Perceptor can put a body back together. Putting a spark back is not the same work at all, and in the first look Skybound released today he stands over a yellow chassis laid out flat and unmarked on a slab and tells Elita Prime what is left of it: “He’s intact again, but there’s just not enough of Bumblebee’s spark left to reawaken, I’m afraid.”

Skybound, Image and Hasbro put two interior pages out today, along with the seven covers the issue is shipping under. Robert Kirkman writes; Karl Kerschl comes in as guest artist, with Mike Spicer on colours and Rus Wooton on letters. The issue opens the next arc as a standalone Elita Prime story, it costs $3.99, and it reaches comic shops on 14 October, per Image’s own release listing [1].

The first page is mostly housekeeping. An Autobot rebel base has its lights on, somebody is welding at a bench in the orange glow of the repair bay, and Brawn is getting patched up and complaining about it. Two soldiers at the back are talking about Shockwave. “I still can’t believe Shockwave is alive,” one of them says, and the other has seen it for himself: “Believe it! Saw it with my own optics. Guy doesn’t even have a head. Just his old blinking eye dangling on a wire. It’s nuts.” Then Jazz counts the energon, tells Elita the reserves will hold for nearly a full cycle, and offers her a full ration. She turns it down.

Interior page from Transformers #37. A wide establishing panel captioned AUTOBOT REBEL BASE shows a docking structure against a purple planet. Below it, a repair bay lit orange, where a red Autobot works at a bench, a tan armoured Autobot stands beside him, and a pink Autobot with wing panels stands at the right talking to the group. In the bottom panel the pink Autobot speaks while a white and blue Autobot works on a green Autobot's arm.

That refusal is what the issue is about. “Thank you, Jazz. But no, not until everyone is operational and we’re at full strength. Until then, we conserve. Too much is at stake.” She applies the same reasoning on the second page, when Brawn offers to take a team out after Hot Rod and she goes alone instead. The main cover carries the line “The price of being Prime!”, and both released pages are Elita refusing something on the way to finding out what it means.

For those of us who have been away from the book a while, the top panel of the second page lays out the plan. The Autobots are a few clicks from the Well of Sparks. Hot Rod and Blurr are out ahead confirming the route, and holding that ground is meant to give the Autobots a rallying point they have not had. Then Hot Rod’s transmission breaks through: he and Blurr are pinned down and need an extraction. Brawn offers to assemble a team, and Elita takes it off him before he finishes the sentence. “No. I’ll go. It has to be me. I can’t risk any of you.” The last panel on the page is her in flight mode, thrusters lit, leaving the base behind her.

Interior page from Transformers #37. Top panel: a green Autobot briefs a pink Autobot and a white and blue Autobot. Left panel: a grey and red Autobot with a microscope mounted on his head stands over a yellow Autobot laid flat on a slab, lit from one side. Right panels: a close-up of the pink Autobot's face, and a red Autobot raising one arm. Bottom: the pink Autobot transformed into a winged vehicle with thrusters firing, rising away from two Autobots on the ground.

The Bumblebee panel sits in the middle of that same page, on the left, and Kerschl stages it as the calmest drawing on the sheet: Perceptor lit from one side, the body laid flat and clean, no debris and no visible damage on it anywhere. Whatever happened to Bumblebee has already happened. “Thank you for trying, Perceptor,” Elita says, and then the emergency arrives and the room moves on.

Seven covers, and the headless thing on the B

Jason Howard draws the main cover, coloured by Annalisa Leoni [2]. Elita is centre frame in pink and white, an orange Autobot and a green one with a raised blade flanking her, all of it over a burning skyline. Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer have the open-to-order B and David Nakayama the open-to-order C. The rest are ratioed: Nick Bradshaw and Jim Charalampidis at 1:25, Ethan Young at 1:50, a David Lafuente foil at 1:100, and a blank sketch cover. The foil and the blank both carry a $4.99 cover price rather than the $3.99 on the others.

On the B, Elita crouches low behind a ridge with a rifle held across her body, and standing over her in the middle distance is a huge purple figure with no head and a wound burning where the head should be. Neither Image’s listing nor the preview names him, and the cover does not show the eye on a wire that the soldier describes. The figure is presumably Shockwave, either as those two have heard him described or as the Autobots are about to find him.

Cover B for Transformers #37 by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer. A pink and purple Autobot crouches behind a dark rocky ridge holding a long rifle across her body. Behind and above her a large purple figure stands with no head, a burst of yellow light burning across the neck, against a dark violet sky with falling embers.

If #37 is a jumping-on point and you have not been reading, the catch-up is Transformers Volume 6: Decepticons Attack!, which collects issues #31 through #36 and lands on 11 November. That puts the collection four weeks behind the single issue. Anyone hoping to read them in order is out of luck, but the run #37 follows is on preorder at BigBadToyStore now at $16.99, with the cart open, instead of being hunted down as back issues. We linked the same collection earlier this month, in our piece on the Energon Universe manga variant covers for December, four of them printed in black and white, one of which lands on Transformers #39.

Transformers #38 arrives on 11 November as well, the same day as the trade. Transformers, G.I. Joe, Void Rivals and M.A.S.K. all run out of the same continuity, and our piece on the Energon Universe milestone sets out how the four books reach each other.

[1] Image lists #37 at 32 pages, $3.99, age rating T, Lunar code 0826IM0514, arriving 14 October 2026. Graphic Policy’s write-up carries the same date and the same seven covers.

[2] Graphic Policy’s cover list credits the A cover to Jason Howard alone. Image’s release page credits Annalisa Leoni on it as well, and the signature in the bottom left corner of the art reads JH 26.

Sources