How Hasbro Sabotaged IDW Twice, and Killed Great Comics Both Times

Any comics fan in the 2010s probably heard about the series alternately called Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye and Lost Light, which ran from 2012–2018.

I gushed. So did lots of outlets — it made The Buy Pile for nearly its entire run, Jason Aaron of Scalped, Southern Bastards, Thor, Avengers and fifty thousand other books publicly praised it, as did Kieron Gillen, Delilah Dawson, Transformers guru Simon Furman, and Comics Alliance gave writer James Roberts a prestigious Best Writer tag in 2015.

Its companion titles Windblade, Til All Are One, Robots In Disguise and Optimus Prime, weren’t bad either.

And then in 2018, IDW gave their Transformers stories a for-real, it’s-over-finished end. Boom. Goodbye to even the much-loved Lost Light.

This wasn’t that weird. Understand, grasshopper: Transformers doesn’t have one overarching arc that continually has to be Crisised or Flashpoint-ed or Secret Wars-ed into making sense, like Marvel & DC -do. Each series & toyline tells the tale of Optimus & co in a slightly different way.

But this wasn’t just because “it’s time for an ending” or “the continuity was getting too cluttered.”

Understand this as well, grasshopper. Transformers comics, and TV shows, and games, and movies, exist to sell toys.

In 2018 Hasbro started a new franchise path — the “War For Cybertron Trilogy,” all-new toys with all-new gimmicks and specific backstory. Surprise, surprise, IDW killed their entire line, and relaunched a comic where the characters were drawn exactly as the toys.

In keeping with the toyline theme, IDW2, as fans called it, told the story of… the beginning of the Autobot/Decepticon war.

*Charlie Brown SIIIIGH.*

The war’s start has multiple incarnations in comics and two whole video games devoted to it already. It’s overdone as Optimus Dies, Grimlock Gets Angry & Leaves, and Shockwave Has Engineered The Whole Master Plan.

IDW1 had gone in new directions with Megatron’s redemption and Optimus’s retirement into citizenry. Starscream finally got a taste of leadership and wished he’d been careful what he wished for. Grimlock got amnesia. And got pregnant. (Okay, weird. But at least it was original!)

Poor Brian Ruckley, writer, and John Barber, editor. IDW2 had two strikes before it even got to bat.

I tried a couple issues of IDW2 and gave up. The story went too slowly, the artists and writers I liked were gone, and the characters were drawn as The Toy Exactly! Everything was a reminder that my beloved Lost Light had been killed to sell toys.

For Primus’s sake, Hasbro, we were gonna buy the toys either way!

This year Hasbro announced they’re yanking the license from IDW2, killing it like 1985 toys who stopped selling in 1986. I figured hey, I might as well read IDW2. With the cancellation, I’d at least be reading a complete epic, and I am a giant-squid-level sucker for anything Transformers, especially after years of no comic reading.

And er… many apologies to Brian Ruckley, Anna Malkova, and the other artists, colorists and editors on the book. It’s really good.

As good as Lost Light and its compatriots, albeit as a very different animal.

Brian Ruckley’s a novelist, and plays to his strengths. This is the most space-opera-y version of the franchise so far; the moon is a massive energy generator, there are lots of tight controls on population and energy use, and organic beings hang around Cybertron, including an entire population of refugees who escaped genocide.

Megatron, a hard character to shove out of one dimension, is the best I’ve seen him: genuinely calculating, plotting a scarily relevant coup based on the idea of entitlement in a world running out of resources. His goons — the legit “personal guard” and the not-so-legit street toughs — run around undermining a societal stability everyone takes for granted.

The art, as is a plague in modern comics, rotates too much and feels schizophrenic. But Anna Maldova and Angel Hernandez are highlights, Malkova’s art especially benefits from the very moody colors of Joana LaFuente.

If you can stick through the sedate beginning, you will get yourself an ‘everything breaks’ moment for the ages. Megatron relies on Optimus’s willingness to observe the rules and hear him out, and hoo boy, no big spoilers, but Optimus regrets it. Around issue #30, the Autobots must destroy much of what is beautiful and good about their world to slow Megatron’s advance. Imagine burning the Library of Alexandria, felling the Colossus of Rhodes, all for the sake of keeping the people there alive.

It’s the most excited I’ve been for TF comics since, well, 2012, when More Than Meets The Eye launched.

And it’ll be gone by the end of the year.

I like stories with endings, and as noted before, Transformers is a lot better at that than any other franchise.

But let’s face it — this is happening because Hasbro can’t leave a good thing alone. We legacy fans will buy anything with Optimus Prime’s COVID-safe face on it, and desperately try to convince our kids that it’s as cool as Minecraft. But Hasbro, if you want your stories to generate buzz, the kind that More Than Meets The Eye and Lost Light created, you have to trust the creative forces involved.

Sometimes you can let a good thing go on. More than three years, even! (That link opens up a whole new can of worm-griping, I warn ya.)

Until then, both IDW1 and IDW2 are well worth your time and money, and a nice showing of complex and thoughtful storytelling that might even do more than sell toys. Maybe we’ll get to revisit both, in some even more nostalgic future. Because for all that I love Transformers’ ability to actually have endings, there are stories left to tell in both continuities.

Until that day, til’ all franchises are one…

¹ Pictured, L-R, front-back: Maketoys Thunder Manus, Combiner Wars Optimus Prime with SND Primo Vitalis Upgrade Kit, Generations Laser Optimus with Maketoys Battle Tanker Upgrade Kit, Toyworld Orion, Mastermind Creations Optus Pex, Mastermind Creations Knight Morpher Commander

² Pictured: Animated Ironhide, Animated Oil Slick, Animated Shadow Blade Megatron, Animated Waspinator, Animated Swoop