I always tell people I was doomed from the start. Before I was even born, my parents had purchased, for my cousin’s birthday, a pair of SHOGUN WARRIORS toys. The 4″ solid metal ones, a Poseidon and a Great Mazinga. They never got around to giving them to that boy, and the toys wound up in my hands, I think before I was even three or four years old, despite the small parts and firing missiles and whatnot.
Those were a starting point for me. A starting point as a fan and collector of robot toys and robot designs, a starting point as a fan of the sci-fi and action end of Japanese pop culture, and I’d even say there could be a case made that it was a starting point for my comic book fandom. Because while the SHOGUN WARRIORS comic book was a bit before my time, my fascination with cool looking robots caused me to gravitate towards the TRANSFORMERS comic book even before I started collecting those toys. The first issue I remember picking up was issue #12, which features a brainwashed Optimus Prime looming over his fellow Autobots, blowing them away with his rifle.
It’s a great cover. Still one of my favorites, even if the story within is only so-so.
These starting points have been on my mind as of late because, before AVATAR came out, the highest grossing film of 2009, domestically, was one TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, one of the worst-reviewed movies of the year just past. And I have to admit, I own that movie on DVD. Heck, I’ve watched that movie on DVD, which is more than I can say for the first Michael Bay-directed TRANSFORMERS flick, which I seem to recall buying out of a sort of grudging brand loyalty. I didn’t much care for the first film because it didn’t seem to care about the title characters, instead spreading its running time among various groups of what Decepticon Air Commander Starscream used to call “puny flesh creatures” who proved, in many cases, to be useless and inconsequential to the overall story. Also, the robot designs and camera work were both equally busy, making the mayhem that ensued throughout hard on the eyes.
The second movie, by and large, stabilized the camera work, gave at least a few robots some character moments — mostly Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron, and Starscream — and had some pretty nifty fight sequences. I didn’t care that it didn’t hang together well as a movie, I didn’t care that it was a series of pointless quest beats stuck together with bits of random jargon culled from twenty-five years worth of TRANSFORMERS cartoons, comic books, and action figure bio cards. It had Optimus Prime, voiced by original 1980′s cartoon vocal talent Peter Cullen, tearing apart Decepticons and nobly sacrificing himself to protect the people of Earth. There are parts of that movie that really, really work for me — long stretches of it, in fact. Maybe even the whole first hour, if you trim out a lot of the going-away-to-college stuff with Shia LaBeouf’s character and his roommate and his ridiculous family. It’s a better TRANSFORMERS movie than the first one, even if it’s a worse movie.
Mind you, it manages that only by sort of half giving a crap about the Transformers as opposed to not giving a crap about them at all except as things to explode and cause explosions. Indeed, the two Michael Bay TRANSFORMERS movies are the polar opposite of the stories that made me a lifelong fan of the TRANSFORMERS, stories I’ve reread over and over again, stories that still hold up for me to this day. They’re the stories that kept me with the TRANSFORMERS for years, and the stories that made me into a habitual comic book reader.
It all began in May of 1989 with issue #56 of Marvel’s TRANSFORMERS comic book series. A new writer had taken over, British comics writer Simon Furman, who had been and still was writing the biweekly (or, as they say over there, fortnightly) TRANSFORMERS UK comics magazine. It started so simply. The evil Megatron was back from the dead and had come up with a plan to undermine the Decepticon command structure on Earth and take care of the Autobots as well. He got Autobot medic Ratchet, his old adversary from the first year of the comic book series, to bring scheming Decepticon second-in-command Starscream back as a cold, calculating engine of destruction. However, Ratchet kept Starscream’s original personality buried just beneath the surface, so when the tables began to turn on him, he wound up pleading for his life with the Autobots and Decepticons it was his mission to kill. Then Ratchet used the technology provided by Megatron to bring back three Autobot heroes — beloved VW Beetle Bumblebee, jive-talking Jazz, and strong but speech-impaired T-Rex Grimlock — and ultimately did the noble sacrifice thing to take Megatron off the table again.
It’s a pretty standard action-adventure comics runaround, not helped at all by serviceable but pedestrian artwork by the team of Jose Delbo and Dave Hunt. Delbo’s robots are stiff, awkward things, and Hunt’s inks don’t liven things up in the least. It looked like an above-average “toy comic,” nothing special, but solidly professional work.
Things didn’t get interesting until the issue after Ratchet’s sacrifice. While Optimus Prime was overwhelmed with grief and considering leaving the Autobots following Ratchet’s death, a new Decepticon warlord named Thunderwing sent his Mayhem Attack Squad — skull-faced samurai Bludgeon, sorta wrestler-gladiator-looking guy Stranglehold, and old-tymey-diving-suit guy Octopunch — to hunt down Bumblebee, Jazz, and Grimlock, as their miraculous return and effective raids on Decepticon strongholds were turning the tide of the Autobot-Decepticon war. Right as the three Autobots were preparing to teleport to Earth, the Decepticons damaged the teleportation equipment and all six Transformers were teleported not off-world, but deep within the planet Cybertron where, as the Autobots soon discovered, their creator, an entity called Primus, sleeps.
Yes, now the Transformers had a sleeping god in the middle of their planet. And when the next issue began, suddenly a strange, inky robed figure with a craggy, segmented metallic body was pointing his hand at the reader. Gone were the simple shapes and smooth lines of Jose Delbo, and their place were sharp, strange, angular shapes crafted by one of Furman’s fellow Brits, Geoff Senior, whose work had a strange boxy, streamlined look to it. His robots were expressive without looking too human, and in battle they had a real sense of weight and mass. Senior is still the gold standard of TRANSFORMERS artists to my eyes. There’s a real energy to his work that a lot of modern artists lose trying to draw all the little rivets and details, or trying to match a preexisting style either from the Japanese or from the old cartoon.
That strange inky figure was an ancient Transformer who watched over Primus to ensure that he did not awaken again. For if he did awake, his conscious mind would be found by his opposite number, the Chaos-Bringer Unicron — the world-consuming transforming planet from the 1986 animated TRANSFORMERS movie, given an origin at odds with his cartoon portrayal, but one far more epic and terrifying. In the cartoon, it was explained that he was the strong-willed, accidentally unleashed robotic creation of a diminutive alien scientist called Primacron. But as explained by Furman, Unicron was no mere alien’s lost pet; he was a rampaging god seeking the destruction of all things and the cold comfort of endless oblivion, who had become trapped in an asteroid that he then shaped into this transforming planet configuration. Likewise, his “good” opposite Primus was trapped in an asteroid of his own, which he reshaped into the planet Cybertron; the Transformers were created as his army against Unicron, beings endowed with fragments of his life force who, one day, would unite against Unicron and destroy the Chaos-Bringer in his stead.
This story became the engine that drove the next two years of Furman’s TRANSFORMERS stories. Unicron was coming to Cybertron, and Optimus Prime and his Autobots had to prepare. The first item on the agenda was finding the Creation Matrix. In the 1986 TRANSFORMERS movie, the one thing that could destroy Unicron was the Matrix of Leadership, hidden within Optimus Prime’s chest compartment, and passed to Ultra Magnus and then Rodimus Prime following Optimus’s death. In the comic books, a similar concept called the Creation Matrix was established early on, but not as a tangible thing within Optimus’s body. It was set up as something more like a computer program, a signal or energy that could infuse life into new Transformers. However, since he needed a Matrix to combat Unicron, Furman retroactively established that there WAS a tangible Creation Matrix in Optimus’s body — which had been placed in a funeral barge following his death in issue #24 and rocketed into space. Oops. So for four issues, teams of Autobots searched planets along the flight path of the funeral barge containing Optimus’s original body, seeking out tales of miraculous renewals and resurrections, of life where none had existed before. The Decepticon warlord Thunderwing followed behind, curious what the Autobots were doing and eventually becoming obsessed with the Matrix and the power it held.
The clever bit about the Matrix Quest storyline, of course, was that it allowed Furman to showcase a bunch of new Autobots who were on toy shelves at the time without having them hijack his ongoing storylines. An Autobot detective called Nightbeat found himself and his teammates on a grimy, urban world where he was put through a noir detective story with obvious references to Raymond Chandler’s THE MALTESE FALCON. An peg-legged Autobot walrus-man called Longtooth and his team wound up on a largely water-covered world hunting a resurrected whale-creature called the klud in
a riff on JAWS and MOBY DICK.
Fortunately for Thunderwing (and unfortunately for the Autobots), the Matrix had become tainted by evil, had become obsessed with gathering dark experience rather than its life-giving purpose. Thunderwing sought its power, but became its pawn. It’s interesting, heavy stuff — just as the Transformers are all Primus’s children and hold a bit of his life energy, Autobot and Decepticon alike, the Matrix contains his pure life essence. And yet it, too, carries the capacity for good and evil, and it willfully chose evil when given the chance. Thus, the Autobots were forced to make a desperate gambit and throw it and Thunderwing out the airlock of their command ship.
With the Matrix lost, Optimus Prime was forced to go to plan B: unite all Transformers under a common banner, because legend had it that when all Primus’s children were united, only then could they bring down Unicron. So Prime was forced to do the unthinkable: surrender. He was lucky that the current leader of the Decepticons was Scorponok, as reasonable a Decepticon as you’re ever going to see. Scorponok was a Headmaster; the gimmick there is that when the robot transforms into its alternate mode, in this case a giant robotic scorpion, the head transforms into a little guy. The little guy happens to be a humanoid life form in a suit of armor, a fellow from the planet Nebulos called Zarak. His insecurities as a man essentially walking among giants, as one living being walking around in another’s body, living another’s life — these are ideas Furman explored a bit with Scorponok, and this vulnerability, this humanity is why Optimus could play this card, even if the troops under his command were starting to worry that their leader was losing it.
At this time, Senior was off the book and another British artist took over, an artist on the total opposite end of the spectrum, but one no less talented. Andrew Wildman’s artwork was similarly bold and expressive, but very organic; his Transformers looked less like robots and more like pupilless men covered in armor. And yet, drawn like this they became somehow more relatable, as silly as it may sound. His art could get beautifully melodramatic; there’s a lot of broad acting going on in his issues, as Autobots rage against Optimus Prime’s decisions, Decepticons chafe under Scorponok’s leadership, and ultimately Decepticon is turned against Decepticon just as the Autobots have reached peace with Scorponok’s forces.
I haven’t even gotten into subplots like Unicron’s agent plucked from the future, who resents being taken from his empire and thus turns against him, or the weak link that is the introduction of a mutant superhero team financed by an oil company man who’d gotten himself tangled in the Autobot-Decepticon war back in the first couple of years of the series. I’ve probably over-summarized as it is. There’s a few points I’m trying to make here, the first being that these are still wonderfully plotted action-adventure comics in the same style as any run on X-MEN or BATMAN or what-have-you. This is the stuff that made me a comics reader. The fact that it’s a pretty solid run of comics, also, is what kept me interested in TRANSFORMERS for so many years; there’s a reason that among TRANSFORMERS fans, characters who never showed up on TV like Nightbeat, Bludgeon, and Thunderwing — characters whose only appearances in 1980′s TRANSFORMERS lore came through Simon Furman’s keyboard and Geoff Senior and Andrew Wildman’s pencils — are still being demanded as brand-new action figures by the long-time fans. It’s because to those who read these comics, they’re as important as first-year stalwarts like Prowl, Jazz, Soundwave, and Starscream.
Yeah, I know, it’s an odd criterion, having grown men begging a toy company to make a plastic action figure of a character because he was in some pretty good comic books back in the late 1980′s, but this is the way fandom works. “I like this guy, give me a little plastic idol to him.” But I know I’m all excited that Hasbro’s making a new Bludgeon action figure, one that looks cool, turns into a tank, and actually has some samurai swords. Here I am, nineteen years after Bludgeon took his Decepticons and fled for parts unknown to regroup and fight another day, waiting for word that an all-new plastic replica of that character is sitting at Wal-Mart. I suppose Simon Furman was right when he wrote on the letters page of that final issue, “It never ends.”
Jonathan L. Switzer has a clear and vivid memory of sitting in his dad’s lap and reading the third issue of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns at the tender age of five. That early experience, along with a couple of die-cast Shogun Warriors toys and the local library’s copy of Frederik Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, seemed to set his fate in stone. For three years, he worked at a Southeast Kansas Japanese animation specialty store, immersed in anime & manga to the point that it started to give him a nasty rash. He was a contributing writer on The Art of Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, had an article on the Robotech franchise published in Protoculture Addicts magazine (issue #94, Nov-Dec. 2007), is a founding member of Ally Comix, and — when he finds the time — writes & draws the ongoing comic series Scwonkey Dog. Oh, and he writes a manga review every month for this very website. 
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