Michael Bay was in Oxfordshire recently to shoot The Last Knight, the final instalment of the mighty Transformers franchise. The maker of the highest grossing movie of 2014 – Transformers: Age of Extinction, which took over $1bn – was up to his old tricks, stomping on British sensibilities by converting beautiful Blenheim Palace into a Nazi HQ.

But, in another wing of the franchise, the shape-changing robots have been venturing into much less likely territory, exploring such weighty issues as social mobility, personal identity and various corrosive ideologies – while also establishing the world of Transformers as a homonormative society. Fans of Chromedome and Rewind may be touched to learn that the two are now in a romantic relationship.

Launched in 2012, the comic-book series Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye tells the story of a group of robots journeying across the universe on a quest to find the mythical Knights of Cybertron (the original children of Primus and the other four gods of the Guiding Hand, in case you didn’t know). The series is written by Guernsey-based James Roberts, whose background is in the civil service.

The cover of new comic. Photograph: IDW Generation

But, such is the churn of the comics industry, the title was wound down in September at issue 57, the plan being to relaunch it this month as Transformers: Lost Light. The hope is to create a jumping on point for new readers, though Roberts’s radical take on the 30-year-old toy brand will continue apace. “I always wanted to give the franchise as much depth and weight as possible,” he says. “One of the easiest ways to do that is to politicise it.”

As a fan of the clunky robots since childhood, Roberts has always had a sense of entitlement when it comes to messing with their core concept – specifically, the act of transformation. “In More Than Meets the Eye, I explored the idea that, millions of years ago, the Transformers existed in a system with a ‘functionist’ doctrine – meaning the thing you turn into determines your status. The more commonplace a device you became, the fewer privileges you had.”

In a move that would doubtless intrigue Bay, Roberts brought in the concept of “municipal eugenics”: a type of Transformer could literally be made redundant, because there’s no longer a use for its newly shifted shape. “Maybe,” says Roberts, “there’s an analogy here in terms of how disabled people are treated in some quarters by governments. If they’re not producing, they’re not making the necessary contributions to society, and so they’re devalued.”



After fighting a four-million-year war, Megatron has renounced violence

Roberts has even dared to rehabilitate the classic Transformers bogeyman Megatron, going back to his early days and depicting him as a young radical. “Originally, Megatron was an incredible thinker who advocated non-violent resistance. He was in the Tony Benn mould, an international socialist. He campaigned for emancipation and equality, but eventually concluded the system had been engineered to withstand any form of dissent – other than force.

“As is the case with grand tragedies, he travelled away from the goals he had in the beginning and walked that well-trodden path from communism to totalitarianism.”

But Megatron’s journey didn’t stop there. Recent issues saw him teaming up with the Autobots, against whom he once waged a four-million-year war. “He’s been tested,” says Roberts of the one-time leader of the villainous Decepticons, able to change into three different types of gun. “And now he’s renounced violence.”

Some may doubt the Transformers concept can bear such weight. But Roberts believes the line’s longevity and the success of the Bay movies have encouraged Hasbro to give him his head. “It’s a mature franchise and it’s doing very well in various iterations. So Transformers can encompass different types of stories, in the same way a property like Batman does.”



Surprisingly perhaps, one strand of the story has met no resistance: the portrayal of same-sex relationships as the norm for this robot society. “When they were created, Transformers were exclusively male. They used the male pronoun and, in the 1980s cartoon series, they had male voices. I wanted to tell romantic stories. If two characters were in a relationship, the probability was they were both going to be men.”

Lovers’ tiff … Rewind and Chromedome in Transformers: More than Meets the Eye #12. Photograph: IDW Generation

Step forward Chromedome and Rewind, both from the original toy line. “They were close,” says Roberts. “You could have read it as them being best friends. Had there been any pushback, that’s how it would have stayed. But about a year into the series, I became more overt, depicting them as essentially husbands, giving them a storyline where the emotional highpoint was one saying to the other, ‘I love you.’



“It wasn’t a big deal to them or those around them. There’s never been any scene – nor will there be – where other Transformers remark upon them being together.”



Nonetheless, says Roberts, “it felt like a big deal to me” – so much so that he drafted a letter to Hasbro justifying its inclusion. But there was no opposition, despite the current polarisation in comics between a loud conservative sector of the readership and the so-called “social justice warriors” promoting a more liberal ideology.

In October, Marvel writer Chelsea Cain quit Twitter following harassment about her decision to depict Shield agent Mockingbird in a T-shirt bearing the slogan: “Ask me about my feminist agenda.” The fuss left Roberts staggered. “People say there’s no place for politics in comics, but comics have been political from the start. If you don’t think X-Men has been telling a story about marginalisation and ostracisation for the past 50 years, you’ve been reading a different title to me.”

His work seems to be going a lot further than T-shirt slogans. Does he ever worry it will catch fire in a similar way? “I do, but anything that sparks a bigger conversation about progressive politics is good.”



• Transformers: Lost Light is published by IDW on 14 December.