Who gets to finish a cartoon that was cancelled?

Keyan Carlile, an animator who has been publishing Transformers Animated comics out of his own shop for years, answered that on October 14 in a post on his own account. Transformers Animated stopped in May 2009, three seasons in. It is getting a fourth season as an ongoing indie comic book series in 2027, co-written by Carlile and Marty Isenberg, who was the head writer of the show and had come to it off Beast Machines. [1] Eric Siebenaler, the lead toy designer on the line, is on it too.

After nearly 20 years… TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED SEASON 4 is finally happening, as an ONGOING INDIE COMIC BOOK SERIES. The show’s HEAD WRITER Marty Isenberg and LEAD TOY DESIGNER Eric Siebenaler feel ready to tell the story, and I am happily using my platform to give them the means.

Marty and I have been co-writing Season 4 all year, and a talented team of artists is bringing it to life as we speak. It’s time to give the series a satisfying, definitive conclusion and do our very best to make the late Derrick J. Wyatt proud. Season 4 rolls out in 2027!

Derrick J. Wyatt was the lead character designer and art director, the man who gave the show its heavy outlines and flat colour, and he died in 2021. [2]

This is not the first book

TFW2005 called it a fan comic in its own write up. Nothing about it is licensed, Hasbro has nothing to do with it, and the label fits. Carlile says so himself on every page he sells: “This is an unofficial project created by much of the show’s original creative team without the involvement of Hasbro.”

But fan is an odd word for the show’s own head writer and its lead toy designer, and they have been publishing Animated books since well before the announcement. Carlile’s shop already holds five of them. There is Bumble Prime in a standard edition at five dollars and an expanded one at eight, The Headmaster Levels Up at five, three issues of Mirror, Mirror at eight apiece, and The Toymaker and the Bots at seven, which the shop describes as written by the original series head writer. That last one is Isenberg, writing Animated, in a book that went on sale before any of this was announced.

So the news on October 14 is not that somebody has decided to make a fan Season 4. It is that a working arrangement which has already produced several books is being pointed at the ending the show never got, with the writer who would have written it.

What you can read now

Mirror, Mirror is the series to start with, and issue four is now the newest one you can buy. It runs sixty pages as a digital PDF, priced at eight dollars with a pay what you like control sitting above that. Issue three ran forty four pages. [3] Issue four carries a twenty page Allspark Almanac Apocrypha written by Jim Sorenson and Carlile, and issue three carries one of its own. Sorenson wrote the original Allspark Almanacs, and he is writing new pages for this one in 2026! There is a Bot Slayer Mission Log in each issue too, two pages of it, showing how episodes of the original series played out in the mirror universe. The three cover variants hold identical contents.

Issue one has sold over four hundred and fifty copies on its Cover A alone. The expanded Bumble Prime has passed nine hundred. Nobody is advertising these books outside the fandom.

Mirror, Mirror #4 closes the Shattered Glass miniseries and is on sale now. It was not when this piece first went up. Carlile had said that issue carries more information about Season 4, and we have not read it, so we cannot tell you what is in it. The Season 4 announcement itself still has a year attached to it and nothing else: no issue count, no price, no month, no first cover.

The plastic

Animated plastic is thin on the ground this long after the show; Flame Toys still carries the line in its Furai kits, and two of them are in stock at BigBadToyStore this morning: the standard Animated Optimus Prime at $47.99 and the Wingblade version at $58.99, both read off the listings with the add to cart control live. Flame Toys has a third one coming, a Shattered Glass Optimus Prime in the same Animated body, listed for pre-order at $69.99.

For the licensed side of the comics, we have covered Skybound’s Visions anthology, and the comics index has the rest. Optimus Prime’s entry in our encyclopedia covers the versions of him that got made.

Footnotes

  1. The show ran from December 26, 2007 to May 23, 2009, forty two episodes across three seasons, and Cartoon Network did not renew it.
  2. Animation Magazine reported Wyatt’s death in December 2021 at the age of 49.
  3. Prices read on the shop pages on the morning of October 15, 2026, with the buy control live on each. Issue four’s page count, price and section breakdown were read off its Cover A listing on the evening of October 16, 2026, with the Buy now control live and all three covers listed. The books are sold by Carlile directly rather than through a retailer, so there is no listing to check anywhere else.

Sources