Transforming the Narrative: An Analysis of The Transformers: The IDW Collection - Phase One, Volume One

By Nola Pfau

For those not in the know, 2018 wrapped up a thirteen-year span of Transformers comics all contained within the same sphere of continuity. Thirteen years doesn’t seem like a lot in the face of some franchises, but for Transformers, it’s unprecedented; the 2005-2018 IDW continuity is the longest cohesive story that has ever existed for Hasbro’s darling robots, longer by far than any of the cartoons that inspired them, and longer too than even the massive movie franchise of the last decade or so. As a means of recording that chronology, in 2010 IDW began releasing The Transformers: The IDW Collection, a series of oversized hardcovers with matching trade-dress, spot-gloss, the works. As established, I am a sucker for the luxury of well-curated comics memorabilia; less established is that I am also a sucker for these robots. I’ve already read the vast majority of this output in the past, but with the first volume of these hardcovers in my hands, I wanted to go back through and do it again, this time with a careful eye and a trusty word processor open for annotation.

And so, here we are. The Transformers: The IDW Collection - Phase One, Volume One. The first story collected here is the origin of the original Transformers villain, MEGATRON. Megatron Origin #1-4 (2007), written by Eric Holmes and drawn by Alex Milne, details exactly how he came to be the leader of the Decepticons, and it’s...not quite the tale you expect. 

It’s also not the earliest story in this continuity, either chronologically or in publication order—there’s a short foreword by IDW editor Andy Schmidt where he explains that the first five volumes at least are in what they’ve determined are the best reading order. He acknowledges this is a subjective thing, but suggests that the method here works well for reading the saga as a complete experience, as it preserves dramatic reveals and other story beats for the right time, contextually. Past volume five this will be less important as the franchise moves directly into numbered ongoings, but for the first several years the Transformers comic line was composed of miniseries and one-shots that jumped around chronologically, so having the work of sorting that out done for me is not a thing I mind. 

I remembered Megatron Origin as the story of a proletariat uprising, and it is, but it’s more than that; in fact it’s weirdly relevant to today’s political climate. The story opens with a bit of worldbuilding; Cybertron (the home planet of the Transformers) in peacetime is ruled by a senate, a corrupt organization that enforces a caste system built around the concept of “functionism,” that is, the idea that a given Transformer’s function in society is determined by their alternate mode (what they transform into). Since Transformers are not allowed to choose their alternate modes, most end up locked into poverty and servitude; providing menial work for the benefit of other, luckier members of their society. 

Enter Orbiting Mine C-12. Here, Megatron is a miner, toiling long hours for Energon, the ambrosia of these cybernetic gods. Because machine organisms do not need to consume food and drink like we might, their only source of fuel and energy is this substance. Wars are fought over it, planets destroyed over it—are you sensing an allegory? Ten points if you did.

The first pages of this story introduce us to Senator Decimus, who is visiting Orbiting Mine C-12 amid a Cybertron-wide “clampdown” (read: curfew) meant to curb riots over an Energon shortage, in order to inform the workers there that the mine is going to be shut down. The workers immediately figure out that the reason for this shutdown is not the mine going dry, but the ongoing encroachment of automation (a politically relevant story crutch here, but a hilarious one in the context of autonomous robots already existing to do the work). Naturally they protest, and when they do, the Senator’s security forces step in, killing one of the miners. It’s notable that this scene contains the first in-story instance of the Autobot logo, what is traditionally regarded as the ultimate Symbol of the Good Guys. Here, it’s adorning the riot shield and chest of an unnamed member of Decimus’ security detail, which means that its first usage is as an oppressive force facilitating the brutal murder of a miner standing up for his rights. That’s right, folks—pre-war, the Autobots are cops. 

In retrospect, it’s wild that IDW got away with this—I’m trying to imagine a 2019 Hasbro, in the face of 2019 social media, allowing IDW to paint its prime money-making heroes with the same brush as Darren Wilson, Daniel Pantaleo, and the multitude of other police officers who have been filmed and witnessed murdering Black people in broad daylight. It’s clear in the reading that this story is built on the common tale of uprising amongst an oppressed people, but I don’t think anyone—the writers, the suits at Hasbro, the fans—could have predicted that the cultural backlash to state violence would become such a marked flashpoint in our own society so soon (relatively) after these books were released. Obviously, I won’t say that no one could have predicted the accuracy of this modeled violence to the real life violence we’ve witnessed, because Black people have been trying to tell us about that for years now.

Still, the politics of oppression on display are interesting here; most of the time, when fiction plays allegorically with this sort of thing, you end up with mutants from X-Men (made it almost two whole pages without mentioning them—a new record), or some other type of aberration where the difference is more than simple skin tone—it’s something that can be weaponized. Mutant oppression, for instance, will never be a proper substitute for good old-fashioned racism because it’s justified to fear someone who can kill you with a glance, and who may or may not be able to control that ability. Obviously the hook with those stories is what people do with that fear, but the allegory falls apart in its base form if the stand-ins are actually dangerous by the very nature of their existence, which is not a legitimate claim that can be made about Black people, or people of any skin tone.

In Megatron Origin, the nature of the oppression is function-based, which itself still does not quite hew close enough to reality, but is at least a legitimate form of oppression we see here. It’s a neat bit of creative allegory, but it does require some contextual trickery to make it work; remember that our classic understanding of Megatron is not only that he transforms, but that he transforms into a gun. Here he can do none of that yet, but it’s important to remember that his alternate mode during the Transformers’ time on Earth is explicitly a weapon. Furthermore, it’s not just any weapon, it’s a Walther P38—a German handgun developed for use by Nazi soldiers in World War II. The character has fascism baked into his core, and no narrative trickery can escape that.

But that’s a problem for the future. Here and now, miners are miners because their bodies and alternate modes are best suited to that function, this is the core tenet of the philosophy. However, those miners then lose that role—it’s more than a job, it’s their entire way of life, from birth onward—due to the threat of automation. This raises the question of how the concept of automation is addressed by the philosophy of functionism: If an individual’s destiny is to serve society in the manner their form is most efficiently made for, then how does automation come about? Whose destiny is it to develop non-sentient machines to do the work of sentient laborers? This is the mechanic by which the oppressive truth of the philosophy is revealed.

We don’t yet know if the truth of functionism is revealed to Megatron, but we do know that he’s not happy to see a fellow worker killed. The move—to make an example of one and inspire fear in the rest—backfires significantly, as an enraged Megatron buries a mining axe in Senator Decimus’ shoulder and attacks the security enforcer head-on, murdering him with his bare hands whilst screaming “NO.” It is an act of spectacular, retributive violence; Megatron, the great despot, commits his first murder to avenge the unjust death of an oppressed compatriot, inspiring a riot and striking the proverbial match that would eventually flame into the great Cybertronian War.

Again, the politics here are fascinating. Megatron’s act of violence is meant to be horrifying; even he is overcome with remorse immediately. His first murder is explicitly of someone bearing the symbol of Transformers righteousness; the thing that we, as readers, have been instinctively trained by decades to think of as archetypically heroic. The thing is, though—it’s not horrifying. It’s not really even wrong. Megatron and his cohorts here have been shown, in no uncertain terms, that their lives are meaningless to the ruling caste of Cybertron. That caste has created a system by which they can increase profits while cutting out pesky things like “having to shelter, feed, and care for workers,” and they are embracing that system without even batting an eye at the destitution this will create amongst the populace; they care only for lining their pockets. One again—does this sound familiar to you? It probably should.

Furthermore, it’s been demonstrated that the primary arm of the senate, the Autobots, designated with “upholding peace,” are absolutely willing to murder civilians without due cause directly in front of a sitting politician without even the protection of plausible deniability. When the individual in question kills this worker, he even says to the crowd that it’s for their protection. In the face of an act like this, Megatron’s decision to retaliate in kind not only makes sense, it’s the only truly reasonable option. Faced with extermination, Megatron acts to save himself, to save his brethren, to strike a blow at oppression. He acts immediately to end an existential threat to his kind, and that act is one of unqualified heroism. The question, then, is how he gets from here to our classical understanding of his nature as a character, because make no mistake, he does get there.

The rest of the first chapter of this story is denouement; the riot is “pacified” (lethal force is used against the crowd as a whole in response to his violence), Megatron and others are taken into custody, and escape during the course of transport to disappear into the Cybertronian underworld. The last couple of pages introduce us to Sentinel Prime and his assistant Prowl, as they briefly discuss the events surrounding Megatron’s escape, before Sentinel dismisses the idea that the situation might need his attention—he doesn’t “have the struts to deal with another whining senator.” I’ll cover Sentinel and the concept of Primes next time, though—right now I want to dig into part of the next issue.

In chapter two, we’re reintroduced to Megatron, this time as an arena fighter. With the orbital mine now gone and Autobot forces looking for him, He’s making a living in underground combat, where all he has to do is show up and fight. This is naturally illegal, and equally as naturally, that hardly matters to the people participating—what normal job or life would they return to, with the encroaching spectre of automation stripping that from them? To be poor, to be marginalized, is sometimes to feel powerless against the machinations of a society that wants to keep you down; it makes sense in such situations to look for small areas of control. The Arena here is one such avenue—to win a fight, to hear a crowd chanting your name; it’s easy to see why someone like Megatron would gravitate to it.

But the arena also betrays him, narratively; it shows that for all of his remorse, his capacity to kill is a thing that he will reach for again and again, murdering his fellow combatants and eventually even his own team captain to assume the role of leader. That his first act was heroic was a coincidence; Megatron’s story is the fable of the powerless reaching for power not to correct an injustice, but just to have it. His prior murder was depicted as an act of vengeance; here, with an opponent powerless to stop him, he coldly and callously ends that opponent’s life, deciding consciously that he’s okay with whatever he has to do to keep and grow his following.

It’s also the first we see of some of his more classic design cues; the prior issue had depicted the buckethead and broad torso that we identify with, but that torso had been bare—he wasn’t a cop, and no Decepticon emblem had been invented yet! Here though we see steps in that direction; first in his taking and wearing of a medallion that resembles a prototype of that faction badge, second in markings that are painted on his chest; a parabolic design that originally functioned as decorative markings on the side of his Generation One toy (again, a gun made for fascists). 

There’s also a neat explanation for one of those classic bits of pointless continuity, because there are fans to whom this kind of thing matters—in the original Marvel comics, which gave all of Hasbro’s characters their names and stories, Megatron’s head is black. However, in the cartoon, it’s silver, the same as the rest of his body. Here, in Megatron’s arena victory, the comic bridges the gap between them—while his head has been depicted as black in the story so far, he removes what is actually a mining helmet to reveal the actual shape of his head. The resulting look was received so poorly that—to my knowledge—it was never shown again in this continuity. 

At any rate, Megatron’s success as a combatant catches the eye of Senator Ratbat (yes, seriously), who dispatches an operative of his to covertly assist Megatron in furthering his cause of chaos and discord. This is where we begin to really see the root of the Decepticon movement; alone, Megatron is an angry ex-miner exorcising his frustration in cage matches. Through Soundwave, Ratbat’s operative, he’s introduced to the original three Seekers: Skywarp, Thundercracker, and Starscream. As there is power in threes, so the Decepticon cause is built on it; the classic trio of G1 villains Megatron, Soundwave and Starscream, and the trio of Seekers, operatives who have one distinct advantage over the Autobots they’re preparing to fight—they’re flight-capable. Via a back-alley surgeon, Megatron immediately has both them and himself fitted with new weapons for war. It’s here we see a leader who isn’t simply reacting, but is planning—one does not spearhead a revolution without tactical prowess. 

Because now, with access to resources and soldiers, that’s what Megatron’s planning— ostensibly he believes in the need for justice, having been a target of injustice himself, but more than that, he’s had a taste of power and he’s hungry. He moves first to have his Seekers crash a ceremony honoring Senator Decimus for his public service—with flight capability they storm the ceremony, causing chaos and carving the newly-designed Decepticon symbol into a giant emblem of the Autobot one before kidnapping Senator Decimus. From there, the attacks escalate to sabotage, mass poisoning, bombings. As Senator Ratbat begins to realize that secretly funding Megatron might’ve been a bad idea, Megatron uses the increasing unrest and awareness of his movement to hijack broadcasts, sending out an open recruitment call. 

Finally, we see Megatron the Orator, as he calls out to the disenfranchised in cities across the planet, imploring them to “bring their misery together and fight.” He unites them under the banner of being “Forgotten” and tells them that they will remain so until they’re willing to take up arms against their oppressors. It’s an effective ploy, and it shows why so many united under him; he promised them power and glory and a redress of indignities—again; a relevant story for today. 

His final act in this origin story, his coup de gras, is an assault on the Autobot Security Headquarters. Here Megatron plays with the Autobots’ expectations, and author Eric Holmes plays with ours. First, Megatron “loses” a significant battle, leading to his forces being captured. Then, as they’re locked in cells with the Autobots feeling triumphant, Starscream rushes against the bars, promising to reveal the entirety of Megatron’s plans in exchange for clemency. Megatron orders his troops to kill Starscream, but they don’t get the chance—he’s taken before the court immediately, where he reveals twin cannons installed in his forearms and hidden all this time. He and Soundwave murder the council, and with the ruling body deposed, the taking of the city of Kaon becomes mere cleanup. There’s a spectacular fight between Megatron and Sentinel Prime, and as the former adds another murder to his tally, Prowl, now the most senior Autobot in Kaon, gives the order to evacuate, prioritising the lives under his care in a way that we have seen no Autobot do yet. The city falls to Megatron, and there the story—this one at least—ends.

On the reread I find that I enjoy Megatron Origin a lot more than I remembered—it’s not really the story of a proletariat uprising so much as it is the hijacking of one by an extremist with a chip on his shoulder. It succeeds in crafting a complex motivation for a character who had thus far been a one-note fascist—he’s not really sympathetic, but he’s charismatic, and it’s chilling to see the way he leverages the hopes and dreams of an oppressed class to pursue his vendetta. It’s interesting to me that these four issues are the only comics Eric Holmes has written thus far—the story here makes him a more compelling villain in the long run, and that’s a thing that I appreciate. Of course, it also complicates some later story choices...but we’ll get to that in due time.