Bob Budiansky

Not actually Kirk Cameron. You can tell because he writes about Earth being millions of years old.

Bob Budiansky (born March 15, 1954) was the writer of most of the Marvel US Transformers comic book series and the creator of much of the mythos, characters, and names behind the first several years of the franchise.

In late 1983, Hasbro approached Marvel Comics to create a storyline around a series of transforming toy robots they had licensed from Takara. Editors Denny O'Neil and Jim Shooter created some of the early background for Transformers, including several names, but much of the material for the first 28 characters was rejected by Hasbro. Revision duties were passed to Bob Budiansky, a writer and penciler who had only been promoted from assistant editor to editor earlier that year.^[1] Budiansky renamed most of the characters and revised the personalities... with a week's deadline during Thanksgiving.^[2] Though Optimus Prime was named by O'Neil, Bob Budiansky is responsible for the names of Megatron, the Dinobots, Sideswipe, Wheeljack, and countless others.

Due to its success, The Transformers four-issue miniseries became an ongoing. None of the three writers had been able to 'get' the Transformers mythos during the miniseries, and Bob Budiansky spent a lot of time directing the story as its editor—and even he thinks it was a total mess because nobody could keep track.^[3] Because of this, after he was replaced as editor (due to Marvel internal rules) he was made the writer from #5 on: he was the only one who knew enough about the mythos! It was in these years that he developed popular characters Shockwave, Ratchet, and Grimlock into the roles they're famous for today; the only characters at this time he didn't create were the movie ones, who were specifically created for the film by Sunbow. He did, however, create the concept of the Autobot Matrix. Budiansky continued to write bios and name characters until at least the end of his tenure on the Marvel Comic book^[4], working off pictures of the toys and what they could do, with names based on whatever the hell he'd just read or seen or heard about that week. When new concepts like Headmasters or Pretenders were created by Hasbro, Budiansky would be given the job of working out story treatments for them and adding them to the Transformers mythos.^[2]

Bob today.

During his run, Bob was constantly kept up to date on Hasbro's plans: information about new toys and their model sheets were sent to him, he attended meetings at their Rhode Island HQ, he visited their annual toy exhibitions. Outside of pimping their wares, Hasbro left him alone. It was up to him whether or not he wanted to follow the cartoon's lead, he wasn't told to keep the target audience in mind (he made the decision himself), and he was even allowed to not use the future-set movie cast.^[5]

Towards the end of his time on the comic book series, Budiansky started to feel fatigue. It was complicated and frustrating, from a story-crafting point of view, to introduce so many new characters in so few issues. At Budiansky's recommendation, the writer of the Marvel UK Transformers comic, Simon Furman, took over Budiansky's duties on the US comic.

An artist as well, Budiansky also drew several covers for Transformers and penciled the first half of his final issue.

As the quote notes, Transformers was a job he enjoyed at the time but is still just a job he did twenty years ago. Not that he isn't pleased to have a 40-year old franchise as his legacy! Until he got onto the Internet and searched his own name in the 90s, he didn't realize it was still such a big deal with fans and was both amused and bemused to learn the truth. In the early 2000s, he started to give interviews to fans and websites. This led to him coming back briefly to adapt The Transformers: The Movie for IDW and he was given an option to pitch to them again, but decided not to as he was far removed from the current Transformers status quo.

Outside of Transformers Budiansky is perhaps best known for drawing Ghost Rider, creating Sleepwalker and writing the entire series, and serving as group editor-in-chief of the Spider-Man titles between 1994 & 1995. In addition, at one point he was assigned to Marvel's "Special Projects" section; this followed his promotion to "executive editor".^[7] He was also tasked with overseeing a number of other limited series, such as an X-Men / Micronauts crossover.

Transformers comics credits

Marvel The Transformers (US):

Editor - Issues 1–4

Writer - Issues 5–15, 17–32, 35–42, 44–55

Penciller - Issue 55

Cover Artist - Issues 14, 29, 31, 45, 47

Marvel The Transformers Universe

Writer/Consulting Editor - Issues 1–4

Marvel Transformers: The Movie comic adaptation

Editor - Issues 1–3

Marvel Headmasters mini-series

Writer - Issues 1–4

Cover Artist - Issue 1

IDW Transformers: The Animated Movie comic adaptation

Writer - Issues 1–4

Convention appearances

• OTFCC 2004
• Iacon One
• BotCon 2010

Budianskyisms

Though not as prominent or well-remembered as the so-called "Furmanisms" that successor writer Simon Furman would popularize, Bob Budiansky also had a few turns of phrase that he repeatedly fell back on:

Enjoy a nice serving of Brown Betty, with DEATH!! But mostly, eat death.

• "Have some (X), courtesy of my (Y)!"

where

"X" = some form of damage, dismemberment or death

"Y" = the special weapon of the character in question

Examples:

"Have some metal-eating slime, courtesy of my slime gun, Autobots!"—Blot Brothers in Armor!!

"Have a mechanical malfunction, courtesy of my concussion cannon!"—Breakdown Heavy Traffic!

"Just a case of bad balance, courtesy of my electro-scrambler."—Blaster The Bridge to Nowhere!

"Energy feedback, courtesy of my electro-scrambler, tinhead."—Blaster Totaled!

"You're going on a one-way trip, Monzo, courtesy of my anti-gravity gun!"—Skullcruncher Love and Steel!

• "I hope you (A) as well as you (B)!"

where

"A" = perform some action, typically shooting

"B" = boast, brag, or some other meaningless non-action

Examples:

"You boast better than you shoot, Dreadwind!"—Goldbug People Power!

"Grrr—I hope you shoot straighter than you think, Weirdwolf!"—Skullcruncher Trial by Fire!

"Only if you aim as well as you brag, Brawl!"—First Aid Used Autobots

• "This wasn't in (Z)!"

where

"Z" = amusingly bureaucratic item with no bearing on the situation at hand.

Examples:

"This...this wasn't in my job description!"—anonymous railway worker Child's Play

"This wasn't on the trail guide!"—anonymous skier The Man in the Machine!

"None of this was in the rehearsal!"—Sky Lynx The Cosmic Carnival

Notes

• As Budiansky's quotes above show, for a while in organised fandom he was the Fallen of the writing world, his stories dismissed or ripped into as being juvenile and silly. His reputation in fandom has gone up since the start of the 21st century, something he attributes to doing interviews.

• In addition to writing the main character bios, Budiansky also wrote the truncated versions seen on the original toy packaging.

• According to Budiansky, Blaster was his favorite character to write for, and "The Smelting Pool!" was his favorite story.

• Budiansky's stories almost always have a human guest star involved and the Transformers getting involved in human affairs and finding them odd. He's stated this was because he thought the most interesting part was seeing these two vastly different races and worlds colliding with each other - or, more bluntly, "The Transformers were on Earth!".^[8]

• He's a fan of the first Bay movie and thinks that the Transformer/human interaction is similar to his own stories.^[3] He is also a fan of the Bumblebee movie, though he would "rather not comment on the ones in between". ^[9]

References

External links

• Hall of Fame video

Interviews

• 2003—TMUK
• February 2004—BWTF
• July 2004 Altered States Magazine (Part 1, Part 2)
• July 2004—OTFCC (with Simon Furman and Andrew Wildman)
• July 2006—Iacon One (with Don Figueroa)
• September 2006—TransFans
• September 2007—20th Century Danny Boy
• July 2009—Rusting Carcass
• November 2009—Metal Machine
• Janaury 2011—Moonbase 2
• October 2014—Circuit 42
• January 2017—The Guardian
• April 2017—AIPT!
• March 2018—Comic Book Syndicate
• August 2018—The Epic Marvel Podcast
• April 2019—Geek To Me Radio (defunct)