Daily Comic Book Mission #037: Transformers #1 (Energon Universe)

Well, all right. Are you ready to transform and roll out. I hope so because today we’re taking it back, way back to nineteen, no wait, sorry, seven, eight, eight, two thousand twenty three, back when things almost made a little bit more sense than they do today, but not a whole lot. However, we did get the Energon Universe, the launch of Skybound and Image Comics. The Energon Universe is a shared universe with Transformers and Void Rivals and GI Joe and some other Hasbro properties. It started with Void Rivals number one, but the Transformers series is in my opinion the best entry in the Energon Universe and my favorite comic book series at this time. I mean, it’s no Shogun Warriors, but what is, except maybe Conan the Barbarian from the 1970s, but that’s not a fair comparison. Transformers number one from 2023 has Optimus Prime on the cover. Well, to be fair, there are like twelve different covers for each of these anymore. Does anyone actually collect all the different covers? Is that a thing people do. It just seems nuts to me. You’d be collecting hundreds of the same comic book every year. Anyway.

You know, to each their own. I am also weird. I like to drink beer and read comic books. I guess that’s not that weird. Maybe it is. Maybe you think that’s weird, and if so, I deeply just don’t care. But we’ll start this issue with some new human characters. In fact, we’ll start this series here. It opens up on some cinematic flashbacks. We’ve got the Ark, we’ve got Optimus Prime, we’ve got some very upset people having flashbacks, and then bang, we meet the two main human leads. We’ve got Spike and his dad. And his dad is at the bar having some issues. It’s the morning. We’ve got some military flashbacks. Something happened in his past. He’s got issues with his son. And then we meet one of the other main human leads, Carly, who is Spike’s friend. And Carly drives a sweet custom van, which plays an important role later in the series, but not right now. Anyway, the two of them are going to go stargazing. It’s not a euphemism; they’re literally going stargazing in the mountains. And then they fall into this cave, and wouldn’t you know it, they land in the Ark, which is filled with a bunch of broken robots that look like Transformers. Because I know what the Transformers are, but if you’re a new reader, this is your first introduction to the Transformers.

So the whole Energon Universe thing is like the characters you know and love but with slightly different stories and a different style and certainly a lot more violence and adult attitude. The bad guys are really bad in the Energon Universe series. Not cartoon bad like back in the day when they’d say, I’m going to take over the world, oh fiddlesticks, the rocket ship blew up and now I’m going to run away. They’re actually squashing humans with their hands. It’s pretty cool. I mean, it’s terrible. It’s gruesome. It’s awful. Terrible things. Anyway, it starts off here. We’ve got Jetfire. Jetfire appears briefly in Void Rivals issue one, which is the first Energon Universe comic book. Jetfire has been lost for who knows how many years and he missed the whole Cybertron conflict. So he starts to reassemble these broken Transformers only to find out that they’re at war with each other. And the first one he reassembles using Teletran 1 is Starscream, the biggest jerk of all of them.

To Starscream’s credit, the first thing he does is shoot Bumblebee in the face. He shoots Bumblebee’s corpse in the face just to make sure. I think Starscream deserves a high five. Anyway, from there it all goes downhill. He then shoots Jetfire in the chest. Then Optimus Prime shows up and starts pulling out all these crazy wrestling moves on Starscream. I didn’t know this when I was reading the comics the first time, but the artist, who is absolutely terrific, and the writer of the first twenty four issues, is Daniel Warren Johnson, who has made a name for himself doing a lot of wrestling stuff. So there are wall to wall wrestling moves in these issues where Optimus is doing pile drivers on Starscream. And in the background, Teletran 1 is still reanimating Transformers, but they’re mostly Decepticons. So we’ve got Skywarp and Soundwave. Ratchet shows up on the Autobot side and there’s a many page, very colorful fight. The colors are just crazy in these issues. I love the art style. Ravage shows up. The humans, Carly and Spike, don’t really know what’s going on, but they can sense that Optimus is the good guy.

At one point they slide his gun over to him. And if you haven’t seen these issues, I know this is radio and not television, but they’re gorgeous. The Transformers look incredible. The colors are incredible. The action scenes are incredible. Daniel Warren Johnson uses a very interesting style, which they carry throughout the entire series even when other artists pick it up. Very jagged lines to accentuate the action. Not a whole lot happens in this issue except for the giant fight scene and this brief introduction to the whole concept. Jetfire crashes in a quarry and the Autobots escape, and next thing you know Starscream is tearing apart a power station and squashes a human being with his robot hands. He grabs a human and crushes him. I’m not sure he deserves a high five for that one. Murdering Bumblebee, yes, because Bumblebee sucks. Maybe he can also find Snarf and get rid of him too. This could be a different comic book series where we send Starscream out to get rid of all the annoying 80s sidekicks like Orko. You’re on the list for extermination.

This one’s a great read and if you’ve been eyeing up the new Transformers series, I highly recommend you start at the beginning. I think these are in trade paperbacks by now. It’s just terrific. The best current comic book series, Transformers. That’s your Daily Comic Book Mission from ComicBook.beer. Enjoy. But don’t pour one out for Bumblebee. He doesn’t deserve it.