words: Kevin Yuen
Since the Transformers franchise seems like this ubiquitous force of animated cartoons and brightly colored action figures, it might surprise a few movie-goers to characterize summer blockbuster The Transformers, coming out later this year, as “another comic book movie.” But even forgetting the fact that the Transformers have been the stars of more than a couple successful comic book lines, they can be anointed alumni of the Marvel House of Ideas because, like Spider-Man and the Hulk before them, that’s where they were originally conceived.
In the mid-’80s, Hasbro Toys acquired a couple Japanese toy lines and wanted to establish them stateside. A few years before, Marvel Comics had successfully reinvented the G.I. Joe franchise for a comic book and television show, so Hasbro again went with Marvel to build a universe for its transforming robots. Jim Shooter, editor in chief at Marvel at the time, wrote up an origin for the Transformers and enlisted the assistance of artist editor Bob Budiansky, who ended up naming and writing character profiles for about 20 Transformers in the initial launch, including Megatron. When Marvel started the comic book, Budiansky was the obvious choice for editor. The initial four-issue mini-series was a huge success, and when it switched to an ongoing series, Budiansky became the writer for the book from issue five to issue 56. His stories mostly focused on the “fish out of water” interaction between the giant robots and humans on Earth, a departure from the animated show, which mostly featured space battles and explosions. However, every few months Hasbro would roll out about 20 to 30 new Transformer toys, characters that Budiansky would have to stick into the stories. “It really became difficult for me after a while to sustain character development, what to me makes a comic book successful,” Budianksy says. “So if you have to bring in a whole wave of characters every few months, you have to push the other ones aside that you’ve been developing. That was the situation I faced, and I have to say, after a couple of years, I felt a little bit of burnout on writing this book because it was kind of onerous to do this every few months.” Luckily, while visiting England, Budiansky had a meeting with the writer of the UK Transformers comic book, Simon Furman, who expressed interest in taking over the US writing duties. Furman went on to finish the series run on Marvel and pen Transformers stories for a handful of different publishers, and is still involved with the series today.
Transformers comics disappeared for eight years after the Marvel series was cancelled in 1994, until Dreamwave Productions picked up the license to much fanfare in 2002. Its newfound popularity could largely be attributed to the intricately detailed and manga-influenced artistic style of Dreamwave President Pat Lee, while Hasbro largely stopped mandating characters to be put into the comics, and creators were given more freedom with the series. “The great thing about Dreamwave [was] they turned it into something that was more out and out a comics property, as opposed to a slightly glorified showcase for the toys,” Furman says. Eventually Dreamwave would file for bankruptcy, but a small, relatively unknown publisher, IDW Publishing, came out on top of a 2005 bidding war and continued to produce comics in a modern style to great success. The company is putting out a few cross-promotional movie comics, including a prelude series and a crossover with Marvel’s Avengers. But just as the Transformers started at Marvel and slowly grew into a monstrous industry, today the comics hum quietly in the background, the unsung, overlooked workhorse of the Transformers franchise. “Would I like to be compensated that Megatron is going to be in some hundred million dollar movie?” asks Budiansky. “Hey, yeah. If I go see it then I’ll have a twinge that I should have a piece of that. Or I wish they called me up as a consultant or something. But that’s the way it is.”
