The Transformers: All Hail Megatron

This didn't happen.

The Transformers: All Hail Megatron was the second major "act" of IDW Publishing's first ongoing comic universe, intended to serve as a "soft reboot" of IDW's increasingly complicated storylines and create a jumping-on point for new readers following the truncated ending of the previous collection of mini-series and one-shots. It marked a radical shift in tone and content in the ongoing story, showing a victorious Decepticon army on Earth while the Autobots are defeated and on the run throughout the universe.

Lasting from 2008 to 2009, the series ran for sixteen issues (including four "Coda" issues of short stories), with a small handful of vaguely associated Spotlight-series tie-ins. A standalone sketchbook and preview comic, "Focus on: Decepticons!", may be considered "All Hail Megatron #0".

The first advertisement for the series was simply a red Decepticon symbol on a black background with "Swear Allegiance 2008" written in red. Follow-up ads used the visual style of post-revolutionary Communist propaganda. The first details of the series were revealed on the trashy Australian tabloid current affairs programme Today Tonight on January 16, 2008.

Overview

One year after the events of Maximum Dinobots, a traitor in the Autobot ranks has given the Decepticons the means to conquer the Autobots, win the Great War, and do as they will on the unprotected planet Earth. The Decepticons conquer New York City and hold the population hostage, and the United States military proves unable to stop them. The attack spreads to other cities around the globe as well.

Kup's team provide one of the book's more iconic images.

Meanwhile, the Autobots are in a sorry state on Cybertron, with Optimus Prime in critical condition, the Matrix of Leadership in Decepticon hands, and a traitor suspected in their ranks. Tensions and tempers flare. The arrival of a second group commanded by Kup finally provides them with the energon needed to repair Optimus Prime, as well as more information about the betrayal, but the coming of the Insecticon Swarm drives the combined Autobot forces onto the defensive. During a running battle with the Swarm, Sunstreaker reveals that he was the traitor and sacrifices himself to save the others. However, another reason for the betrayal is that Hunter O'Nion is now a captive of the Decepticons...

The Decepticons question their place now that the war is apparently over; Starscream begins to doubt Megatron's goals and secretly teams up with some Decepticons in another bid to overthrow Megatron. A rebellion soon ensues.

The Autobots are saved from the Swarm by the timely arrival of Omega Supreme, who transports them to Earth. A pitched battle with the Decepticons follows. It is revealed that Sunstreaker betrayed the Autobots due to Bombshell messing with Hunter. The Decepticons are driven off; the intervention of a disgruntled Thundercracker prevents the European Union from nuking New York City, though he pays for his "betrayal". Megatron is severely damaged by the combined efforts of Optimus Prime and the humans. The captive Hunter is euthanized by Sideswipe, and everyone angsts.

Production

Series writer Shane McCarthy.

Writer Shane McCarthy pitched All Hail Megatron in direct response to a request from IDW for a tale that would change the whole direction of the line in hopes of regaining some of the ground lost as Simon Furman's run had wound on. Specifically featuring a cast made up almost entirely of 1984-1986 characters for their high recognizability, the series was originally intended as only six issues; Chris Ryall requested its expansion to twelve.^[2] Similar to a tactic DC Comics had employed after its series Infinite Crisis two years prior, McCarthy jumped the entire IDW universe forward one year in time in order to present a story that could shock readers with its sudden, dramatic differences, the product of unseen changes that occurred within the "missing year". Originally, the series was slated to be issues #35–46 in the IDW overarching "sub-numbering" scheme,^[3] leaving Furman twelve issues set during the "missing year" to wrap up any loose ends he could (though in the end, only nine issues were published across Revelation and Maximum Dinobots). Ultimately, however, the sub-numbering was dropped before release of the series.^[4]

Drift on the cover to issue #6.

Unlike Furman's ongoing series of mini-series and inter-connected Spotlight issues, All Hail Megatron's twelve-issue run is almost entirely self-contained, with the only supplemental issues coming in the form of Spotlight: Jazz, featuring a framing story set during the events of the main series, and Spotlight: Drift, providing some backstory for McCarthy's original character Drift. This new Autobot made his debut in the pages of All Hail Megatron proper, and his introduction was heavily hyped by the company, garnering the character quite an infamous reputation as a polarizing figure in the fandom and marking him as one of the most distinctive elements of McCarthy's tenure on the brand for good or for ill. A small handful of other Spotlights were published while All Hail Megatron was running, but had nothing to do with the story; regardless, they would go on to be collected with Jazz and Drift in a trade paperback labelled as the third volume of the All Hail Megatron story.

Drift was not all that set the fandom's sensibilities ablaze: the abandonment of not just Furman's storyline, but nearly all of the unique elements (discussed in more detail below) he had introduced into IDW continuity, also sat ill with many readers. Whether planned or in response to this, with issue #7, All Hail Megatron abruptly began referring back to several of these elements (including what seemed a very hasty explanation for why Cybertron was habitable again), and soon, it was announced that a four-issue mini-series, All Hail Megatron: Coda, would follow the main twelve-issue series and feature stories set between Furman and McCarthy's runs that would deal with the assorted dropped concepts and continuity glitches. This idea ultimately fell through; instead, the four "Coda" issues were appended to the end of the series as issues #13-16, and mostly featured stories set after All Hail, paving the way for the upcoming ongoing series.^[5]

Creative team

Hutchison's cover to issue #1.

Shane McCarthy wrote all twelve issues of the main series, which were predominantly illustrated by Guido Guidi and colored by Josh Burcham. A short lead-in time coupled with personal and family sickness meant that Guidi was not able to illustrate every issue, so Casey Coller, E. J. Su, Robert Deas and Emiliano Santalucia stepped in to provide back-up line art, while Deas also helped with coloring. The "B" variant covers for each issue were drawn by Trevor Hutchison in the style of Soviet Union propaganda posters.

Each of the four "Coda" issues was split into two eleven-page stories, written and drawn by several different creators. These opened with an Optimus Prime and Ironhide story by returning fan-favourites Simon Furman and Don Figueroa in issue #13, which saw Figueroa debut the new "skeletal" art style he would then employ as artist of the soon-to-debut ongoing series, and the first tale by incumbent ongoing writer Mike Costa, centred on Starscream with art by Chee Yang Ong. Issue #14 added an epilogue to Sunstreaker's story by the returning McCarthy and Santalucia, while line editor Andy Schmidt planted the seeds for future stories with his contribution to issue #14, covering the return of Galvatron, with art by IDW cover contest winner Andrew Griffith. Issue #15 was dedicated to explaining character transformations; while Denton J. Tipton and Casey Coller dealt with Perceptor's change from scientist to sniper, writer-artist Nick Roche returned to the character of Kup with a story that bridged Roche's earlier Spotlight: Kup with All Hail. Written with some assistance from James Roberts, this story transformed the "Rocherts" team into fandom darlings, resulting in their collaboration on the Last Stand of the Wreckers mini-series and defining the character of Prowl for the IDW universe. Lastly, issue #16 saw Mike Costa set up further plot points for the ongoing in a Spike Witwicky story with art by Guidi, while Chee returned to illustrate a Bumblebee story in #16 by Zander Cannon, paving the way for the Bumblebee mini-series the pair would soon produce.

Discrepancies

The Seekers' reversion to older F-15 alternate modes stood out as strange.

As noted above, All Hail Megatron has some odd discontinuities with the preceding storylines. Before All Hail, IDW's Transformers universe had very much been the vision of one creator—Furman—and was written very tightly, with most stories across different publications interrelating and forming a complex, unfolding tapestry. To then see so much of this ignored or thrown out as another creator took the reins of the universe proved aggravating to fans, and garnered All Hail an especially negative reputation at the time. As time has gone on and more and more creators have contributed to the IDW universe, making their own changes to what has gone before them, hindsight has seen All Hail's changes stand out far less in the grand scheme than they did when they first occurred, but as one of the more controversial aspects of a series that lasted an entire year, we here dedicate some space to noting the major offenses.

Most visibly, several characters were redesigned into their original Generation 1 forms; though done in the name of recognizability,^[7] for characters like the Seekers, Astrotrain, and Ratbat, who had previously been given modern alternate forms in earlier stories, this stood out as especially technologically incongruous and illogical. On the flipside, characters such as Prowl, Sideswipe, and Sunstreaker were updated into new forms based on their concurrently-available Universe toys, at Hasbro's request.^[8] The Seekers actually reflect both these approaches, as they've reverted from modern F-22s to F-15s (which they were in the original cartoon), but they're drawn in the style of their Masterpiece toys. This mix-and-match approach to design would only increase with the onset of the ongoing series, as artistic freedom resulted in characters changing designs from issue to issue, depending on artist.

The Matrix had a sudden introduction into IDW continuity.

Virtually all of the new technologies Furman introduced during his run such as Ultra-Energon, the Magnificence, and holomatter avatars were entirely discarded, with Pretender technology only getting a late-on nod in Kup's "Coda" story, its conveyance of ultimate power seemingly completely forgotten by the time of Perceptor's "Coda" tale, given the depiction of Bludgeon therein. The Matrix of Leadership was promptly retconned in as a key factor in IDW's history, despite not appearing in the story depicting the war's origin (years later, James Roberts's "Chaos Theory" would expand and explain this glitch), while the paucity of energon that drove the backstory of Furman's new vision seemed a thing of the past. The creation of the Insecticons is a major plot point in All Hail, despite two of the team's members previously appearing in Spotlight: Blaster and Megatron: Origin, while past depictions of IDW's eloquent Soundwave were ignored in favor of instating his monotone speech patterns from the original The Transformers cartoon.

Despite their initial remit of trying to fix glitches, the four Coda issues did not fare too well on the continuity front, immediately doing away with Starscream's change in heart from the main story's conclusion and partially re-writing a scene from Furman's Sunstreaker and Hunter story to skew it in another direction. It was Andy Schmidt's Galvatron story from #14 that proved most chaotic, full of legitimate errors rather than conscious changes, as the writer mixed up which of the Dead Universe Transformers could survive in the living universe longer than their comrades,^[9] and invalidated an earlier reference to Scourge as a modern-day Decepticon (a nixed plot point that would have seen him presented as the Decepticon equivalent of Kup^[10]) by presenting him as another of the Dead Universe legions. This story also mistakenly reiterated Cyclonus's "patriotic" personality, which was dismissed as a facade in Revelation, but future stories would continue to run with this depiction of the character as it proved far more interesting.

Motion comic pitch

In 2012, a motion comic version of All Hail Megatron was pitched to IDW Publishing by Sideshow Productions. The pitch (adapting a scene from the first issue) featured Daniel Ross as Starscream, David Sobolov as Megatron and Michael Bell as Scrapper and Skywarp. IDW rejected the pitch and the motion comic went unproduced.^[11]

Notes

• A persistent rumor among fans is that the series was originally conceived as an Evolutions title—a parallel universe, and the decision to incorporate it into the existing IDW storyline came later. However, no statements from the creators have backed this up, and the writer himself has claimed that it was never meant to be a hard reboot.^[12]
• Titan reprinted the series and some of the covers in their Revenge of the Fallen comic, in issues 1–8, making up titles for each chapter from the fourth part onwards. When plans changed, requiring the story to be cut-off with issue #8, they hacked up, edited, and pasted together three pages into one page and told readers to buy the trade paperbacks to get the whole story.
• Guido Guidi made modernized designs for at least two characters which were eventually not used. The characters were Soundwave, who would have turned into a modern microcassette recorder — which reporters still use today — and Wheelie who was cut from the series due to Spotlight: Wheelie.

• 

  A modern alt mode? GET OUT.

• 

  Me Wheelie say, it lucky day when not used for AHM... ay.

• The story got a sort-of sequel eight years later, when the 50th issue of The Transformers kicked off "All Hail Optimus".

Collections

• The Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 1 (February 18, 2009) ISBN 1600103715 / ISBN 978-1600103711
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #1–6.
  • Bonus material includes a cover gallery (not including the sketch covers). Also included is an art gallery consisting of Drift in both Cybertronian modes, and sketches of Cliffjumper, Perceptor, Soundwave, Ratbat, Frenzy, the Constructicons and Devastator.
  • Trade paperback format.

• The Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 2 (September 16, 2009) ISBN 1600105246 / ISBN 978-1600105241
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #7–12.
  • Bonus material includes a cover gallery and a 2-page art gallery featuring sketches of Reflector, Frenzy, Kup and Hot Rod.
  • Trade paperback format.

• The Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 3 (October 28, 2009) ISBN 1600105416 / ISBN 978-1600105418
  • Collects Spotlight: Blurr, Jazz, Drift, Cliffjumper and Metroplex.
  • Bonus material includes the alternate covers of each issue, as well as art of each Throttlebot by Marcelo Matere and new cover art by Trevor Hutchison.
  • Trade paperback format. Instead of being Volume 5 of the Spotlights, the TPB is labeled as part of the All Hail Megatron series. For some reason, the Drift and Cliffjumper issues were swapped from their original order.

• The Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 4 (January 13, 2010) ISBN 1600105920 / ISBN 978-1600105920
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #13–16.
  • Bonus material consists of a cover gallery.
  • Trade paperback format.

• The Transformers: All Hail Megatron — Book Club Edition (July 19, 2010) ISBN 1600108164 / ISBN 978-1600108167
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #1–12.
  • Bonus material consists of a cover gallery.
  • Science Fiction Book Club exclusive smaller-format softcover.
  • This edition is erroneously referred to as All Hail Megatron: Earth War in a few places. Notably absent among those places is anywhere on the book itself. The book's title is simply All Hail Megatron on the cover, inside cover, and spine. The colophon refers to the book as All Hail Megatron — Book Club Edition.
  • Trade paperback format.

• The Transformers: The Complete All Hail Megatron (July 27, 2011) ISBN 1600109551 / ISBN 978-1600109553
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #1–16, and Spotlight: Blurr, Jazz, Drift, Cliffjumper & Metroplex.
  • Bonus material includes a cover gallery and the art sketches from previous collections.
  • New cover by Trevor Hutchison.
  • Hardcover format.

• 

  All Hail Megatron Volume 1 – cover art by Klaus Scherwinski

• 

  All Hail Megatron Volume 2 – cover art by Trevor Hutchison

• 

  All Hail Megatron Volume 3 – cover art by Trevor Hutchison

• 

  All Hail Megatron Volume 4 – cover art by Trevor Hutchison

• 

  All Hail Megatron — Book Club Edition – cover art by Trevor Hutchison

• 

  The Complete All Hail Megatron – cover art by Trevor Hutchison

• The Transformers: The IDW Collection Volume Five (December 14, 2011) ISBN 978-1613770528
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #1–16.
  • Hardcover format.

• The Transformers: All Hail Megatron (Red Label) (March 18, 2015)^[13]
  • Collects the entire four-volume series.
  • Limited to 350 copies.
  • Exclusive slipcase and cover.
  • Each book is numbered and signed by artist Guido Guidi.
  • Hardcover format.

• The Transformers: The Complete All Hail Megatron (November 15, 2017) ISBN 168405219X / ISBN 978-1684052196
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #1–16, and Spotlight: Blurr, Jazz, Drift, Cliffjumper & Metroplex.
  • New material, if any currently unknown.
  • Trade paperback format.

• Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 43: All Hail Megatron, Part 1 (November 29, 2017)
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #1–8.
  • An article on creating All Hail Megatron, character design sketches by Guidi, and the series pitch by Shane McCarthy.

• Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 44: All Hail Megatron, Part 2 (December 27, 2017)
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #9–16.
  • A Decepticon Roll Call with mini-bios, and trivia about All Hail Megatron #13–16, pointing out notable plot points in the Coda issues.

• Transformers: Best of Bumblebee (September 7, 2022)
  • Collects The Transformers (1984) #16: "Plight of the Bumblebee!", Transformers Annual 2017: "Ghost Stories", Robots in Disguise #27: "Black Planet: Dark Cybertron Chapter 11", Transformers (2019) #2: "The World In Your Eyes Part Two", and All Hail Megatron #16: "Hidden".
  • Bonus material includes an art gallery.

• 

  The IDW Collection Volume Five – cover art by E. J. Su

• 

  The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 43: All Hail Megatron, Part 1 – cover art by Don Figueroa and Guido Guidi

• 

  The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 43: All Hail Megatron, Part 2 – cover art by Don Figueroa, Guido Guido and Emiliano Santalucia

• 

  Best of Bumblebee – cover art by James Biggie

International Printings

Spain

All Hail Megatron was translated and released in Spain by NORMA Editorial.

Volume 1

• ISBN 978-84-679-0069-9

Volume 2

• ISBN 978-84-679-0164-1

Japan

The Complete All Hail Megatron was translated and released in Japan by Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions.

• Transformers: The Complete All Hail Megatron (March 23, 2015)
  • Collects All Hail Megatron issues #1–16, and Spotlight: Blurr, Jazz, Drift, Cliffjumper & Metroplex.
  • Bonus material includes a cover gallery and the art sketches from previous collections.
  • Trade paperback format.
• ISBN 479687514X
• ISBN 978-4796875141

• 

  Transformers: The Complete All Hail Megatron (トランスフォーマー:オール・ヘイル・メガトロン)

References

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