A one-shot called Transformers: Trial and Error. The elevator pitch is that, on a pre-war Cybertron, a young, idealistic public defender named Orion Pax must defend a well-intentioned but radical rabble-rouser named Megatron. Probably make this a double-length issue, really lean into the legal drama aspect of it, but don't lose sight of the fact that this is an alien species of transforming robots.

 

An idea I’ve kicked around. Not much

A continuation of G1 set in present day. Using current toys as characters. New bodies thanks to the plasma energy chamber. Set on Earth Cybertron (currently in earth orbit) and deep space.
Year one. Set tone and character development of new characters. Legacy characters pick right up.

Reverse ultimate doom Autobots and humanity working together to send Cybertron to a new home.
Cybertron citizens are happy and healthy. Golden age. A counsel of autobots and retired decepticons governing.

deep space. Springer and the wreakers have found Galvatron/Scorpanok a civil war has broken out between the two leaders. Zerak is preparing to retake nebulos and galvatron is rebuilding Unicron.

Things escalate quickly and Nebulos is destroyed by zerak if he can’t have it nobody can he goes with with it. Big G takes control of remaining forces. Springers crew

tryes to destroy The Death Star… I mean half rebuilt Unicron… crew grossly is out numbered, Fort Max escaping to earth (space bridge) chared and damaged, Soundwave and his minions reprogram the Space bridge and send it ? Prime and his team are stranded on earth. I’d stretch it out 12 issues (1 year) and the final page the Cons ship rises from the ocean and is heading for wherever they sent Cybertron.
Year 2
Autobots board the (apparently restored at some point between 2010 and now) Ark to go after the decepticons. A team of autobots stay behind to defend earth lead by spike. Headmasters/targetmasters (human partners) are earth based now. Optimus captains the ark.

Cybertron??? Will Optimus follow the Cons or rescue Springer and the wreakers What will they find when they get there… will springer survive till help arrives… stay tuned for the next exciting addition of The Transformers.

 

Idea 3: Getter Robo G vs. Transformers: The Machination

A familiar story. Human finds crashed spaceship, mechanical alien entity offers Faustian bargain, human and alien cybernetically hybridize their species and try to take over the world. It's uncanny how well Emperor Brai fits as a Transformers villain and how well IDW Scorponok fits vice versa. The series cold opens with Ryouma getting kidnapped right off the street, the first two or so issues combining his amnesia arc with Hunter O'Nion's headmaster arc. Ryouma too gets unwanted cybernetic implants, but unlike Hunter he actually succumbs to the Machination's reconditioning and is pitted against his own team.

The remaining issues chronicle their battles for the lost Cybertronian colony ship Atlantis.

 

I would do a series about how Star Saber became leader of the Autobots in Victory. Kinda show his start from a mere rookie to becoming the best swordsman in the galaxy, rising through the ranks to becoming the Autobot Supreme Commander. I mean, we don't know much about his past, so why not explore that? What trials did he have to overcome to become so strong and become leader of his faction? Did he lose friends and allies? Did he have a rival in his faction? I want to know all that, if at all possible.

 

While I'm not sure what directions my plot would go or what characters to focus on, etc., I know I would want to invest a lot into world building, particularly when it comes to the Cybertronian race. I want to treat Cybertron as an actual planet with actual history - different regions with different cultural groups with their own histories and mythologies - and have a lot of that inform the current state of Cybertronian society. IDW1 gestured at this with the era of the Primes, in which various tribes and people groups (some defined by physical differences, some from environmental proximity, some more ideological) became unified, first into thirteen tribes ruled by autocratic god-kings, then to a single monarchical system ruled by a single Prime, then into something of a republican system. I would like to complicate that idea by introducing different nations on Cybertron in addition to the traditional one. In practice, this probably looks like the whole "colony worlds" thing from Cybertron and IDW1, but since they all coexist on the same planet, they are more immediately connected to the story of the inevitable Autobot/Decepticon war.

All of this, I think, would go a long way towards making Cybertron feel like a real world, and Cybertronians like a real species of intelligent, sapient life, which would allow the story to be set on Cybertron and still have plenty of room for interesting plotlines. I think it would almost certainly be better suited for a novel rather than a comic, however - which may just be a limitation of my writer's brain.

 

Transformers: What If?

Remember that bad Deviations comic that basically just bullied Hot Rod? I'd do something like that, but good, tackling all possible divergences in the Transformers' history.

 

Blackarachnia as Spiderman? Take THAT, Marvel! Ha ha ha! :-D

 

The homage to the G1 cover lined up perfectly for the story.

 

A one-shot profile book featuring obscure and generic Transformers (including random recolors) from the 1980s cartoon created specifically for the show who had zero or little personality given to them originally. Those who were not even given a name would be given a name, and treated as if they were actual known Transformers characters.

 

It’d be Crossroads with better production values than me photographing toys in my living room and attic. Maybe with an improved storyline as well, since I’d have the input of the artist and editor strengthening the weak parts.

 

Well. I'm a writer/artist but "breaking in" takes an act of congress.

 

I think about this a lot so buckle up lads.

I'm always thinking up fan universes and the like as like a weird mental exercise I do now or then, usually when I'm reading or watching Transformers stuff and thinking of how I'd do it instead. But tbh what I want really boils down to something mostly light and fun but also waaaaay more grounded as a robot comic. In terms of worldbuilding I am so done with concepts like Sparks, the Allspark and Primus and miss when I was a kid and just thought they were robots that were built by somebody. I don't even think protoforms are that interesting anymore.

I can't overstate how much I prefer the idea of Transformer bodies all just being built and wired together from scratch by the hands of another Transformer instead of some liquid metal thing that gets poured into a mold and given an actual-ass soul from God. Or the sentio-metallico just popping out of the planet thing and all the little rivets, cords, and bits of glass and wheel just happening around the spark, or the Allspark turning cars and stuff immediately into humanoid things (without accounting for how that would work without the vehicles already having heads and limbs tucked away in there somewhere), or that Pyramid thing in IDW2 where they come out of the core of the planet completely formed.

I grew up with Beast Wars, RID, and the Unicron Trilogy and the Allspark in Beast Wars was really the biggest point of mysticism in my whole childhood viewing experience, but my kid brain rationalized it as more like a (Oh well duh, it's the afterlife. Their souls go to the afterlife when they die. Of course) and it wasn't like the core of the plot or anything. Just a "here this exists". Like there was Primus in Cybertron but as a kid I don't remember thinking of him as a mystical God or anything, just like some kind of glowing entity related to the Transformers in Energon and Cybertron's robot mode in Cybertron. Also that was like, Anime. Anime just be like that. I don't think I once considered the fact that these guys were anything other than robots built by some ancient mysterious alien/aliens until I discovered the tfwiki not long after the 07 movie came out and found out about Primus in the marvel comics.

Transformers never hit the same way they did when they were just robots. Like for all the bold takes that came from Beast Wars and Beast Machines for the time they never forgot that they were robots and not just metal aliens. For my take their personalities would just come from an advanced computer algorithm that essentially mimics human level emotions and intelligence. Maybe the Matrix or Vector Sigma or something is a super-computer or computer program that's just always been on Cybertron that can upload a personality to a brain module or hard-drive because their own AI technology just isn't quite there yet. Or maybe it is and they just make the minds from scratch as well like the Dinobots and technobots. Why don't they make everyone an awesome tank or a jet? I dunno because it's expensive I guess, or a shortage of Cybertronian jet fuel. It can be explained, trust me. No sparks, still too magic. No protoforms-- they still gotta build a body for their babby Transformer. I just can't do the whole a-god-did-it thing anymore. It's just so overdone and boring to me now.

That said, they would still act like humans like they have in every other series, perhaps with less formality though. Like more MTMTE, Beast Wars and Animated and less Prime and IDW2. There are some subtle ways to make both the Autobots and Decepticons seem alien without sacrificing the core values of what makes a character an actual character. Like I remember reading a fanfic at one point where Bumblebee is unable to hear the sound of the ocean in a seashell due to how he lacks the specific parts in a human ear for that effect to occur, and how Optimus isn't able to see the constellations the way humans do as it can be assumed that Cybertronians have never needed to make out patterns and symbols the same way humans have through evolution. I'd like to see small stuff like that, while also letting them get drunk on oil and playing online games and junk. For some reason I like the idea of some Autobot like Hot Shot or Hot Rod putting on a gaming headset going "Where we dropping boys" and there being like, one of the Decepticons in the same game-lobby.

I'd try to tone down the war-bad theme that was pretty much all that could be thought of to say with Transformers as of late, at least with the Netflix series. There are so many interesting political, existential, speculative and philosophical views shared through the genre that things could be so much better than just "war's bad and it makes this red dude depressed". I'd try to go deeper into what can actually be said through sci-fi and how the world could, speculatively, react/be affected by aliens being present on the planet disguised as their technology. Oh yeah, and I'd reset the focus to Earth even though everyone hates humans. We've seen the robots fight on Cybertron. We've seen them living life before Cybertron. Both have seen varying degrees of success, but I'm not sure how much more can be said that could warrant keeping things set squarely on Cybertron. We can always do that again in flashbacks, or cutaways to what's going on on Cybertron. Maybe even a mini-series. No big deal.

This wouldn't necessarily mean making humans the main focus, more like it would be part of the setting. Like I'm thinking back to Furman's -ation era, in which you have Decepticons like Scorponok and Megatron coming up with plans (through fascimiles and/or stoking existing tensions) that involve shifting the balance of powers on Earth in order to weaken humanity for conquest, while always maintaining a strict code of stealth because dang, humans can still be dangerous and perhaps the Decepticon army has been fractured or something right now. It was the closest I think we got to Robots in Disguise hiding in plain sight being a featured/core element outside of like, Cybertron maybe? But only really because they stayed in disguise in populated areas, and was only briefly used for jokes. I also don't dislike the idea posed in Dark of the Moon of Soundwave making human contacts to help the Decepticons reach certain goals in exchange for money, technology, or power. Which isn't really an unrealistic thing to occur, especially when you consider the Decepticons would probably lie about conquering the whole world thing. In fact if they even said something like "We just want to conquer country X" that would probably be enough for some people. I'd also lean into the horror aspect associated with this setting of aliens that can shapeshift into pretty much anything hiding in plain sight and plotting humanity's extinction and/or slavery, which would be pretty easy to do, and pretty popular today with a lot of online horror featuring concepts of Doppelgangers, Skinwalkers, and the like.

I've also been really down with alternate history stuff lately, which might inform this next part. Maybe it's the whole Rise of the Beasts being an accumulation of scripts like The Last Knight was rather than a natural follow-up and building of stakes and scale from Bumblebee that a reboot would necessitate that's been on my mind, but I've been thinking of that cut scene that was going to be at the end of Bumblebee of Knight-verse Megatron in cryo stasis under lock and key by Sector Seven, and how that whole plot-point can be redone for a new reboot of the Bayverse with that initial story point intact. Only with no Allspark. If humans had Transformers in their possession since the early 1900s, how would the world be shaped differently? In the 07 movie, Megatron is given as the reason for the huge technological leaps in the 1900s. Now, in real life we can chalk this up to basic human ingenuity, which I kind of prefer as a human. But if Megatron had been found by the United States in 1897, and his body was used as a framework for technology in the 20th century, how different would the world look now? Both geopolitically as well as technologically? Would ray-guns be a common form of weaponry, and/or has been for the past century? Would we have colonized Mars or would the moon look like a mini-Cybertron? What about human-made transtectors-- Ginrai anyone? Would the wars throughout the 20th century have gone down differently? Would the cold-war still be ongoing today? Especially if we took that note from the expanded movie universe comics that had Shockwave similarly captured by the Soviets. Would the western world be more militarized (it would allow the military-based Decepticons to blend in easier) or less? Is AI technology now an even more inescapable facet of daily life and used for essentially everything now? And could technology have actually regressed in some sectors-- like what if the internet or credit transactions was limited due to the reality, which has been kept secret from the public, that there is technology out there that could completely destroy their economies if they put too much stock in these things. Either way, Megatron would 100% be conscious and perhaps vocal, manipulating and deceiving the S7 humans for his own ends like in Animated. Pretending to be helpful, maybe convincingly repentant, but actually seething the entire time due to his restricted status.

Anyway that would be a vague outline of the setting for the action to occur. In terms of premise and characters, I don't have anyone specific in mind aside from Megatron and Optimus Prime with neither of them being THE leader of the faction, just notorious ones if that. I think I mentioned this before, but I'd take out the Prime lineage entirely and make Prime just his name. Amazing how much world there is to build when you take the Primes out of the equation. Cybertron's history can be literally anything now. There would be a team of Autobots who are stranded on the planet, and meet a rotating cast of humans who they either befriend or have trouble with, but it doesn't make sense for humans to stick around in an alien military base. Unless their base happens to be like an abandoned parking garage and there is a homeless dude living there that they just hang out with time to time. Really the only reason they would consistently hang out with any humans while trying to hide from them is if the human is a macguffin (no) or if they just lived under the same roof (is better).

Megatron should be the main villain though, full stop. His motivation 100% being vengeance on the humans, as well as his main focus being on developing plans to destroy them, rather than the Autobots or Optimus directly. Because you know, if people are going to plot to betray them they have to have at least some valid points for it beyond sheer power hungriness. We've seen the latter and it's kind of been done. Also he would like, never lose. He should be loaded with Xanatos Gambits in which he would win at least somewhat. Because as Marty Isenberg put it, Megatron gets kind of worn out if he's a master planner that just keeps losing. He should struggle somewhat, but his threat shouldn't be diminished through his losses. During the lead up to him he should be given some kind of legendary status. For the Decepticons a commanding general who ventured into the stars in order to find the cure for their planet's energy issues only to disappear, with legends of him returning as their saviour. Whereas the Autobots would think of him as a boogeyman, the ultimate evil due to his almost messiah-like status among the Decepticons. There would be other villains and threats, but like come on. Megatron. Main bad guy. Let's go.

Lastly, I'd make it funny. Not all the time, but it would be a comic where you can laugh with both the heroes and villains. There would be a sequence of the Decepticons receiving tax forms and trying to do the math to file them only to find out upon realistically converting Decepticon currency to the US dollar that their economy is actually worse than Earth's.

 

A miniseries based around the $5 Legends/Legion G1 Generations toys. It starts with the Wreckers failing catastrophically on an assignment to prevent Shockwave from tapping into the anti-matter core of Cybertron. Refusing to be beaten, Impactor fires a harpoon through Bludgeon and sends him and two unnamed Decepticons into the antimatter chamber, which causes and explosion that wipes out Cybertron, all of its moons, and several neighboring planets. The comic covers a very small force of Autobots that remain alive on Earth as a hidden colony, and what happens when Megatron shows up with what little forces he has left.


I wouldn't be afraid to kill off any characters, and I would follow a bit of sage like advice I heard once: You want to prove you're a good writer? Kill off your favorite character so you're forced to explore someone else.

 

It would be a solo comic starring a grown-up Daniel Witwicky.

Similar premise to Saw or Cube or summat, doesn’t matter. The ever-annoying Daniel somehow gets trapped in a thing, who cares what it is or how he got there. Not important.

He then spends the next 52 issues being injured, tortured, and emotionally destroyed. Over and over and over. As unpleasantly as possible. At the end of the last issue, as he dies from being subjected to more pain and suffering than any human ever, it’s revealed to be just a dream.

That he had while unconscious after being thrown into that cliff in The Rebirth. Sadly for him everyone else has buggered off and left him for dead. Since he can’t move, child Daniel just lies there crying as he slowly starves to death.

The End.

 

I'd probably do a comic as an "Untold Tales of Spider-Man" style companion to the cartoon.

I'd focus on giving origins/introductions to characters that were never introduced like the coneheads and Season 2 Autobots, the Protectobots, filling in some of the plot holes like how the Constructicons could have created Megatron when we already saw that he was the one who corrupted them later.

When we get to 1986, that's when it has the potential to get really interesting. Get into the construction of Autobot City, the introduction of Ultra Magnus and seeing him take an earth mode for the first time, and work in characters who were never actually in G1 but have retroactively become G1 characters like Windblade, Drift, Alpha Bravo, Offroad, and Sunstorm.

Now, where this gets kind of different is that I would write them as caricatures of 80s celebrities like how half the G1 characters were so suddenly Windblade is Dolly Parton and Offroad is Hulk Hogan and Drift is John Ritter and I have to negotiate that with their established characteristics. Or I base them on 80s voice actors and imagine that Alpha Bravo is played by Lorenzo Music.

 

A story with completely original characters. No reused names. Just totally fresh

 

I want cheap, disposable entertainment. Just like the good old days when comics sold in the millions. Nothing fancy. Just robots punching each other. 99 cents. Newsprint. All ya need.

 

TBF, if they could make a newsprint / 99 cent model work, they would

 

If I just had to do a single story, I think I'd pick a concept like "The Theft of the Golden Disc" but just do a pred-centric heist comic.

That or something with the Monsterbots.

 

I’d write a story surrounding a small cast of Autobots and Decepticons set on Earth. It’d be your basic “Autobots and Decepticons fight over -enter McGuffin- on Earth” due to the story being more focused on the characters. Characters outside of the main cast would often pop up, sometimes becoming recurring characters or part of the main cast. It’d stay on Earth until the later issues, with the exception of flashbacks to Cybertron. Later in the series the main cast starts roaming off of Earth and bigger threats are introduced, the Quintessons and Unicron in particular, who would be in a shaky alliance with each other. This would be under a single comic, with no spin-offs or limited series.