A licensed comic is expected to sell steadily and not much else. Marvel had Transformers from 1984, Devil’s Due carried G.I. Joe through the 2000s and IDW ran both of them until the rights moved on, and The Hollywood Reporter’s word for how all of that sold is sleepy. So when Robert Kirkman put Void Rivals No. 1 on the shelf in 2023 as the side door into a shared universe built on the two licences, he was betting on a category that had never asked much of anybody, and he says now that he expected it might not work. He told THR he was worried the idea would crash and burn; Hasbro, by his account, had concerns of its own.

On Friday evening The Hollywood Reporter published the numbers, with Skybound opening up figures that publishers normally guard. The Energon Universe, which now runs to Transformers, G.I. Joe, Void Rivals and the M.A.S.K. book launched in June, has sold over 7.6 million units since 2023. When we wrote about the line crossing a milestone back in March there was no figure attached to it, and now there is. The Transformers comic accounts for 3.5 million of them, a share Skybound itself puts at about 47 percent.

But the figure that ought to land hardest with those of us who were buying this run in 2023 is the one on the first issue. Transformers No. 1 has been through fourteen printings and Skybound is preparing a fifteenth, with the launch printing selling 170,000 copies and every printing since adding another 180,000 between them. Across the title Skybound has now run 67 reprints. Kirkman, who could reasonably keep a share of the credit for the idea, hands it to one person instead.

“Three years in and that book is still being reprinted. It’s a testament to Daniel Warren Johnson, who wrote and drew that issue.”

Kirkman built the Energon Universe to be shared, and almost half of what it has sold is the one title Daniel Warren Johnson opened.

Image’s own release listing for Transformers No. 1 puts the original publication on 4 October 2023 and the fourteenth printing back in stores on 16 September 2026, ten days ago, still at the $4.99 it carried on the day it launched [1]. Retailers have reordered that issue thirteen times since the launch printing, and Skybound is setting up a fifteenth. Licensed tie-ins do not do that.

There is another reading of the report, though, and it starts with Kirkman taking over the writing himself. When he did that with issue 25 in October 2025, drawn by Dan Mora, the issue sold 127,811 copies, and Image already has it back in stores on a fourth printing of its own dated 10 June 2026. The only bigger single-issue figure anywhere in the report belongs to the M.A.S.K. debut in June, at 206,203. So the handover did not cost the book its audience.

Cover A of Transformers issue 25 by Dan Mora: Optimus Prime in truck form leading two Autobot cars across desert hardpan, his robot head rising enormous behind them against orange cloud, with three Decepticon jets firing in from the right.

“We are an upward trajectory, which as you know, is very rare in comics. You usually get a big launch number and then sales slowly drift. That’s why you see so many relaunches in the comic book industry.”

The collected editions say something the monthly numbers cannot, because a trade is a book somebody has to go and choose rather than a habit picked up at a counter. Skybound puts the Transformers trades second among all its collection lines, behind only Invincible: the company’s own flagship, and a Prime Video series besides.

Which is where the report meets a shop counter, and where it gets awkward for any of us trying to buy the thing. MyComicShop catalogues that run cover by cover rather than issue by issue. The first issue turns up there as 67 separate rows, one per variant. What has stock behind it this morning is almost entirely convention and retailer exclusives [2]. Cover A and Cover B, both of them Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer, are out. The issue Skybound has reprinted fourteen times is the one we cannot walk in and pick up.

The collections are where the stock is, and they are the cheaper way in besides. Volume 5, “Generation One!”, opens on issue 25 and runs through issue 30, and both of its covers are in at $11.95 against a $16.99 cover price; Volume 4 sits beside it at the same money on its direct market cover. Volume 1 is down to the Jonboy Meyers variant at $15.00, a cover Image printed once and never again; Volumes 2 and 3 have nothing in on either edition.

Volume 6 is the next one out. It collects issues 31 to 36, the run ending on the issue Skybound gave THR a number for, and Image has it at 128 pages for $16.99 arriving 11 November 2026. Amazon lists the same ISBN under a subtitle Image’s own page never uses, “Decepticons Attack!”, and gives it a release date of 8 December 2026 [3]. The two listings disagree by four weeks on a book neither of them has printed yet.

As for where we are in the run, issue 36 reached shops on 9 September 2026, and issues 37, 38 and 39 are solicited through to 9 December 2026 with Kirkman writing all three. We covered the Wheeljack preview out of issue 35 in July, and the rest of what we have run on the book sits in the comics archive.

[1] Image labels the printing currently in stores and nothing before it, so the release page shows the fourteenth and says nothing about the thirteen earlier ones. Those are visible only in retailer catalogues, and not cleanly even there: MyComicShop’s 67 rows for issue 1 are variant covers rather than printings, so the two counts measure different things. The same goes for the coincidence that MyComicShop lists 67 rows and Skybound reports 67 reprints. Two unrelated numbers that happen to match, and neither confirms the other.

[2] Seventeen rows carry stock, among them the NYCC and MegaCon covers, the Whatnot and ComicMint editions, and an employee variant. Read off the series page on 26 September 2026. Image credits Cover A and Cover B to Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer, with Ryan Ottley on C and D, Cliff Chiang on E, Orlando Arocena on F, Bryan Hitch on G and Ian Bederman on H.

[3] Both listings agree on the ISBN, 9781534332638, on the page count and on the contents, and both credit Robert Kirkman with Jason Howard, Ludo Lullabi and Mike Spicer. The subtitle and the date are the only places they part company.

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