Hearts of Steel

Bumblebee attempts to be a Really Useful Engine.

Hearts of Steel is a comic miniseries published by IDW Publishing in 2006. It was the first and only story in IDW's The Transformers: Evolutions series. It is set in an alternate Generation 1 continuity in which the Transformers' first contact with humanity is in the late 19th century, rather than the 20th.

The series is written by Chuck Dixon. Ted McKeever was originally announced as artist (and produced the piece which eventually became the wraparound cover of issue 1), but for unknown reasons, Guido Guidi took over the job, designing the characters' new 19th century forms and drawing three of the four issues of the series (with #3 drawn by Antonio Vasquez and Luis Czerniawski).

Five years after the original mini-series, the creative team returned to the universe with a two-issue tie-in to IDW's Infestation 2 event. In 2014, the series was brought into the modern day as part of the X-Files: Conspiracy crossover. In 2017, a version of the story was folded into the 2005 IDW continuity via the Revolutionaries series.

	The Transformers: Evolutions Hearts of Steel issues:	»
#1 #2 #3 #4

Overview

The story opens with the Transformers engaged in a battle on Ice Age Earth, and having adopted bizarre animal alternate forms as a result. When the climate cools, both sides retreat underground and enter a period of stasis, not awakening until the 19th Century. Soon both sides are making alliances with humans and utilizing the technology of the age to continue their war, with the Decepticons attempting to reach an electrical generating station in New York City to fuel their war machine. John Henry and Mark Twain, along with other historical figures, play prominent roles in the book.

Timeframe

It is not possible to pin down exactly when this story takes place, due to some contradictory information that doesn't match up to real life. The Civil War is not mentioned, so it is most likely after 1865. Mark Twain lived in San Francisco from 1864 to 1866, and he appears to live there in this story. However, he claims in issue #4, to have one daughter, which would place the story between 1872 (the birth of Susy Clemens) and 1874 (the birth of Clara Clemens). The finale of the story involves a race to New York, where it is noted Thomas Edison has completed his first electrical generating facility; this must be Pearl Street Station, which was not operational in real life until 1882. The sequel, Infestation 2, was explicitly set in 1888, and returning human characters did not appear to have aged as many as twenty years.

The Hasbro Heroes Sourcebook (see "Continuity", below) would go on to posit that the events of the miniseries took place 150 years before the present day. Assuming that the present day refers to the year 2017, the book's date of publication, this would place the events of Hearts of Steel sometime around the year 1867 — while this estimate doesn't really line up with any of the aforementioned events, it was used on this very wiki as an arbitrary placeholder date for many years.

"Ice Age Wars"

The first few pages of this story show that the Transformers came to Earth immediately prior to an (unspecified) ice age, and fought a war there and then using dinosaurs, giant insects, and (possibly) other beast-forms as alternate modes, before going into hibernation until the 19th Century. Many of the main characters wear these distinctive spiky bodies for the first half of the story, before taking on vehicle-based forms. Where necessary in this wiki, this prelude to Hearts of Steel is referred to using the (unofficial) term "Ice Age Wars".

Alternate modes

Shockwave and his alternate mode of an ironclad ship. Toy please, Hasbro?

In this story, most of the Transformers take the form of 19th-century locomotives and railway cars, rather than 20th-century automobiles, airplanes, and the like. Some notable exceptions are Shockwave, who becomes an ironclad ship, Scourge, who transforms into a blimp, and the Seekers, who become biplanes (which is a bit of an anachronism). Optimus Prime only appears in slumber and Megatron does not appear at all, though concept drawings for both of them are included in the trade paperback.

Concept designs of Megatron were produced, but ultimately went unused. MediaWiki will give its firstborn to whoever makes a toy of the one on the left. My child is gone.

The Transformers portrayed in the story seem to adopt not only the appearance of Earth's machines, but its technology level as well. Locomotive-form Bumblebee is fueled by coal, Scourge flies using a real gasbag, and Ravage is sufficiently vulnerable that a gas explosion is enough to incapacitate him. This is not unprecedented; a similar phenomenon is hinted at in Dreamwave's G.I. Joe crossover, while in some original G1 stories, the Transformers coveted supplies of gasoline. Still, whether this is an actual story point or merely a stylistic choice is not clear.

Continuity

John Barber is having way too much fun.

Originally, Hearts of Steel was conceived as the first installment in Evolutions, an ongoing series of Elseworlds-style tales that would re-imagine the Transformers in different time periods and settings. For a variety of reasons, Evolutions fell through, leaving Hearts of Steel as a small, strange continuity separate from IDW's ongoing "Generation 1" universe. As a result of this isolation, it hosted several crossover events—notably 2014's Infestation 2 and 2015's X-Files one-shot—that would have otherwise undermined the narrative direction of the main ongoing universe. In 2015, Ask Vector Prime feature gave the Hearts of Steel universe its customary universal stream designation, seemingly confirming it as an entirely separate world from any of IDW's other Transformers faire.

In 2016, IDW announced the formation of the Hasbro Universe, which aimed to amalgamate several disparate Hasbro properties together into a single shared continuity. Piggybacking off the back of the Revolution maxi-series came Revolutionaries, which told a story involving, among other things, ancient Transformer activity on Earth - including cameos of the Hearts of Steel characters. This caused no small amount of head-scratching and confusion among fans, and was the subject of vigorous speculation for several months before issue 5 of Revolutionaries revealed the reason why. In this sequence of events, the characters who would become the Hearts of Steel Transformers were, in fact, amnesiac Maximal explorers; they had been brainwashed by Shockwave into believing that they were the Autobots and Decepticons and fighting the "Ice Age Wars," which were revealed to be a series of wargames Shockwave orchestrated and studied for his own strategic benefit. Revolutionaries #5 revealed what had happened to the lost Maximals between the events of Infestation 2 #2 and the modern day, introducing "Hearts of Steel Bumblebee"—in reality a 'bot named Centurion—as a supporting character.

In doing this, however, IDW did not strictly retcon out the original events of Hearts of Steel, but created essentially two versions of the exact same tale, each occurring in distinct universes. As a result, the comic is something of a Schrödinger's comic—it can be read as a "what-if" tale about the "real" Autobots and Decepticons waking up in the wrong century, or a story about brainwashed Maximals re-enacting the Great War on Earth, with no major discrepancies between the two.

Only a few months later, Hearts of Steel would get a second shout-out in the IDW continuity in the pages of Wrath of Karza, where a series of time disruptions caused the "real" Optimus Prime to briefly adopt his steam engine body while battling Baron Karza.

Collections

• Hearts of Steel TPB (December 27, 2006) ISBN 1600100554 / ISBN 978-1600100550

• Includes concept art and all covers for each issue.

• Hearts of Steel (2012 Edition) TPB (February 1, 2012) ISBN 1613771703 / ISBN 978-1613771709

• New cover art

• Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 39: Hearts of Steel (April 5, 2017)

• Hardcover collection of Hearts of Steel and Spotlights for "Galvatron", "Optimus Prime" and "Mirage".

Covers

• 
  Hearts of Steel TPB; art by Guido Guidi.
• 
  2012 Re-release; art by Guidi and Joana Lafuente
• 
  Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 39; art by ??? (Bumblebee) and Guido Guidi (retro)

International Printings

Spain

Evolution: Hearts of Steel was translated and released in Spain by NORMA Editorial.

• ISBN 978-84-9847-912-6

China

Transformers: Hearts of Steel was translated and released in China by DMAN in August, 2017.

• ISBN 978-75-3195-357-9

Toys

Nearly twenty years after the original comic book, the Hearts of Steel designs finally made the leap into toy form as part of the Generations Comic Edition exclusive subline.

Timelines Optimus Prime / Timelines Starscream

Timelines Bumblebee / Timelines Megatron