The series ultimately reached 80 issues and spun off several miniseries. It started life as a four-issue, bimonthly limited series in 1984, but proved so popular that it continued publication as an ongoing monthly until spring of 1991. by Marvel Comics, was the very first original fiction to feature the famous robots in disguise, as well as the longest-running. The Transformers, the monthly comic book published in the U.S.

New Transformers were often hastily brought in to meet the demands of Hasbro, and older 'product' was often swept aside or killed off en masse in epic, climactic battles. This was the same reason few writers were willing to pick it up after he stopped.īecause it was a book intended to sell toys, Transformers featured an ever-rotating cast. He would later write the longer running series until issue #55 (when he started to burn out due to having to shoehorn so many new characters into so few pages). The manufacturers of the original toys admitted the toys were developed for young boys and gender wasn't really a factor in their design.īudiansky was the lead writer for their most famous incarnation in the 1984 limited series, The Transformers. In most of their depictions, female-gendered Transformers were not shown or barely shown to exist. We don't wanna have, you know, girl robots.' So, I said, 'OK, just want to clarify that.' - Bob Budiansky, Rusting Carcass interview Well, I remember bringing up that question early on with Hasbro, 'are any of these female?' And then I think Hasbro's attitude was, 'this is a boy toy.To his credit, there were early notes indicating he wanted there to be female-gendered Transformers before Hasbro said, no: Bob Budiansky, one of the premiere writers of the early Marvel comics versions acknowledges this in an interview.

'Boys Toys'įor a dozen years, female Transformers weren't even acknowledged as even EXISTING. To date, no one has explained why there are two genders, what the origin of said genders were and why a machine-based species even bothers having remnants of a dimorphic species (reproductive genders) if they were always machine-based having no previous organic origins.

Transformers, Vol. 1 by Ralph Macchio