With The Transformers: The Movie celebrating its 40th anniversary, and this Deviations comic now being 10 years old itself, I thought it was a good time to find out the answer to the question: What if Optimus Prime didn’t die?

We start this “What If”-style comic by briefly recounting the scenes leading up to the epic battle between Prime and his nemesis, Megatron, in the movie. A battle which, after Megatron takes an interfering Hot Rod hostage, sees Prime defeated and soon, dead.

But then something changes; veteran warrior Kup manages to restrain Hot Rod, and Prime gives Megatron one last chance before taking care of him once and for all.

In the wake of Megatron’s death, Starscream anoints himself leader of the Decepticons and rids himself of weak allies.

So far, not much has changed. But the story of the Autobots does deviate pretty significantly, and there’s still the looming threat of Unicron to worry about…

This is an interesting enough thought experiment, but it’s far too harsh with its characterisation of Hot Rod, not to mention everyone’s treatment of him, in light of Prime’s continued leadership. It also doesn’t do nearly enough with the Decepticons; we’re reduced to mostly just seeing how Prime’s survival affects Starscream, who gets to interact with Unicron in Megatron’s place. Even then, he has little to do.

It wraps up a little too neatly as well, leaving numerous pages to advertise IDW’s then-ongoing (and very good) Transformers line, along with some behind the scenes material.

With such a short page count, it’s inevitable that we would be rushing to a conclusion here, but it’s still a shame that the Deviation doesn’t feel like it gets a chance to be fully explored, and the way Hot Rod is treated really bothered me.

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