Hey everyone. A while ago, there was a thread that had the question "How would the the big Marvel comics events be different if the Transformers were still part of the Marvel Universe?". Now, that got me thinking. We were discussing how the Transformers would have effected the Marvel Universe, but my question right now is this: how would the events of the Marvel Transformers comics be different if they would have continued to exist in the main Marvel Universe?

Would SHIELD be an antagonist for the Transformers? Would the Avengers aid the Autobots in their battle against the Decepticons? And the list goes on. What do you think?

 

There'd have been ten million "events" where the Avengers normally teamed up with the Autobots would suddenly decide they're not friends anymore so they'd have a big fight and "things will never be the same again" except everything literally goes back to normal the second the event finishes. Also Nick Spencer would make Optimus Prime a Decepticon who wants to wipe out all life on Earth and reveal that he's always been a genocidal Decepticon and he'd secretly kill Bumblebee in the process or something, then the good guys would fight again.

 

Well, TFs weren't a part of mainstream Marvel since Circuit Breaker's appearance in Secret Wars II, so I dunno. That's a lot of history to cover. Presumably SHIELD would have taken the place of RATT. WHo knows if they would have tried to fool the public with Robot Master or not. Circuit Breaker may have been an antagonist or, possibly, a recruit. The Car Wash of Doom would have been a bigger deal, for sure, and the West COast branch of the Avengers would have had to investigate a lot of Transformers-based phenomena, etc.

 

“The All New! All Different! TransFormers!
The greatest comics magazine in the world!
Starring Wolverine!”
Circa 1990

 

I'm hoping they wouldn't be all that different. Even though Transformers was a part of the Marvel-U they barely interacted. I think that was for the best. Trying to tie in all these different universes into a shared universe never seems to work...

 

There would be no fandom. We'd all have killed each other eons ago fan-raging over whoever ended up winning Galactus v. Unicron.

 

Probably Unicron. Or Thanos.

 

I think Marvel hit the nail on the head. Just like G.I. Joe, the Transformers in Marvel 616 would have been incredibly disruptive, almost to the point of being universe-altering disruptive. You would have had a full scale war, probably with at least three factions (though more likely probably more than five). Think about it, the political superpowers don't really like rouge superhumans. They liked Excaliber, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four because they were controlled. They did not like the X-Men, the Defenders, or the any of "those guys." No matter how good a leader MG1 Prime was, he would have still squarely fallen into the "cannot be controlled rouge" category. That's also not counting the other races like the Shi'ar and the Kree, who would have at the very least known about Unicron and the Matrix (probably especially the latter as it is probably the most controllable object in MG1 given its size).

If we played this scenario realistically, there would have been massive casualties on all sides. Superhumans killing Transformers and Transformers killing superhumans and Transformers. The "pick them up and put them back together" mentality would only fuel that. You'd probably eventually end up with an Age of Apocalypse scenario, because we all know that dude can play a long game.

Would it have been interesting? Absolutely, especially if you threw the safe character rules off and threw in some things like sparks, and a Lenin-like Megatron meets Magneto. Come to think of it, the 'cons would have probably fallen in with the USSR quite well, especially given how they started, though I am not sure OP and the Autobots would have been as pro-American/western as we think. But, ultimately, that leads us down a splinter time line, and not the actual 616 main universe.

 

Marvel writers hate robots. It's a trend they've carried forward since the Silver Age. For the most part, Marvel's scope and breadth of robots and robot stories are limited to robots "struggling to be human", "hating their creators" or being "alien and unknowable in their needs and/or desires".

MG1 Transformers don't romance. They don't have sex. Their interpersonal relationships are pretty limited. They don't wear skintight outfits and don't really spark the traditional reader power fantasy. The vast majority of comic writers struggle to tell stories even with those visceral human-interest hooks. I wouldn't expect Marvel to do very well by them at all. Unless there was some kind of sea change at Marvel (i.e. the Transformers were as well received as 90's Wolverine), you would have seen the Transformers basically being the butt monkeys of the Universe.

As a result, you would have seen them be effective for the limited series they were in, then beat up a ton outside that miniseries and shuffled off to the comic ghetto with stuff like Alpha Flight and other crap teams that Marvel doesn't know what to do with. The concept might be interesting, but I doubt the execution would be.

This might sound like I have a low opinion of comic writers. Maybe I do, by and large. Every so often a really great writer comes along and piques my interest but the big houses of DC and Marvel have really not grabbed my interest for a while.

Overall, I don't think Transformers were meant to tell the kinds of stories Marvel wants to tell. Or rather, they don't tell the story how Marvel wants to tell them. Marvel tends to grab hot button issues and wave them like a burning flag. They're more interested in the imagery and flashy concepts as opposed to actually exploring anything. CIVIL WAR! PERSONAL RIGHTS! But what of it? Super-people being forced to be held accountable for trying to be super seems less like a controversial issue to me when you compare it to the Functionist universe where you are killed en masse when your right to exist is revoked because a group of religious zealots think you have no social utility.

And that's the thing: Roberts, Barber, Roche... they've all done a wonderful job in the past getting Transformers to talk about race relations, "human" rights, failure, metaphysics, religion, redemption and friendship in a way many other comics can't. These topics and ideas have been explored for a decade-plus because he's made Transformers people, with a limited (as opposed to Marvel's excessive and DC's "enough to choke a hippo") amount of soap opera subplots.

So the answer is - not very different, save for maybe a year. Marvel comics has historically been absolutely terrible in making things stick for more than 5 years and within the last 10 has happily torn up their rulebook so that nothing matters. I'd be more upset with how terrible the Transformers would have been if Marvel held onto that license as opposed to having it eventually flow to IDW.