It’s Library Card Sign-up Month, and TRANSFORMERS’ Optimus Prime is helping libraries everywhere celebrate by showing off his very own Cybertron Public Library library card. But there’s More Than Meets the Eye to the iconic Autobot leader. Did you know that before he was the hero we know today, Optimus Prime was a librarian named Orion Pax?
Skybound Entertainment, a sponsor of this year’s Library Card Sign-up Month, recently launched a new, critically acclaimed Energon Universe comic series starring Hasbro’s TRANSFORMERS—the latest in a long line of stories featuring the robots in disguise. With a vast franchise spanning four decades and encompassing toys, animated television shows, movies, comic books, video games, and more, there is a trove of unique TRANSFORMERS stories, each with their own take on our favorite characters’ backstories, including Optimus Prime.
First: a quick primer on “Prime”
While it may appear to be a last name when referring to Optimus Prime, “Prime” is actually a designation of leadership. Typically, Prime is the rank of highest distinction and is used to identify the leader of the Autobots. It is bestowed onto those who carry the Matrix of Leadership, an ancient artifact and conduit for the power of Primus, the creator-god of the Transformers robots (and from whom the Prime designation is derived).
Other Primes include Vector Prime, Primus’s appointed guardian of time and space; Solus Prime, the first female Cybertronian; and Sentinel Prime, Optimus Prime’s immediate predecessor as leader of the Autobots.
Who Is Orion Pax?
Orion Pax was first introduced as a dockworker in the TRANSFORMERS Generation 1 episode “War Dawn”, in which a group of Autobots travels millions of years into their home planet Cybertron’s past before the war with the villainous Decepticons began. After Orion is critically injured by a surprise attack from Megatron (the Decepticons’ leader), the Autobots carry him to Alpha Trion, a Cybertronian working to repair other damaged robots. Alpha Trion rebuilds Orion Pax entirely and names him Optimus Prime, "the first of our new defenders.”
Since the Generation 1 series and the toys that launched it, the TRANSFORMERS franchise has grown to include numerous animated television shows, movies, comic books, video games, and more. And with all the new storylines that these sequels, spinoffs, and reboots bring, Orion Pax’s origin story has gone through several iterations.
In the 2005 comic book reboot from IDW Publishing, Orion is introduced as a police captain. And in the newly released Transformers One origin story movie, Orion’s background as a “lowly worker bot” echoes that of Generation 1. In several other iterations of the franchise, however, Orion Pax found work in the information sector.
Orion’s Librarian Beginnings
In 2002, a new comic series from seasoned TRANSFORMERS writer Simon Furman would combine elements from the original cartoon and earlier comics with new storylines in a rebooted Transformers Generation 1 universe. The six-part first volume Transformers: The War Within kicks off the series in the early days of the war between the Autobots and Decepticons as Optimus Prime’s rise as the Autobots’ leader began.
Within the first few pages, we meet the data archivist Orion Pax (or as he’s known here, Optronix) toiling at his workstation in the Vaults of the Cybertronian hub capital Iacon, where data from all over the planet is collected, analyzed, sorted, and stored for future use. Optronix’s friend Bluestreak is recounting the recent death of the Autobot leader Sentinel Prime at the hands of Megatron. Although Optronix appears indifferent to the news and eager to return to this work, he is later chosen by the Council of Ancients to succeed Sentinel Prime as the new leader of the Autobots. Optronix protests that the Council must have made a mistake, but they insist he is meant to be the next Prime, and he is swiftly bestowed with power from the Matrix of Leadership, becoming Optimus Prime and joining the fight against the Decepticons.
As librarians would say: Other duties as assigned!
Orion’s librarian origins would become standard in future TRANSFORMERS stories (even if his title would vary, from historical archivist to file clerk).
In 2010’s computer-animated series Transformers: Prime (part of the “Aligned Continuity”), after Optimus Prime loses his memories and temporarily reverts to Orion Pax, Autobot Ratchet tells the story of how Orion Pax, “a clerk in the Iacon Hall of Records” and once a friend and mentee to a much-younger Megatron, became Optimus Prime. In the three-episode arc “Orion Pax” that opens the second season, Megatron recruits the amnesiac Orion to his crew, seeking to use his experience as an archivist to decode data from the Iacon archives and uncover the locations of stashed Cybertronian technology and weapons on Earth.
Agent William Fowler, a human character in the show, sums up the arc’s conflict succinctly: “Are you telling me Prime thinks he’s some kind of librarian and a Decepticon?!”
Orion’s background is similar in the Transformers: Cyberverse cartoon, where he’s depicted as “a file clerk … and yet, he did so much more than that,” as well as the 2019 Transformers comic series from publisher IDW, where the archivist Orion was once friends with the miner Megatron before the two served as senators. Even in the Shattered Glass continuity series, which turns the TRANSFORMERS universe on its head and depicts the Autobots as ruthless tyrants, “A librarian named Optronix was one of the most obsessive researchers in the Great Cybertronian Archives. Not satisfied with his station in the hierarchy, through time he schemed and backstabbed others to reach one of the highest echelons of Cybertronian society.”
While it may be an unexpected origin story to some, it comes as no surprise for us at I Love Libraries that one of our favorite cultural heroes would start his journey in the library, a place where preservation of and access to information is of prime importance. Start your own journey and sign up for a library card today!
LIBRARIES: More Than Meets the Eye!
Featured image: TRANSFORMERS artwork for the American Library Association's Library Card Sign-Up Month. Art by Marz Jr., courtesy of Skybound Entertainment.
