Shattered Glass Animated

Never underestimate one man's love of drawing goth girls.

2008 was a big year for Transformers. Transformers Animated began broadcasting its first season in full, marking a triumphant return for Transformers to western animation courtesy of Cartoon Network. Elsewhere, Fun Publications blazed their own trail by introducing the Transformers brand to its very first mirror universe in its then 25-year history in the form of Shattered Glass. And when two production teams of asylum-running fans love each other very much, they create a horrific frankenbaby that this wiki has designated "Shattered Glass Animated".

Conceptual history and development

As the first official Transformers convention following Animated's broadcast, BotCon 2008 featured several events built around the show, its cast, and its crew. Among the special guests in attendance were Animated story editor and writer Marty Isenberg, storyboard artist and animation director Matt Youngberg, and art director and lead character designer Derrick J. Wyatt. The three were in the middle of planning Animated's third season; inspired by the convention's Shattered Glass theming, a mirror universe adventure was floated as a potential episode concept (likely by Wyatt, if his later social media presence was any indication). An outline for the episode, in which "Optimus and crew" accidentally TransWarp into a world of evil Autobots and heroic Decepticons, was written up by Tom Pugsley and Greg Klein under the title "Strange Reflections". However, once the season three opener "TransWarped" was extended from the length of two to three episodes, "Strange Reflections" was put on the back burner for a potential season four, and Pugsley was reassigned to write "Human Error, Part II".

Note the goatee. Not because of the mirror universe, but because he's Billy Mays.

This was all happening behind closed doors, however, and Animated's initial public forays into mirror universes came in its ancillary media. The first was in 2009, in the artbook-cum-encyclopedia The AllSpark Almanac, which authors Jim Sorenson and Bill Forster presented as an in-universe document produced by their mirror doppelgangers. This other Sorenson and Forster originated from a universe referred to as Quadwal -3760.925 Theta; at the time, this marked only the second "negative polarity" universe documented in the universal stream terminology used by the officious Transcendent Technomorphs, after the Shattered Glass universe itself (and the third in total, after "Shattered Expectations"). Later in the same year, the "Shatteredverse" comic Around Cybertron #6 would use the likeness of Animated Bumblebee's "Elite Guard" toy as the Wireless Automated Sales Person, with its exaggerated Animated styling representing its in-universe holographic cartooniness. 2010 saw the release of The AllSpark Almanac II, the rear cover of which included a quote of praise for the book attributed to "Swindle (Mirror Universe)"—the first explicit, in-fiction appearance of a mirror universe Animated character.

The AllSpark Almanac II was printed at a time when we knew Animated wasn't coming back for a fourth season, so the authors were allowed a look at the cartoon team's internal documentation in order to allow them to briefly summarise what could have been. The guide revealed that the episode concept had since gained the name "Mirror, Mirror", after the Star Trek episode that brought morally inverted parallel universes to the public consciousness. While it would be easy to lay the blame for the Star Trek reference on Sorenson, who had form doing so and would perfect the art in Beast Wars: Uprising, a look at those internal documents reveals that it was the Animated team that had coined the name "Mirror, Mirror" when the episode had been pushed to season four. A later revision of the same document corroborated the Almanac summary that the focal characters of the episode were changed to Sari and Bulkhead, moving away from the "Optimus and crew" angle.

This change of focus might be attributed to Derrick Wyatt, who was greatly interested in the Shattered Glass concept and an evil Sari in particular. According to his friend Heather Morgan, Wyatt had began to design Sari during season three's production, despite her very small role in Pugsley and Klein's outline. Wyatt would continue to foster the development of mirror universe Sari with Morgan and others on his Formspring account; the wider Transformers fandom would become aware of the character in 2010, when Wyatt posted a collection of Sari-themed artwork to his blog. "Shattered Glass" Sari was featured in five of these art pieces, including an inked and coloured icon based on his season three production sketch, a limbless Sari based on a flying Gamera, and Sari posing with a Frankenstein's monster take on Bumblebee. Morgan would later clarify that the pictured Bumblebee was intended to be evil Sari's own creation, based on the relationship she'd seen between regular universe Sari and Bee, explaining the image's filename, "SGSari'sBee.jpg". We stress that none of these three illustrations are official, despite being drawn by Animated's lead character designer, as they were created after the show had ceased production.

Thanks, shadow self! We'll do battle later.

As often happened with Wyatt's off-the-clock artwork, ancillary media would come along and absorb it into the Transformers brand. For the Japanese guidebook Transformers Generations 2011 Vol. 1, Wyatt completed the artwork of both Saris in conflict, teaming them up with fellow body-type-sharing enemies Optimus Prime and The Motor Master. "Shattered Glass" Sari thus became a canonical part of the Transformers universe and, if further proof were needed, the accompanying text confirmed that she had been intended to appear in Animated season four. Later that year, a pair of lithographs were made available exclusively at BotCon 2011, each comprised of a collection of all-new bios and tech specs for minor Animated characters. The Decepticon lithograph included entries for "Shattered Glass Optimus Prime", "Shattered Glass Bumblebee", "Shattered Glass Sumdac", and "Shattered Glass Sari", giving each character an official character model and profile for the first time. While the majority of the bios were written by Jim Sorenson, Sari's was written by Heather Morgan, who'd become something of a custodian for the character at Wyatt's behest.

Morgan and Sorenson would collaborate again on the special "Shattered Glass Animated" edition of Sorenson and Forster's The AllSpark Almanac Addendum, published in Transformers Collectors' Club magazine #44 in April 2012. This edition showcased the character models from the lithograph, alongside new bios; additionally, a "diary" page written from Sari's perspective, penned by Morgan based on Sorenson's outline, summarised a number of adventures paralleling the episodes "Sound and Fury", "SUV: Society of Ultimate Villainy" and "Human Error". This addendum would flesh out the world by establishing mirror versions of Prowl, Ratchet, Bulkhead, Sentinel Prime, Ultra Magnus, Soundwave, and a cadre of human superheroes in the form of HYBRID. Sari's page canonized another of the illustrations from Wyatt's blog entry, showing her wielding energy chainsaw weapons. When this addendum was integrated into The Complete AllSpark Almanac in 2015, it also officialised a piece of fanart from Wyatt's DeviantArt account, putting a face to the previously-mentioned mirror universe Megatron and establishing the existence of Starscream and the Autotroopers. Presented in the in-universe Almanac style, the addendum refused to use "Shattered Glass" as a descriptor, instead referring to their characters with appellations such as "Optimus Prime (Mirror Universe)"; when printed inside the Complete Almanac, these were simplified into the format "Mirror Optimus Prime".

Other collector-aimed stories would give the "Shattered Glass Animated" universe a more definitive place in the multiverse. The edition of Transformers I.Q. published in Collectors' Club magazine #58 in 2014 established evil Sari to live in the universal stream Malgus -411.27 Zeta using some very leading questions. The 2015 pack-in manga Legends Comic: Bonus Edition Vol. 11 included Sari in a pan-universal display of evil female Transformers from all across the brand's fiction. One of the final Transformers stories Fun Publications ever released, 2017's "Epilogue Two", featured a mirror version of the TransTech establishing contact with a whole multiverse of negative polarity universes, among them a "Shattered Glass Animated" stream by the name "Cybertron -MA07".

The capstone on the "Shattered Glass Animated" universe came in the penultimate issue of the Collector's Club magazine in 2016. The main selling point of this issue was a "definitive" preliminary episode guide to Transformers Animated season four, with "Mirror, Mirror" once again summarised, paired with unseen artwork. The four bios originating from the BotCon 2011 lithograph were also reprinted in this issue, unabridged and unaltered. And, for the first time, the mirror continuity received a full comic strip as part of Josh Perez's SD SG in the form of "The Re-Burn of Blurr", a tale written by Wyatt to parody Animated's own capstone story, "The Return of Blurr".

Overview

Reading list

• The AllSpark Almanac II (2010)
  • "Swindle (Mirror Universe)" is quoted on the back cover.
• "The 'Cons" (lithograph, 2011) / "The 'Bots and 'Cons" (Collectors' Club #71, 2016)
  • Profiles for "Shattered Glass Optimus Prime", "Shattered Glass Bumblebee", "Shattered Glass Sumdac", and "Shattered Glass Sari". Both printings are identical.
• The AllSpark Almanac Addendum (Collectors' Club #44, 2012) / The Complete AllSpark Almanac (2015)
  • Bios for the Sumdacs, Optimus, and Bumblebee, as well as a diary entry by Sari. The Almanac printing rearranges the images, alters Sari's doodles, and changes the subheaders and layout to add in artwork of and references to Megatron, Starscream, and the Autotroopers.
• Transformers I.Q. #16 (Collectors' Club #58, 2014)
  • Contains characterisation and questions concerning Sari and Bumblebee.
• Legends Comic: Bonus Edition Vol. 11 (2015)
  • Sari makes a non-speaking cameo as part of a group of villainous women.
• SD SG: "The Re-Burn of Blurr" (Collectors' Club #71, 2016)
  • The only comic story set in "Shattered Glass Animated" continuity, parodying the Animated script reading "The Return of Blurr".
• TransTech: "Epilogue Two" (G.I. Joe vs. Cobra #9 (Diamond Edition), 2017)
  • Bumblebee makes a non-speaking cameo among glimpses of other negative polarity universes.