the right to reprint the original Marvel Comics run of The Transformers, first published in 1984. Re-reading it today unleashes a flood of nostalgic memories from my own ten-year-old youth.
The Skybound reprint of The Transformers #1 has a publication date of August 2024, though my local comic stores didn’t get this issue in stock until very recently, so I’m not sure when distribution actually started. The premiere issue, published on its own, serves as a teaser for a compendium that will collect the first half of the Marvel series. That’s due in April 2025, to be followed by a second volume finishing it off later in the year.
Opening the issue and reading the story for the first time in decades, the top question in my mind was how well Marvel’s take on The Transformers would hold up to other media depictions, past or present. To be honest, I had (and perhaps still have) some skepticism on that front.
| Title: | The Transformers |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Original Publisher: | Marvel Comics |
| Original Publication: | May 1984 |
| Reprint Publisher: | Image Comics |
| Reprint Publication | August 2024 |
| Writer: | Ralph Macchio |
| Format: | Comic Book |
When Hasbro launched the Transformers product line in 1984, the Robots in Disguise were an immediate smash hit with kids everywhere. Following the model that had worked so well for G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero a couple years earlier, the toy company saturated the market with tie-ins of every type, from coloring books to lunchboxes and more. The most popular among these were an animated television series produced by Sunbow and a comic book published by Marvel.
Through most of my childhood and well into young adulthood, the general feeling shared by myself and other fans of both properties was that the G.I. Joe comic was the superior canon we clung to, whereas the silly Sunbow cartoon was seen as kiddie nonsense we’d outgrown after a few years. Transformers, on the other hand, went the other way, and its cartoon was regarded as the better version of the story, compared to the often disappointing comic. Eventually, I sold off all my Transformers comics, but kept (and still have) all my issues of G.I. Joe.
In recent years, the G.I. Joe Sunbow series has had a resurgence of nostalgic popularity that caused me to re-evaluate my old opinions, and come to the realization that the goofy cartoon had a lot more merit than I previously appreciated. With that in mind, I looked forward to revisiting the Transformers comic, wondering if it was also better than I remembered. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that one issue will be enough to make that determination.
Initially planned as a four-issue limited series, Marvel’s The Transformers sold well enough to continue on for a total of 80 issues, plus four issues of a Headmasters spinoff. I believe I originally gave up somewhere in the mid-30s.
Unlike the case with G.I. Joe, the Transformers cartoon and comic did not differ from each other quite as dramatically in style or tone. Early issues of the comic tell essentially the same story as the More Than Meets the Eye premiere miniseries. We learn of the mechanical planet Cybertron and the war between its native Autobot and Decepticon factions. A group of Autobots leave in a spacecraft called the Ark, but are ambushed by Decepticons. The ensuing battle results in the ship crashing onto an unexplored planet (Earth), where both groups hibernate for four million years. Upon waking, they discover a world teeming with what they believe is mechanical life, only to realize the machines here aren’t sentient, while strange organic meatbags are the planet’s actual dominant life form.
Although some of the fine-point details differ, the first issue of the comic should feel awfully familiar to any fan of the cartoon. Perhaps the biggest distinction between them is that the Autobots’ first human ally is a teenage boy named Buster Witwicky, rather than Spike Witwicky. Nevertheless, while reading it, I inescapably hear the cartoon voice actors in my head.
Written by Ralph Macchio (no relation to the actor), the premiere issue is an extremely talky affair, filled with a lot of clunky, exposition-heavy dialogue. Immediately after being revived, the characters all stand around and introduce themselves (supposedly to each other, but more directly to the reader) in pages cluttered with dialogue bubbles announcing their names, skills, and general personality traits.
Dispensing with pretenses of subtlety, Decepticon leader Megatron declares that the reason he started the war was because he just plain hates peace and prosperity. Buster’s auto mechanic dad is also a pretty ridiculous caricature of a middle-aged, blue collar American male who repeatedly chastises his son for wasting time with useless book learnin’ when he should be doing real work like his old man.
Stuff like that aside, the issue does a competent enough job of setting up the story premise. Nothing in it is enough of a deal-breaker to turn me off reading further. The artwork, drawn in a very functional and utilitarian style, isn’t terribly flashy or dynamic. Notably, most of the characters are drawn to closely resemble the toy models, even those whose robot modes looked pretty awkward. Both Ironhide and Ratchet were radically redesigned in the cartoon, to good effect, but not here.
As I recall, later issues of the comic introduce some storylines I found pretty lame when I was a kid. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about them now, but I plan to buy the compendium and will try to give them the benefit of the doubt before rushing to judgment again.
Skybound has chosen to publish the issue on newsprint. As a result, details aren’t quite as crisp or colors as bold as a modern comic (or even previous reprints by IDW). However, for certain comic book purists, the experience of reading it may feel a little more authentic to how the comic was originally printed in the 1980s. Personally, I’m not enough of a stickler to be bothered one way or the other.
Decidedly more problematic are a handful of typos that may not have appeared in the original book, likely caused by a faulty scan of the original pages. As seen in the example above, when the Decepticons attack the Autobots on the Ark, the caption containing the phrase “fully fueled for the battle” instead comes out as “fully fubleo,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. I believe this problem was inhereted from IDW, suggesting that Skybound has licensed the same scans. Sadly, Skybound’s reprints of the Marvel G.I. Joe comic suffer this way as well.
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Two questions.
“Decidedly more problematic are a handful of typos that may not have appeared in the original book, likely caused by a faulty scan of the original pages.” … so does this mean the typos were always there, made by the artists and then fixed in 1984, ahead of the original print run?
Is Sam Witwicky from the movies supposed to be same Buster/Spike, or a descendant of the character?
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No, with the recent G.I. Joe reprints, people have done comparisons that show the text was fine in the original issues but got garbled in the reprints. That looks like what happened here as well.
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Darn. I really wonder how that can happen, haha. I’m assuming they are working from/with the original files, and not applying new ink or lettering after the fact?
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These reprints are taken from digital scans of the original issues. Those scans don’t always pick up the text correctly.
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Ah, thanks! Sloppy stuff.
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Buster and Spike are essentially the same character, though I seem to recall one of the comics later retconning that to say they’re brothers or something. Maybe I’m misremembering that.
The movies’ Sam Witwicky is sort of vaguely based on that character(s), to the extent that Michael Bay could give a shit about any of the source material. Shia LaBeouf’s performance doesn’t much resemble either version.
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Classic Bay!
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