User:Locoman/Sandbox/ShatteredGlass
The Shattered Glass continuity family encompasses the comics and prose stories released under the "Shattered Glass" banner. Riffing off the old "mirror universe" trope of a parallel dimension where good is evil and evil is good, the vast majority of Shattered Glass fiction depicts a strange, backwards universe in which the heroic Decepticons battle the evil Optimus Prime and his Autobot legions. Although individual iterations of the concept sometimes base themselves on specific universes—for instance, Shattered Glass Animated is a direct inversion of the Transformers: Animated cartoon the "main" Shattered Glass universe that ran from 2008 to 2016 is a vague amalgamation of multiple "Generation 1" characters that doesn't really map onto any one specific franchise or universe.
Fun Publications introduced the concept in 2008, with that year's BotCon convention comic. The idea proved wildly popular with the fandom—indeed, it is arguably the most popular and long-lasting contribution Fun Publications would ever make to the overarcing Transformers mythos—and the company spun off a wide variety of toys and fiction all set in this reality. Over the next few years, other facets of Transformers fiction would occasionally experiment with the concept, though none of them found any real success until 2021, when Hasbro unexpectedly announced a revival of the concept by launching a rebooted Shattered Glass comic and toyline.
Within the fictional Transformers multiverse, Shattered Glass fiction is not linked to any one universal stream designation. Instead, the TransTech denotate all "negative-polarity universes" by appending a minus sign to the stream's designation—for instance, the primary Shattered Glass universe is "Primax -408.24 Epsilon", while the universes of Shattered Glass Animated would be "Malgus -411.27 Zeta". For simplicity's sake, however, we have consolidated all Shattered Glass-related fiction on this page.
Major continuities
[edit]As of 2026, we identify two major continuities in this family, many of which possess a number of notable sub-branches and micro-continuities. The lists below are not meant to be complete guides to every work in that continuity, but provide a quick overview of that continuity's most notable media.
Fun Publications Shattered Glass continuity
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- "Shattered Glass" (2008)
- "Dungeons & Dinobots" (2008)
- "Do Over" (2009)
- "Reunification" (2009)
- "The Desert Heat!" (2009)
- "Eye in the Sky" (2009)
- "Blitzwing Bop" (2009)
- "Recordicons" (2010-2015)
- "Transhuman" (2011)
- "Invasion" (2012)
- "Solar Requiem" (2013)
- "Beast Wars Shattered Glass" (2013)
- "Another Light" (2015)
- "Spatiotemporal Challengers" (2016)
}}
The first Shattered Glass universe spun off from the events of the 2007 Crossing Over storyline, and initially followed the "Classics" Cliffjumper as he arrived on the Shattered Glass version of Cybertron. After the obligatory misunderstanding, he teamed up with the heroic Megatron and his Decepticons to foil Optimus Prime's plan to invade Earth aboard the Ark warship. Between 2008 and 2011, the storyline broke into two semi-parallel branches: a series of online prose stories followed Cliffjumper as he travelled to the dystopian Earth of the Shattered Glass universe with Starscream to counter Rodimus and his breakaway faction of Autobots. Following the lead of the immensely popular Shattered Expectations comic, these stories adopted a light-hearted tone, spoofing the tropes endemic to the original Transformers television show and eighties cartoons in general.
Reunification, the 2009 Transformers Collectors' Club magazine comic arc, formed the second branch of the storyline, which saw Alpha Trion lure the dimension-hopping Landquake, Breakaway, Topspin to Shattered Glass Cybertron as part of his plan to depose both Optimus and Megatron. The group escapes with Skyfall's body and encounter the pacifist Quintesson of Aquarius, who allows them to unite into Nexus Prime and defeat Optimus Prime's Omega Doom superweapon.
Between these two major branches, the "Recordicons" comic strip featured the wacky misadventures of Ravage, and the 2010 arc of "Around Cybertron" featured a glimpse at the evil counterparts of Rook and Andromeda.
2012's "Invasion" storyline marked the first major shift for the universe: the evil Ultra Magnus and his evil compatriots crossed dimensions, attacked Cliffjumper's native "Classicsverse", and destroyed the entire universe with the Terminus Blade. A small number of positive-universe refugees escaped into the Shattered Glass reality; the dimensionally transposed "Classicsverse Earth" then became an ancillary setting. A group of Autobots led by the heroic Ultra Magnus somehow materialized in the distant past, and battled their universe's evil Megatron in 2013's "Beast Wars Shattered Glass" story.
In 2015, Fun Publications wrapped up basically all of their dangling plot threads in "Another Light", a bizarro take on The Transformers: The Movie that saw the effective end of the war after this universe's version of Unicron reformatted the evil Optimus Prime into the benevolent Nova Prime. This didn't stop Fun Publications from making a few more glimpses at the universe, however--the "Spatiotemporal Challengers" storyline in 2016 featured a team of GoBots navigating the universe, while "Coalescence", the final Shattered Glass story, served as an interquel between the original prose stories and "Invasion", tying off a long-abandoned plotline regarding the mirror-universe Underbase.
IDW Shattered Glass continuity
[edit]- Shattered Glass (2021)
In 2020, after a long hiatus, Hasbro's Generations Selects released an exclusive "Shattered Glass" two-pack that featured Optimus Prime and Ratchet, advertising them as characters from IDW Publishing's Shattered Glass comic.<ref>"The Deluxe Class Shattered Glass Ratchet and Voyager Class Shattered Glass Optimus Prime figures are inspired by the Shattered Glass comics created in partnership with IDW."</ref> At the time, most members of the fandom assumed that this was just Hasbro mistakenly accrediting IDW Publishing instead of Fun Publications for the original Shattered Glass concept; in May 2021, however, it was revealed that IDW would launch a full revival of the Shattered Glass concept with the debut of a new five-issue miniseries, a reboot set in a world where the Autobots have triumphed and the heroic Megatron has gone into exile.
Minor continuities
[edit]Shattered Expectations
[edit]
- "Shattered Expectations" (2008)
The first Shattered Glass story, retroactively dubbed "Shattered Expectations", was the product of an April Fools' Day gag gone horribly wrong (or right, depending on how you interpret things. On April 1st, 2008, Fun Publications "leaked" three pages of what was supposedly the upcoming BotCon 2008 set's accompanying comic--a deliberately campy, Generation 2-inspired take on the "evil parallel universe" treatment, which featured ridiculous gags as Grimlock being a genius, Jazz talking like Mr. T, and reverse-Furmanisms all rendered in Derek Yaniger's style.
Fandom response was almost entirely positive, and the fandom was in turn almost unanimously disappointed when the truth came out. Fun Publications took note of the positive reception, however, and hired authors Greg Sepelak and Trent Troop to punch up the dialogue for the real comic before allowing them to continue the Shattered Glass story in prose form.
Shattered Glass Animated
[edit]
Derrick J. Wyatt expressed interest in doing a Shattered Glass-themed episode of Transformers Animated, but this idea didn't come to fruition before the show ended in 2009. AllSpark Almanacs alluded to the idea, and featured a few glimpses of a Shattered Glass Animated universe: a reality where Isaac Sumdac, ruler of Detroit, has enslaved the evil Autobots and his "daughter" Sari.
Transformers Legends
[edit]
- "Shattered Glass" (2014)
The Transformers Legends mobile game featured an event based on the original Shattered Glass comic, although in this adaptation it's Rodimus who launches the Ark for Earth instead of Optimus, who's nowhere to be found.
SD SG
[edit]
- SD SG (2015-2016)
A series of parodic strips that poke fun at the Shattered Glass universe and the Transformers franchise in general.
"Transfer Point"
[edit]- " {{#if:||Transfer Point}}" (2015)
The original Challenge of the GoBots cartoon featured an episode where the heroic Guardians accidentally travelled to a backwards universe populated by evil doppelgangers. In 2015, the Ask Vector Prime Facebook feature retroactively declared this to be just one of many negative-polarity realities, no different from any of the many Shattered Glass universes.
Epilogue Two
[edit]
- "Epilogue Two" (2017)
Fun Publication's final Transformers story ever includes a glimpse at several new realities—these include "shattered" versions of Axiom Nexus, the 2005 IDW continuity, the Unicron Trilogy, and a backwards look at the original Generation 1 cartoon continuity, all part of a hitherto-unseen "negative multiverse".
Forged to Fight
[edit]
- "Prime Suspect" (2019)
- "Shattered Bridges"
- "Shattered Lenses"
- "Shattered Fates"
The Forged to Fight mobile game featured a Shattered Glass-themed event that pitted heroic, Generation 1-style Decepticons against evil Autobots from a hitherto-unseen mirror version of the movie continuity family.