The Greatest Leader of His Time

Ruminations on holding power, and on Robots in Disguise

(Hello to all my new subscribers, and sorry this post isn’t about games. It IS about narrative, and how the media we consume shapes the stories we tell ourselves. As I head to New York Toy Fair for the first time in my life, I thought this would make an appropriate post. Turns out the timing was even more on point than I thought.)

When I was a little dreamer, there was a commercial for a new Transformers toy with a jingle that went: “Powermaster Optimus Prime / the greatest leader of his time!” This tight little couplet imprinted on me, and forevermore, any time I thought of Optimus Prime, I would think “yeah, the greatest leader of his time!”

Honestly, more than just the jingle for this toy imprinted on me. One day in 1988 when I’d stayed home sick from school, my mom took me to Toys R Us and surprised me with this absurdly cool figure in an effort to help me feel better (attitudes about going out in public while sick were different back then). It definitely worked; the experience of opening and manipulating Powermaster Optimus Prime for the first time subconsciously became the metric against which I would judge all future toy acquisitions. It’s still happening now; a few months ago, I got a sample of Legacy Armada Optimus Prime through work and thought, wow, this makes me feel like I’m opening Powermaster Optimus Prime in 2023. Not coincidentally, that figure is probably going to end up my favorite Hasbro Transformers release this year (I work in the toy and game industry so it’s not weird that I keep a list like this. Really.)

Despite this imprinting, I have to say, Optimus Prime hasn’t been my favorite Transformers character since I was about that age. Like anyone irrevocably enmeshed in a fandom, I take pride in diving deep for my picks. Oh, my friend’s child, your favorite character is Bumblebee? Cool, that’s nice for you. I’ll just be over here thinking about Swerve, the sitcom-obsessed bartender whose extreme loneliness almost drove him to lose himself forever in a fantasy world of his own making. Optimus Prime is obviously the iconic face of the Transformers franchise, but us lifer fans can’t make the obvious choice.

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I went to a Catholic high school (mostly out of my caretakers’ fear of sending me to a public school in the south Chicago suburbs), and about five years after I graduated, the school opened a "Leadership Center” off the back of a fundraising campaign they hiply dubbed TC2L, or “The Courage to Lead.” Alumni newsletters talked breathlessly about how now every student could answer the call to be leaders in their own lives and out in the world, as though every single person who attended the school (largely because they could afford it) was thrust into that position by a world in need of their vision. A school newsletter from Spring 2007 had this to say about the soon-to-open Center:

“In addition, a copyright for the Leadership Program has come through Washington, D.C., making the program an official and true part of the [school] experience. Now, future students have another positive to look forward to when they walk through the doors on their first day of classes — they will be leaving in four years better prepared to lead in the world than when they first had entered. This is a truly amazing and novel idea, and gratitude here is owed to the members of the Advisory Board who came up with such an ingenious idea."

Courageous! Amazing, novel, ingenious! Copyrightable! Give us money now, please, so we can build a suburban Catholic school bursting with little leaders waiting to set the world right.

Last year, the school’s president banned students and teachers from displaying Pride, Black Lives Matter, or any other “identity-based” flags in their classrooms. Now that’s courage.

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For about eight years of my career, I carried a manager’s title, and for the back half of those years, that title came with actually being responsible for managing people. My team was incredible, honestly the best you could ask for, and I think largely I was a pretty good boss for them. Unfortunately, my own boss was so bad he got canceled into oblivion by national media, so I left my position, and a lot of my team with it. I’ve kept in touch with almost all of them since, and I don’t think any of them resent my decision to leave, but I’m honestly not sure I deserve full grace there. Leaving was a move of self-preservation, and although I don’t want to be too hard on myself for choices made in the summer of 2020, I do think the Catholics had one adjective right — leading does take courage, and I’m not sure I had enough of it when I needed to.

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At the end of “More Than Meets the Eye,” the pilot episode of the original Transformers cartoon, our heroes’ human ally Spike Witwicky writes this observation about Optimus Prime in his journal: “Optimus Prime cares a lot for his fellow robots. And he doesn’t want anything to happen to them. I think he’d make a neat president!” Nice sentiment, Spike, but don’t you know that your show takes place in 1984, and Transformers, like all my generation’s favorite cartoons, wouldn’t exist without the rampant deregulation of the FCC by President Ronald Reagan? But yeah, okay, let’s make a big red truck the president instead. Dummy. I’m glad Shia LeBeouf played a version of you in the movies.

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We live in a gerontocracy. To misquote 45, “there are dilapidated people on both sides.” Mitch McConnell can’t get through a public appearance without freezing up, and Dianne Feinstein has arguably left most of her mental acuity behind¹. Nevertheless, they persist. We’re likely looking down the barrel of a general election with the two oldest presidential contenders in history, just like last time. At the point these folks are at with their faculties, it feels pretty plainly to me like a case of “I’m just doing this for me, to hold onto whatever power I can amass for as long as I can.” Which, unfortunately, is probably what most folks who gravitate towards positions of power are after in the first place. But at least the sharper ones can still keep up appearances.

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The comic panels I’ve been using throughout this post come from the book The Transformers #23, “Chaos Theory Part 2,” written by James Roberts with art by Alex Milne. In this story, Optimus Prime (then a policebot named Orion Pax) learns some troubling information about Cybertron’s governing senate, realizing that the ruling class may not always have the best interest of their people at heart. After getting roughed up by some senators’ goons, Orion bursts into their chamber and demands answers to three questions given to him by his revolutionary friend Megatron, at that time a blue-collar laborer with literary aspirations (the tyranny would come later).

In real life, Megatron’s three questions are adapted from British parliamentarian and Labour party luminary Tony Benn, an unapologetically radical progressive who developed five questions he thought should be asked of anyone in power. Since Orion Pax didn’t cover all of them, they are:

1. What power have you got?

2. Where did you get it from?

3. In whose interests do you use it?

4. To whom are you accountable?

5. How do we get rid of you?

James and Alex, the team on Transformers #23, would go on to create what I have come to accept is my all-time favorite comic book, More Than Meets the Eye, a sci-fi adventure sitcom about how a society rebuilds after a war and an incredible mashup of Battlestar Galactica, Community, and my favorite childhood toys. The series kicks off with Optimus Prime, realizing that his presence can only ever remind his fellow Cybertronians of endless conflict, abdicating his position of leadership and taking off for the stars.

By the way, More Than Meets the Eye series writer James Roberts also runs the nonprofit Guernsey Community Foundation, a charitable organization that works to serve underprivileged folks in his home municipality, as its chief executive and board director. I have to imagine he’s a pretty good leader.

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I don’t work in management anymore. In 2021 I got a nice job in my favorite industry as a regular old employee, and I like it that way. My bosses are chill and advocate for their teams when it’s important to do so. No one reports to me and I can spend most of my day listening to music while I answer emails and manipulate spreadsheets. My high school would have been disappointed — good thing they didn’t have to waste their copyrighted Leadership Program on me.

I do still, though, find myself in leadership positions from time to time. Most recently that includes one of my larger creative projects, a show I’ve been co-executive producing with one of my best friends and creative partners for the past five years. Recently my friend and partner decided it was time to move onto other things, but I figured I wanted to stay.

However — and this is completely honest — before I settled on that decision, I thought about Optimus Prime. I thought, what if one of the folks on our team didn’t trust me there without my partner, didn’t think I could run things solo? What if, internally, one of the people I was responsible for was going through their own version of Orion Pax’s monologue to the Cybertronian senate — “HOW CAN WE GET RID OF YOU?”

Do I think that was really happening? No, because I think we run a show that would have given anyone on our team the confidence to speak up safely if they had any issues with leadership. But I had to be sure. So before I took on the role of executive producer solely for myself, I let our team know that if any of them didn’t think I should, they could tell my partner and she and I would plan out a different future for the show.

Now, that didn’t happen, and executive producer I remain. But I think my putting it on the table was crucial. I don’t say this to seem like I’m patting myself on the back here, I just think this is a line of questioning that anyone in a leadership position should follow from time to time. Ask themselves the five questions, you know? Because if the only person you’re serving in that position is yourself, buddy, it’s time to make like Optimus Prime and roll out.

While I was thinking through this all, the jingle that opened up this post played on a loop in my head at full volume. Optimus Prime really is the greatest leader of his time — or at least he taught me more about leadership in three comic panels than I ever learned in school.

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A couple weeks ago I was out in Los Angeles for a work trip, and while I was there my friend introduced me to Frank & Son’s Collectible Show, a wild amalgamation of a convention and a flea market with permanent weekly hours and hundreds of vendors selling all sorts of cool shit — including, much to my joy and my wallet’s dismay, third party Transformers toys I usually have to pay absurd shipping rates for.

I ended up buying two figures at Frank & Son’s. First, a third party Powermaster Optimus Prime figure called Power Baser, styled after his appearance in the Super God Masterforce anime.² I put him on my shelf at home, right in front of my reissue Powermaster Optimus Prime.

I also bought Mastermind Creations’ Optus Prominon, who was, in fact, styled after Optimus’s appearance in the “Chaos Theory” story arc. His senate-busting ass I put right on my desk at work, a reminder that any power one holds must always be exercised for the good of the people one holds power over.

Maybe Optimus Prime really is my favorite after all. Sorry, Swerve.

1. As I was doing final edits on this, the news came through that Dianne Feinstein passed this morning. How’s that for timing. Thank you for your service, Senator.

2. Yes, I know this is technically Ginrai, who is a distinct character from Optimus Prime, but this post doesn’t need to go that deep, ya dig?