Transformers Comics - And a Giveaway

I grew up in the 80s on a steady stream of Saturday morning cartoons and toy store visits, but for the longest time, the world of comics completely eluded me. Like I knew they existed, but I had no interest in reading them. I wrote a story for class in 6th grade where I gained superpowers and gave myself the name Storm and it wasn’t until years later that I learned the name was already taken by the X-Men co-leader. Granted, I would find out all about the mutants a few years later when their cartoon came out, but at the end of the 80s, I was completely oblivious to comics as a whole. 

Cut to 1989. Transformers was no longer on the air and have been replaced by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as the premier after school cartoon. Of course, I’m watching it, but I’ve still got my Transformers collection and playing with them in my backyard, with Powermaster Optimus Prime coming out that previous year, and other newer ones in my collection.

I lived in a small town in Nevada called Fallon, about an hour west of Reno in the middle of the desert. It’s where the Top Gun program moved to after it left Miramar, California. We had a few fast-food places and some privately owned video rental stores, but it would be at least a few years until we got a real comic book shop. Instead, we had Kents Mercantile, a general store that opened in 1904 and somehow survived for almost 90 years selling a mishmash of weird stuff. You never knew what you’d find there when you walked through its doors. The place had the original hardwood floors, and all of its windows were covered up with paper. If someone told me it was haunted back in the day, I would have believed it in a heartbeat. Going inside felt like walking back in time, and for a twelve-year-old kid, that wasn’t the highlight that it would be for me today. 

During one of my trips in there with my friend Rich, I spotted an LP of Stix’s Mr. Roboto. While we were laughing about it and how my dad used to own a Jukebox with the record in it, I turned around and spotted something glorious. On a spinner rack was issue #57 of the Transformers comic. On the cover, Autobot medic Ratchet is blasted in half by Megatron. I was similarly blown away – I had no idea there had been years of Transformer comics I could have been reading this whole time. I grabbed that issue and for the next few months, I visited Kents like clockwork to get new releases. After a while, I saved myself the trip to the creepy wayback store and subscribed to the comic. As a side note, the store finally closed down in 1992.

Transformers #1 was published in 1984, beating the pilot episode of the cartoon by four months. Originally planned as a 4-issue mini-series, the comic’s popularity earned the series an astonishing 80 issues. Of course, being published by Marvel Comics, Transformers had to crossover with mainstream stories at some point and issue 3 had an appearance by none other than Spider-Man. Another notable crossover is the first of many with GI Joe where Bumblebee met an untimely end (for a few issues at least).

It astonished me by how different the comic was to the cartoon, besides sharing the same characters and names. I learned Megatron and Ratchet had a rivalry going back to the very beginning of the comic. It introduced so many new characters to showcase upcoming toys and even had numerous original characters that never received figures. Did you know warlords and politicians like Straxus and Emirate Xaaron fought over Cybertron after Optimus and Megatron crashed on Earth? Did you know Transformers had a god named Primus? It would be a decades before Primus would appear in a cartoon, and only this year are Straxus and Xaaron getting toys based off their comic book designs. 

Two years after I started collecting the comic, the story started teasing something big - Issue 75, a double-sized comic featuring Unicron’s arrival on Cybertron. The comic explains that Primus and Unicron were brothers from the beginning of the universe, celestial beings that created and destroyed entire words. After eons of battling, Primus trapped himself and Unicron on barren asteroids. While Primus created the Transformers from the surface of his new planet Cybertron, Unicron copied his brother’s convertible creations and turned his planet into a Transformer itself. I couldn’t believe the origin of Unicron could be so much different from the episode Call of the Primitives where he was built by a little gremlin name Primacron.

The comic only lasted another 5 issues after that before being cancelled. The final issue teased more to come after Optimus Prime’s resurrection, the second time he’d come back from the dead, not including the movie adaptation. It broke my heart to see Transformers seemingly die again, another stream of stories that dried up. Though Transformers would return with a new comic and cartoon in a few years, it still hurt to lose that. 

I still own that first Transformers comic I bought, nearly ripped in half by my older brother, just like the many toys of mine he broke. Though I never replaced that issue, I bought a bunch of others afterwards to get an almost complete collection. I’m still missing a few, just like those cards I used to collect. While Transformers comics have continued on through a few different companies, there’s still something special about that weird original run with stories like the Car Wash of Doom and Club Con, where Ratbat runs the Decepticons as a fuel auditor, and Blaster and Grimlock fight over the right to lead the Autobots. 

To share my love of Transformers comics, I plan on giving away two copies of Transformers #8 released on May 28, 1985, the second appearance of the Dinobots facing off against Megatron. To enter for your chance to win, leave a comment on this article and follow the Old School Evil Facebook page between November 1 and November 30. I will announce the winners on December 3rd on the Facebook page. Don’t miss your chance to get your hands on this significant piece of Transformers history!