floats your canon). This is all fun and games (and charming silver age-style spin-off stories) until The Accident. You just know it was Shockwave's fault . The breakthrough that goes wrong. This is a proper superhero/villain story, here. We know our boy has that mutation, that special thing that scientists later tried to replicate, to poor results . It's made his soul different than other 'bots. Whether he was stalking through the comics pages as a zombie, or floating through space and time as a ghost in the 'toons, Starscream's got something nobody else has got. How did he get it? Let's step back a bit, before I come up with an "accident," and we reach full-on fanfic-style territory here. Let's back all the way up to the beginning of things. They've overused Unicron. Movies, shows, comics, they've used him so much, and for the same thing every time. The strength and the weakness of the Transformers property is that for all of its gimmicks and its manga-flavored robot action, it is essentially a superhero story. Look, this isn't a secret. These guys were in the Marvel universe for a hot second. Marvel-style mutants showed up, and Spider-Man swung 'round Megatron's leg. One of the human supporting characters showed up in Secret Wars II , for God's sake. Bob Budiansky did most of the heavy lifting, but Jim Shooter, Ralph Macchio, and Dennis O'Neill all took part in crafting the earliest, most important bits of Transformers . The Autobots were