I’m a Transformers fan. I’ve been watching the various TV shows since I was a kid and have seen every single Michael Bay film in the franchise. Because sometimes, I need a way to send my enjoyment in film as a medium crashing to the ground when it gets just a bit too high, like I enjoy life or something? Feels like that shouldn’t be allowed the way everything’s going in the world.

No, focus back to Transformers, where it’s safe. Recently, I’ve been trying to start collecting comics from IDW and have discovered there are way too many series… just way too many. After months of searching Amazon and various comic stores and spending more money than I would have liked, I now have a couple of complete series and a bunch of incomplete series that I will never be able to complete, which irritates me. Then, one night, on my latest trawl for new comics to purchase, I came across exceptional news… IDW had lost the rights to Transformers comics and had been handed over to Image Comics with new issues already out?! Finally, a Transformers series I can get in on the first issue and not have to worry about having to deep dive in order to buy back issues.

I don’t have a bunch of Image comics, but I have heard from my mates that their art style is stylistically different to IDW, which I took with a grain of salt as most of the time I feel that “stylistically different just means they use wider lettering and darker shades of colours. Then I got the comic in my hands and opened the first page. Turns out I had no fucking idea what I was talking about in the best possible way.

Now that I’ve shown my hand, as it were, let’s roll this back a bit and talk about one of the biggest changes in this new series, which is the plot. The well-established plot of the Transformers (in both the G1 cartoon and original Marvel comics) has been that Autobots and Deceptions crash land on Earth while a war rages on their home world of Cybertron.

The two factions then lay dormant for centuries before a volcanic eruption triggered their revival. The two sides then resume their civil war on Earth, to often disastrous results. That rough outline is still present for this new series, and yet, there’s still a bunch of surprises to this story.

Mainly, and SPOILER WARNING for people that haven’t read the first couple of issues yet, well-established characters that fans would assume to be safe are not. Within the first ten pages, one of my favourite characters was killed off in a brutal fashion that I did not expect and that sums up one of my favourite things about this plot. The writers have taken risks and don’t want to play it safe. There are references to the Vietnam War and the effects of war on soldiers and civilians alike, which is something you don’t see a lot from this franchise, at least not so explicitly. I can’t wait to see how the writers delve deeper into these themes and ideas going forward, and I really hope they don’t shy away from it as the series continues. Understandably, whether you’ve been following the franchise before or are coming fresh to the table will affect the mileage you get from this shake-up. Personally, I loved it, and every page had a little line or some reference that I just adored.

Something where your mileage won’t vary is with the artwork because it is fantastic across the board. Whereas IDW is all clean, with crisp lines, giving a bit of a mechanical and sterile feel to the art, Image is so much more gritty. The way the artists use harsh colours and lines in the action to juxtapose the beautiful world through Optimus’ eyes and the horrific violence that occurs throughout the comic sticks with you long after you finish reading.

Whereas the original cartoon and comics had a single laser shot and a robot falling down with a building collapsing cleanly in the background, in the new series, there is no such thing as clean. There is always debris, collateral damage, and horror for the innocent bystanders. That is the horror of war, which is made even more bleak when considering that this has become routine for the Transformers.

Years of endless war have dulled the terror and suffering to just white noise. It’s incredibly moving for me, and there are not many comics where I get such a clear intention for what the artists are trying to convey in their art and how well it meshes with the writing.

The new Transformers series from Image Comics is one of those comics that upends what you think the medium is capable of. It happened in 1986 with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons‘ Watchmen, in 1982 with Gary Larson‘s Far Side Gallery, and, for me, at least, it’s happened now in 2024 with Image’s Transformers.

Have you read the new Transformers series? What other Image comics would you recommend? Let me know in the comments below.