Fun Publications

From GoBots Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search
FunPub-logo.jpg

Fun Publications, Incorporated was an American publishing company who, from 2005 to 2016, held the license for the official Transformers convention, BotCon, and the Transformers' Collectors Club. Through these avenues, the company's writers orchestrated what was referred to by a few Transformers fans as the largest modern "revival" of the GoBots franchise to that date, though this was before comics based on the brand were put out by a proper publisher.

GoBots fiction[edit | edit source]

Ownership of the GoBots franchise has become complicated in the years since it became defunct. Hasbro's acquisition of its competitor Tonka in the '90s gave it rights to the GoBots "concept", or intellectual property, but the original toys and cartoon remained under the control of Bandai and Warner Bros, respectively.

Still, the intellectual property was enough for Fun Publications, through their Official Transformers Collector's Club, to dip their toes into producing new GoBots-related stories by incorporating the GoBots into the Transformers multiverse. From 2008 to 2016, Fun Pub delivered new fictional adventures of the GoBots through OTFCC materials, including prose fiction, comics, and social media venues. In fact, Fun Pub actually created several new GoBots continuities, described below.

  • Transformers Timelines — Based off of the Challenge of the GoBots cartoon, this GoBots universe suffered a Cataclysm which caused the breakdown of their reality on a fundamental level. Tracing the origins of the Cataclysm to a Transformers universe, several GoBots traveled through dimensions to confront the problem. The Cataclysmverse was introduced in the prose story Withered Hope before continuing through the four-part Spatiotemporal Challengers series. GoBots fleeing from the Cataclysm during the Diaspora turned up in different Fun Pub Transformers universes, including several cameos during the Beast Wars: Uprising series that culminated in the Monster GoBots operating as the major antagonists in Cultural Appropriation as the "Antares Eight".
  • Renegade RhetoricAsk Vector Prime was a Fun Pub feature told through Q&A on an official Facebook page. Hosted by the borderline omniscient Vector Prime on the Transformers multiversal hub Axiom Nexus, the host broke the fourth wall to describe a version of the "real world" where GoBots became the successful, decades-spanning franchise instead of Transformers. In this world, Challenge of the GoBots continued on for a second 65-episode season, making up the bulk of the new continuity for "Renegade Rhetoric". In-universe, the RR continuity's version of Cy-Kill briefly replaced Vector Prime as a guest host for AVP. Even after he was identified as a terrorist and fled back to his home reality, Cy-Kill continued regaling readers with his exploits through pirate broadcasts of Renegade Rhetoric.
  • "Brain Problem Situation" — In the same "real world" that aired the second season of Challenge of the GoBots, Fun Publications eventually assumed the license for the Official GoBots Collector's Club. "Brain Problem Situation" is an inversion of the real Fun Pub's story "Withered Hope", describing how Transformers suffering a breakdown of their reality traveled to a GoBots universe to confront the problem.

External links[edit | edit source]