Transformers: The Movie #2

History

When the 1986 animated film arrived, Bob Budiansky — editor of the monthly Transformers comic and the man who had named and profiled most of the franchise's characters — was too busy with the ongoing series to write the adaptation himself, so the task fell to Ralph Macchio, a veteran Marvel writer-editor who had also scripted the very first issue of the original Transformers limited series in 1984. Macchio worked from an early draft of Ron Friedman's screenplay rather than the finished film, which accounts for several divergences between comic and screen. The series existed editorially as a self-contained mini-series with no continuity ties to the monthly US book; Budiansky himself had little enthusiasm for the movie's new cast, and the ongoing US series continued to be set in the present day. In the UK, however, Marvel reprinted all three issues as a 76-page Winter Special — the largest single-story Transformers comic Marvel UK had ever published — and Simon Furman used the movie's events as a springboard for his own ambitious ongoing UK stories.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Story title: 'Judgment Day!' — Part 2 of 3 of the Marvel Comics adaptation of The Transformers: The Movie (1986 animated feature).
• Credits: Written by Ralph Macchio (adapting Ron Friedman's screenplay); pencils by Don Perlin; inks by Ian Akin and Brian Garvey; colors by Nel Yomtov; letters by Janice Chiang; edited by Bob Budiansky; editor-in-chief Jim Shooter.
• On-sale date: September 1986 (per Amazing Heroes #101); cover date: January 1987 — the issue was published after the film had left theaters.
• The comic was written from a not-quite-final draft of the screenplay, meaning it includes elements cut from the finished film — most notably an extended, more graphic death scene for Ultra Magnus at the hands of Scourge and his Sweeps that was removed before the animated film was finalized.
• In the comic adaptation (across the three-issue run), Kranix is depicted as a Transformer, whereas in the finished film the character's species and nature are treated differently — a direct result of script-draft discrepancies.
• The issue centers on Hot Rod and Kup being captured and put on trial by the Quintessons and their Sharkticon executioners on Quintessa, while Galvatron and his Unicron-reborn Decepticons return to Cybertron to confront Starscream — whose brief coronation and destruction by Galvatron is depicted here.
• The three-issue series was reprinted by Marvel UK as a 76-page Winter Special (1986) — the largest single-story Transformers comic Marvel UK published — and later collected by IDW in The Transformers Classics Vol. 7 TPB (2014) and The Transformers Classics Vol. 6 TPB (2010), and in a Swedish translation by Atlantic Förlags AB (1988) where pages 1 and 9 were cut.
• In 2026, Skybound/Image Comics announced a 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition hardcover collecting both the original Marvel three-issue run and IDW's 2006 four-issue re-adaptation, with a new cover by Sean Murphy — the first time both adaptations have been collected together.

Cast · 24 characters

Full credits

Key issues in Transformers: The Movie

Variants (1)