It seems pointless to continue a series discussing my issues with Simon Furman’s run on Transformers comics when I’m reviewing those very comics. So this series has been in limbo, at least until I’m all done with his comics. However, we are at the point of War Within: The Age Of Wrath that was never published thanks to one foolish man. Pat Lee.
Lee was the founder of Dreamwave Comics, which was part of Image’s family until he went on his own. It was a one-shot image of the classic Transformers in action as part of a series for Wizard magazine that led to his company to get the license for the Transformers. They made both a G1 based series and one based on the current line of the time, Armada/Energon, two-thirds of the “Unicron Trilogy”. Dreamwave went down before they could get to Cybertron. What happened? Lee didn’t know what he was doing mostly. There were rumors of mismanagement of funds for personal use like expensive cars for his family and other indiscretions. Blaming the “shrinking comic market” Lee closed Dreamwave…and then formed another company. Meanwhile the creators of the Transformers and other titles (by then it was all licensed properties) saw nothing and I’m not sure they were ever fully compensated.
In 2011 Furman sold copies of the unpublished issues of the last miniseries, The Age Of Wrath. He would tell the Cybertron tales while others handled the “modern-day” Transformer tales, usually on Earth but later spread back to Cybertron. I do not have access to these comics but Sol Fury of TFW2005 posted summaries of the two issues that were fully scripted (4 & 5) and the unscripted sixth issue that only got as far as an outline. So let’s see where the series ended up.
