In a recent installment of Daniel Warren Johnson‘s newsletter, The Forbidden Library of Daniel Warren Johnson, the mega-hot artist and writer of Transformers may have announced that he would be leaving the title at the end of the next story arc.
This follows up on last month’s announcement that Jorge Corona would take over art duties from Johnson with issue #7. At the time, it was generally assumed that Warren Johnson would stay on as the series writer and possibly return to art duties, trading off arcs with Corona.
After declaring that he had just finished inking his final Transformers page, Johnson writes, “I will still be drawing all the A covers for the Transformers series, and I will also be writing the next arc for none other than the great JORGE CORONA!”
This can be looked at in two different ways. Either Corona is coming on as an artist for the next arc, and Johnson will continue writing for a new artist the following arc, or DWJ is leaving as a writer after the second story arc.
The content of the newsletter leans me towards the latter. Johnson said at the end of his newsletter, “Now that my art duties on TF have wrapped, I’m already working on the next project. It’s something that I’ve never done before, and I’m really excited to share it with you all.” While earlier in the newsletter, he says, “I’ve had so much fun bringing Optimus and the gang to life. I still can’t believe I got to be a part of this relaunch, it feels like a dream.” This certainly sounds like someone taking a bow right before leaving the stage.
At NYCC this past October, it seemed like Johnson would be on the Transformers series for the long haul, so this announcement will undoubtedly come to many as quite a disappointing surprise. His kinetic art style and return to G1 Transformers: The Movie-inspired writing made the Transformers comics franchise the hottest it has been in years.
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