Transformers Animated Season Four Finally Rolls Out – Seventeen Years Late and on Paper

When Cartoon Network cancelled Transformers Animated in 2009, it left Optimus Prime’s Detroit crew stuck at the end of season three. Season four was already being planned, with Energon deposits scattered across the city by the AllSpark. Now that season is finally getting made, as an ongoing independent comic series from 2027.

The people involved matter here. The show’s head writer, Marty Isenberg, is co-writing with animator and devoted fan Keyan Carlile. Eric Siebenaler, who designed the original toys, is on board, and a team of artists is already drawing. This is unofficial: Carlile’s earlier comics in the same vein state plainly that they’re made by much of the original creative team without Hasbro’s involvement. It’s the fan-film loophole in reverse. The usual arrangement is fans pretending to be professionals; this is the professionals cheerfully moonlighting as fans.

There’s a track record. Carlile and Isenberg have already produced Bumble Prime, a famous unmade season-four story, and The Toymaker and the Bots, a tribute to the show’s art director Derrick J. Wyatt. They’re now finishing Mirror, Mirror, a four-issue miniseries set in the evil Shattered Glass universe. These have mostly been sold as digital comics through Carlile’s Ko-fi page. More season-four details are promised in Mirror, Mirror #4, out later this month.

Wyatt’s ghost hangs over the project, in the best sense. His angular, rubber-limbed designs made Animated look like nothing else in the franchise. Optimus became a junior maintenance-crew leader rather than a lorry-shaped messiah, and Bumblebee a hyperactive pocket rocket. Wyatt died in December 2021, aged 49. Carlile says the aim is a satisfying, definitive ending that would make him proud, which is a better reason for a comic than most.

British readers of a certain vintage will recall that Marvel UK once kept a weekly Transformers comic running for 332 issues, largely by having Simon Furman invent whatever the cartoons and the American comic hadn’t got round to. Fans finishing what the official channels abandoned is practically the founding tradition of this franchise. Till all are one, as somebody once said – or, in this case, till all the seasons are done.