Fans of The Transformers often cite Bob Budiansky as the founder of Transformers lore. He was the main writer for the US Marvel comic, but more importantly he conceived the names and descriptions for most of the original Transformer’s characters. Bob Budiansky, however, is not the focus for this first foray into understanding how The Transformers concept came about. Instead, the focus is on editor-in-chief of Marvel, Jim Shooter.
Jim Shooter is important. He wrote the original treatment for the Transformers, naming their homeworld as Cybertron and providing a reason for the Autobot-Decepticon war. Simply put, Shooter created the fictional world in which the Transformers franchise would thrive. Now, there is a long story for why the editor-in-chief decided to take it upon himself to write the treatment for free, which I shall recount here, but first a quick bit of background.
Who is Jim Shooter?
In the early 1980s, Shooter was helping to transform Marvel into a pop culture force. He had started his career with DC in the 1960s, but that just hadn’t paid much money. Instead, he began to focus on an alternative career at NYU. Then he met Stan Lee. Lee offered Shooter a full-time post at Marvel. At first that didn’t pay much either, so he left, only to return in the early 70s’, working for DC and then Marvel. By 1978, Shooter was made Editor-in-Chief of Marvel, replacing Archie Goodwin in the role. Shooter’s tenure would prove controversial. In the prologue to a book collecting various interviews with Shooter we are told:
‘Whilst Shooter is remembered for fostering talent, he was also controversial as he required his writers to keep stories simple and easy to follow as a way of increasing sales. Some considered him a ‘merciless dictator producing indistinguishable product’ whilst others saw him as a ‘cultivator of talents undertaking decidedly unique, original, and envelope-pushing material.’ (Jim Shooter Conversations, p.xiii)
Whatever view is taken of Shooter, one thing is certain, he led a major restructuring of Marvel, sorting out various long-term problems, and ensured that Marvel engaged aggressively in the emerging and fast-growing direct-sales market. Without Shooter, Marvel might well not be the commercial beast that it is today.
Shooter and The Transformers
Jim Shooter’s involvement with The Transformers begins in 1983 in a rather surprising way. It begins when a now largely forgotten toy company called Knickerbocker Toys, who approached Marvel Comics as a potential partner. They had recently acquired the licence for a series of toys developed by a Japanese company which they had called the ‘Mysterions’.
In 2021, Jim Shooter tells us about these initial meetings via a multi-part blog post called The Secret Origin of the Transformers. Here he explains that:
‘Marvel Comics was their second choice as a creative services provider. They had gone to DC Comics first. The executive who approached us showed us what DC had created for them. It was a comic book. He only had photocopies. I don’t believe the thing was ever printed. It was awful.’
Shooter found the first treatment of the Mysterions to be ‘pathetic’ and ‘wrong-headed’ with a chaotic storyline full of swear words and violence. More than that, he found the concept boring. It offered a war between good and evil robots. Nothing more detailed than that and no motivation. Shooter provided a new treatment which almost came to something, but then something major happened: Knickerbocker was acquired by Hasbro.
That would seem to have been the end of the matter, only Hasbro had other ideas, as Shooter explains:
‘Some months later, the Hasbro exec who was Marvel’s main contact, Bob Prupis, came to my office. He pulled a few toy vehicles out of his bag and proceeded to open and unfold them into Robots. They were bigger and much more complex than the Mysterions. Different Japanese technology, same general idea.’
Shooter put Denny O’Neill to the task of developing a treatment for these new transforming robots, but what he produced didn’t work.* As Shooter had already previously developed an idea for the Mysterions concept, he decided to write up a backstory himself. What he came up with was unrelated to the Mysterions, borrowing from O’Neill only a few elements such as the naming of the Autobot’s ship as ‘Auntie’ (which would eventually become the Ark) and possibly the naming of Optimus Prime. This, then, was the origin of The Transformers.
* Danny O’Neill is best known for his work on Green Lantern, Arrow and Batman. Throughout his career, however, he crossed between DC and Marvel at regular intervals. In the early 1980s, he was at Marvel, mainly working on Iron Man and Daredevil. By 1986, he had returned to DC.