Void Rivals
Up first, was the only fully new property within the EU (so far), which follows a pair of similar looking aliens (Darak and Solila) whose species have been stuck in something of a war with eachother for centuries (sound familiar?).
The main difference here, is that the aliens are organics, and we're slowly learning what their hidden similarities and connections really are, with recent issues even suggsting the races, and their strange home worlds, build around what appears to be a black hole, are connected to the Quintessons.
This series works well in the EU in particular, due to it introducing lots of new characters and concepts, as well as connecting to pre-established aliens from the Transformers mythos, such as the previously mentioned Quintessons, the Skuxxoids and others.
The very first issue of the series shocked the world with it's mid-issue cameo from the Transformer, Jetfire, leading to his journey to a little planet called Earth...
The Transformers
Transformers picks up a currently unknown amount of time after Jetfire's appearance in Void Rivals and finds the Autobots and Decepticons revived on the planet, after the Ark crashed on the planet in the distant past.
This version of the story is a lot darker than most recent Transformers comic lines, feeling more akin in tone and general content to the original Marvel series that kicked off the franchise in the 80's.
Whilst edging on a lot of familiar story beats of the past in this series, it does it's best to change as much as possible too, such as the Witwicky family having a lot more tragedies than we saw for them back in the 80's, to even popular characters being unceremoniously killed off in very brutal manners.
During the early issues of this story, Starscream attacks and destroys a military jet, and it's pilot, only for his friend, and co-pilot, Duke, to escape...
G.I. Joe
Set a few months on from the awakening of the Transformers on Earth, the "Duke" miniseries follows the eponymous character trying to find out what the giant robot who killed his friend was, along the way being recruited into GI Joe.
Meanwhile, Cobra Commander leaves Cobra-La in his own series, where we learn that Megatron was found by the people of Cobra-La, and has been studied by them for some time, and he starts a journey to locate a potent energy source for his own world conquest plans, leading to the early stages of Cobra being formed...
Following this, Scarlett follows it's namesake as she infiltrates the Arashikage clan to follow her friend Jinx, while Destro follows the head of MARS industries as he continues his new business deal with Cobra Commander and develops his BAT units...
I'm not a major GI Joe fan, but so far these stories are doing a good job at building the Earth-based characters up, and gives some credence for the inevitable Transformers Vs GI Joe battles to come down the line.
Though I do hope they do something new, rather than just have the Joe's think all Cybertronians are evil, until they suffer some mutual loss, forcing them to team up with the Autobots.
The future?
While the creative teams haven't been very vocal on the future of the series, and have said there are no current plans to integrate any other Hasbro products at the moment, I find speculation fun, so let's have a guess for the future!
First up, the Energon Universe special gave us some brief looks into the upcoming storylines, which include Hot Rod looking for a friend who was interested in the Sacred Ring, Baroness joining GI Joe and Megatron escaping from Cobra-La.
Now for the speculation! I'll start by saying that since I'm not a GI Joe guy, I dont have any real predictions for that, besides the upcoming crossover potential, and most likely more character alliegences being switched, like we currently have with Baroness. Another likely future plot would be that MASK and VENOM get spun off from the Joe's and Cobra.
For Transformers it seems likely that after the formative stories, we'll start getting more focus on new or lesser known characters, such as what has been shown in the preview for issue 10 with Beachcomber. This seems to be very in line with the kill-happy attitude the creators have had with the cast so far.
Finally, and probably the biggest topic is from Void Rivals. The most obvious future plot seems to be that the Zertonian god "Zerta" is either a Quintesson or Cybertronian, especially after the Judge referred to them as "Zerta Prime" in Void Rivals 9, which highly suggests a major crossover between the species down the line.
Of more interest to me however is the Sacred Ring itself, a supposed black hole that is surrounded by the reshaped planets of Agorra and Zertonian.
I personally believe this "black hole" is a partially active space bridge or worm hole, which will lead us to more characters or settings down the line, such as maybe it leads to Elonia and the Space Knights, or Prysmos with the Visionaries or even any of the Cybertronian colonies such as Caminus or Velocitron.
Perhaps we can go to Eukaris, and start up a Beast Wars spin off comic set in the modern day rather than the distant future?
On the other hand, maybe the portal can lead to another universe, like either a previous continuity or a shattered glass style universe?
One major theory I have is that the "Goliant" mentioned by the Zertians as being kept away by the Sacred Ring could be Unicorn, as a long-game final boss for the franchise or perhaps it is a completely new and unrelated character? (Though there would be no way to predict that, and where's the fun there?)
So that's where we are with the Energon Universe right now, I am greatly enjoying the franchise so far, and really do hope we get some more lines before long. While is do still find it a pity that they had to end the Ruckley run of Transformers from IDW, I do sincerely hope this series does well in the long term, and from what we've seen so far, it does seem to be going in a positive direction so far!
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