The Ark series
From Transformers Wiki
The Ark series is a series of non-fiction guidebooks chronicling Transformers character models produced by Jim Sorenson and Bill Forster beginning in the year 2007.
Despite being a specialty product printed on heavy-stock premium paper which caters to a fantastically small audience, the series has sold absurdly well.
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Contents |
The Ark series
- 2007 — Transformers: The Ark — Character models for the US cartoon.
- 2008 — Transformers: The Ark II — Character models for the Japanese cartoon
- 2009 — Transformers: The Complete Ark — Omnibus addition of v1 and v2, with edits, additions, corrections and new content to replace pages that were dropped because they overlapped between the two volumes.
The Ark Addendum
In addition to The Ark book series, Jim Sorenson has published several Ark Addendums on his blog, featuring character models too trivial to include in the book, or expanded profiles (such as weapon details) which simply could not fit in the print edition.
The Transformers
The Headmasters
Super-God Masterforce
Post-release discoveries
Right: Junkyard's finalized models by Toei as published in Transformers Generations.
In the years since The Ark series books were published, multiple model sheet collections and production bibles have surfaced through various auction sites, social media and fan archive blogs, revealing that the vast majority of the models from the original cartoon that Bob Budiansky and Jim Sorenson had in their collective possession at the time of publishing, were not final. An overwhelmingly large portion of the character models published in the books were older models that had received several revisions before making it into the cartoon, meaning that some of the details that can be found on these models had either been removed or redesigned afterwards, hence why some of them don't match up with what can be seen on-screen.
As Budiansky was mostly involved with the comic side of the Transformers brand at Marvel, it appears that he was not in possession of a lot of finalized production material for the cartoon, nor were the rest of the comic department at Marvel, as is evident throughout the majority of the comic's run. With the nature of how Toei is known to operate, and their unwillingness to share much of anything they worked on with other companies (especially outside of Japan), and also due to them having the final say in the character design process, it's reasonable to assume that Toei refused to share a lot of the finalized character models with Marvel—or more likely—never told them that they had made changes to the designs. As more finalized material from Japan has made its way into the public, it has become more and more apparent that this was likely to be the case, most notably during the beginning half of 1986, where entire models for both The Transformers: The Movie and season 3 were getting full overhauls by Toei, rather than some minor tweaks like the years prior with seasons 1 and 2.
Notable discoveries
Pretty much the entirety of the season 2 characters published in the books are pre-final models. Several of these models received anywhere from one or more revisions, that could consist of small tweaks (such as removing or adding details, or redesigning the heads), or entire redraws that look very similar to the first copy (AKA, the ones published in the books), but when compared side-by-side, they're actually just ever so slightly slimmer or stretched wider (sometimes the lineart is the give away, as certain lines don't always line up with each other, or look like they're sketched, whereas in the earlier revisions, these lines all connected). This includes—but is not limited to—the Aerialbots, the Autobot Cars, the Mini Vehicles, Omega Supreme, the Coneheads, the Decepticon Triple Changers, and so on.
Several of The Transformers: The Movie and season 3 model sheets that appear in the books—such as the ones for the Predacons, Pipes, and Sky Lynx—all received entirely new models by Toei, different from what was originally drawn up by Marvel Productions, with Sky Lynx and the Predacons drawn from angles that are much more stylistic when compared to the standard ¾ angles used in past seasons, and feature large, black shadows underneath their rear-view models, which also hadn't been used until this point. Also among the drastic changes in the art style are the "boxier" hand designs used on the Predacons, which would be utilized more frequently in the subsequent Japanese cartoons like The Headmasters, instead of the rounded hands that were more common in Floro Dery's work for seasons 1 and 2.
At the time of publishing, not much was known about the unique head design that appears alongside Rodimus Prime's models in the books. For years, everyone assumed the boxy robot mode Rodimus model used in the books was the model used in the film and season 3, and that this single head design was just a close-up reference for animators (which was a reasonable assumption, given the precedent of the prior seasons), but in reality, this head design was Rodimus' robot mode model! It turns out that Toei scrapped the Marvel Productions model design entirely in favor of the sleeker design used for Hot Rod's final model (which was also designed by Toei to replace the boxier Marvel Hot Rod model). Rather than designing an entirely new model sheet for Rodimus that fit the slender aesthetic they wanted, all that was designed was a new head, with the animators simply instructed to draw a larger version of Hot Rod's body with Rodimus's head slapped on top. Because of this, no official robot mode model exists for Rodimus, just a head design. Bridging off of this, another discovery relating to Rodimus Prime was made. In 1987, Toei apparently decided to make a proper robot mode model for Rodimus that wasn't just a larger Hot Rod body with a different head, so for The Headmasters they made a new design that resembled his toy, even going so far as to redesign his entire transformation scheme to match the toy as well.
The Junkions Junkyard and Scrapheap were also given entirely new models by Toei for the movie, that had parts matching the other non-Wreck-Gar Junkions, giving them a collective "mix and match"-type design, rather than the two stand-alone designs drawn by Floro Dery. The problem with the Junkion models though, is that the only known trace of the final Toei Junkion models as of 2024, is a small section in the back of the Transformers Generations guidebook. That being said, Dery's original designs for these two Junkions did still appear in season 3 of the cartoon, due to AKOM animating the two episodes they appeared in.
Swerve's models used in the books are probably the most controversial in this series of revelations, as Swerve's robot mode appears to have been traced directly from a screencap of the episode "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 5", rather than using an official model, while his vehicle mode model is a flipped version of Gears's model that had been photoshopped to make the rough-sketched lines more crisp, and to add the missing details like the Micro Change "M" on the hood, which is absent on Gears' model, but present on the official Swerve model. The reason for this tracing being published in The Ark series over an official model, seems to date all the way back to the '80s, as it seems to be a result of his model not making its way to Marvel Comics—and by extension—the hands of Bob Budiansky, as Swerve was notably absent throughout both the UK and US Marvel comic continuities, and his bio was never published in The Transformers Universe profile book either. The official painted cel of Swerve's models that has surfaced on the internet since, appears to have come from Marvel Productions, so it seems likely that Marvel Productions and Toei both had access to the models, but Marvels' comic department didn't, making this a somewhat rarer model to find the official lineart of out in the wild, especially State-side.
In closing, the opening "Notes" page of the first book states that these were the materials they had at their disposal, and that Jim and Bill knew that there were more models out there that they either didn't have or didn't have good copies of and enticed readers with any materials to aid in their compilations by contacting the listed email address. In recent years, some of Jim Sorenson's other Transformers art compilation works, such as Transformers: A Visual History, saw newly-surfaced materials that weren't published in this series or in the tie-in "Ark Addendum" posts on his blog.
Chinese reprints
The Chinese reprints have been published by DMAN.
- Transformers: The Ark I (November, 2017) ISBN 9787531955023
- Transformers: The Ark II (November, 2017) ISBN 9787531955030
