The year was 2005. The treacherous Decepticons and their heroic Autobot counterparts descended upon the Earth and unleashed a new era of Transformers comics through IDW publishing. Thirteen years and hundreds of issues later, that universe has come to a close. Transformers historian Chris McFeely distills the entire history into one handy guide as we remember the masterful storytelling of the first IDW Transformers run.
Click the jump for a review and sample pages from IDW’s final installment in the now-ended Transformers series.
(Oh, and if the author Chris McFeely sounds familiar, yes, it’s that Chris McFeely, editor of Tfwiki.net. Cue the Binary Podcast team running around in circles and squealing.)
If you’ve listened to any episode of Binary System Podcast that mentions Transformers, you’ll know that Elizabeth and I have relied heavily on the Transformers Wiki. We’ve had to, because when they say “hundreds of issues,” boy, they’re not kidding.
The entire series was more than a decade of storytelling, with dozens of individual titles, mini-series, Spotlights, annuals, and a Christmas special. It’s a lot to keep up with, especially since the first few issues in 2005 started after the Autobot/Decepticon war had already moved to Earth, and the real origin of the Transformers wasn’t revealed until the last few issues of the series. TFwiki was an essential resource if you’d just finished reading an issue and you needed to know, say, who the heck Ki-Aleta was, how the D-Void was created, and why reawakening someone named Vigilem was a really bad idea.
TFwiki is a great place to fall down a rabbit hole, following the links in each article into finer and finer details about every character, powerful relic, and event (I’ve fallen down the hole twice while writing this review, and I still need to read a summary of everything that happened to the alternate version of The Lost Light after the quantum engine malfunction). If you’ve ever wanted one of the people behind all that to write the entire Transformers story in chronological order (with pictures!), then Transformers: Historia is definitely the book for you.
It’s all here, right from the earliest point in Transformers history that any of the comics ever reached. The Guiding Hand and the original Thirteen Primes (both what they actually were and what legend eventually turned them into). The rise of Functionism and the Senate (and the destruction of both by Megatron). The early infiltration of Earth by the Decepticons. All the various machinations of Bludgeon, Shockwave, Scorponok, and every one of the legendary Primes who absolutely refused to stay dead.
Mind you, this is very top-level stuff that doesn’t necessarily tell you exactly what happened to each and every character. The book covers the basics of all the many, many different storylines (written by at least fifteen different authors, so props to everyone involved for keeping a consistent through-line), and it accompanies everything with samples of artwork by all the stunningly talented artists involved (Casey Collier, Jack Lawrence, and Alex Milne to name a very few). There’s also two gorgeous character sheets – one for Optimus Prime (with artwork by Guido Guidi) and one for Windblade (with artwork by Sara Pitra-Durocher) – and a complicated timeline on the last two pages that lists out each of the titles and where they fall in the Transformers history.
Long-time readers of the series (like me!) will appreciate getting the entire history laid out in an easy-to-read format. Newcomers to the series…well needless to say, spoilers ahoy! A picture on the very first page reveals a stunning bit of information that we didn’t find out until the fourth-to-the-last issue of Lost Light. If you don’t know anything about IDW’s Transformers (and don’t mind having the main plot points given away), then this book could give you an idea of which storylines sound the most interesting. Otherwise, you might want to read the whole series first. Go ahead and start with issue #1 of More Than Meets The Eye, you won’t be sorry.
