Comic publisher | |
Industry |
Comics Fan club organizing |
Headquarters | Fort Worth, Texas |
Website | fpcomics |
Fun Publications is a publishing company that runs the Transformers Collectors Club and G.I. Joe Collectors Club under license from Hasbro. Besides releasing comics, Fun Publications releases exclusive toys and runs conventions for their clubs.
Fun Publications also publishes a serial comic distributed as part of the official Transformer's Collector's Club magazine. There are six pages to the comic in each magazine, which together "make one complete story arc" by the end of the year with 36 pages in six months. The full strips from the first two years were distributed by IDW as Transformers Cybertron: Balancing Act.
In addition to releasing comic books and magazines Fun Publications Timelines series has also produced prose stories, licensed toys and video media. However, 2016 has been announced as the final year in which Fun Publications will hold BotCon and host the Collectors Club.
The Timelines Landquake toy proved extremely popular. Critics of the comic have said that the stories play directly to the fans of the Transformers conventions and stories center on the toys being introduced each year.
After the Transformers convention license was acquired by Fun Publications, they issued a new series called Transformers: Timelines, a series of stand alone tales. The first comic was released in 2005 with a story called "Descent into Evil", starring a group of updated classic Autobots and new characters fighting the evil forces of Deathsaurus and his Insecticons. As would follow with each year's story, some of the characters appearing would be released as exclusive figures at Botcon.
Their 2006 BotCon tale, "Dawn of Future's Past", acts as a prequel to the Beast Wars; and was distributed by Diamond in November 2006.
A sequel to the Marvel Comics Generation 1 story called "Games of Deception" was the centerpiece for the 2007 comic. The story centered on the Decepticon Bug Bite's attempt to take over the Decepticon forces of Megatron. This story features the Transformers: Classics toy line as well as this year's Botcon exclusive toys. The text story Wreckers: Finale Part II was also released.
The 2008 comic "Shattered Glass" takes place in the "Shattered Glass" universe, in which Classics Cliffjumper is hurled into an alternate reality where the Decepticons are heroic while the Autobots are evil tyrants. The text story "Gone Too Far" was also published.