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#transformers #mtmteI’ve been thinking about this all day, and it’s kind of distracting me from my Work-work, so I’m going to go ahead and write this down so I’ll get it out of my system.
Spoilers for MTMTE #38…
I’ve said this before: Transformers has historically been a pretty regressive franchise, even for...
I’m a huge fan of James Roberts’ work in the Transformers universe. I think the above three panels do a good job encapsulating why.
The first panel comes from The Transformers #22, “Chaos Theory, Part 1,” published in 2011. It’s a flashback sequence to Megatron’s first time in jail, as he’s being questioned by a Cybertronian police officer named Springarm. The second and third panels were published just a few days ago; they’re from More Than Meets The Eye #32, “Twenty Plus One.” Without spoiling too much, Nightbeat (some combination of former hostage negotiator, judge, and detective) is trying to solve a spat of mysterious disappearances, and wants information from Megatron to help prove or disprove his working theory that all of the victims were created the same way.
The first thing I like is Robert’s consistent depiction of Megatron. Four million years (and three writing years) separate the pacifist miner from Tarn and the bloody-handed-tyrant-cum-captain, but Megatron’s response has stayed the same, for the same principled reasons: Cybertronians ought not be obligated to divulge information concerning their creation, because that information can easily be used (and has been used!) by the state to segregate Cybertron.
It would have been easy for Robert’s to let Megatron divulge his creation process in the latter scene, and pointed to this change as a sign of character growth—“it only took four million years and the death of 100 billion sentients, but Megatron has come to realize that it’s okay to answer some questions. He’s learning to trust, and he’s learning when information disclosure is important.”
But Roberts didn’t take the “character growth” cop out, and this gets me to the second, and more significant, reason I like the juxtaposition of these two scenes. Beyond Megatron’s response, look at what else has stayed consistent: in both situations, a well-intentioned police officer is asking Megatron for deeply personal, definitional information. And in their own way, Springarm and Nightbeat’s differing response help explain (and justify) Megatron’s refusal.
In the first scene, Springarm apologizes for asking the “old,” irrelevant question concerning creation type—but his apology didn’t stop the police officer from asking the question in the first place. Springarm asks his question out of an unexamined reliance on tradition, and a seeming ignorance as to how the mere continued inclusion of questions of creation is proof (particularly to Megatron) that the Cybertronian state has not “moved passed” apartheid.
In the second scene, Nightbeat makes it clear that he emphatically agrees with Megatron’s refusal—but that regardless, Megatron needs to divulge this information, because lives are at stake. There’s no reason to doubt Nightbeat or his intentions, but the point still stands: an upholder of the law is evaluating what constitutes necessity and justice, with no eye to how the information he wants will be ultimately used.
The larger point is that in any specific case—Springarm, Nightbeat, even and especially Orion Pax—a man a Cybertronian might be good and just and principled, but systems are, by their very nature, corrupting influences, and these systems have and will use matters of race creation to divide and control the populace. This is where Megatron’s opposition springs from. And if Roberts had written Megatron as answering Nightbeat’s query, it would have been a sign that Megatron’s concerns were, on some level, misplaced—that the state doesn’t mean harm, that you should trust it to use personal information in limited ways, to the betterment of all society. And for all of his many, many faults, Megatron is right to doubt that.
(Post script: Megatron’s consistency also returns to some of the ideas brought up in The Transformers #22 and #23—specifically, if the war has fundamentally changed Optimus Prime and Megatron. Prime concludes that he has stayed the same and that it’s Megatron who has lost his way. These scenes make an interesting counterpoint.)
THE OLD MAN’S BACK AGAIN! A desperate last gamble that might mean the sacrifice of one of their own gives the Autobots a chance to fight back - but what will it take for Megatron to join them? Find out in MTMTE #54, the penultimate chapter of THE DYING OF THE LIGHT, now on TFWiki!
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Come back next week for the final issues of SINS OF THE WRECKERS and G.I. JOE VS TRANSFORMERS!
So here are some of the characters I’ve been working on lately which have shown up on the cover to MTMTE 41 :) Yes, They are all female transformers and out of these designs 3 of them I also choose the names for.
It was fun to help create these characters. I know I’ve wanted more female characters in transformers for a while now. I’ve always placed one or more in the background of various TF projects I’ve worked on. Now we have the opportunity to have more of them and I’m very happy about that.
When the story came up for having new female characters I knew that I would like to have some of the characters that haven’t been used yet. I know I really wanted Firestar and James was able to get her for MTMTE. Then we were talking and he asked me to come up with a crew of new characters, both male and female and I was pretty excited about that. He didn’t have any names in mind at the time, so I wrote down a bunch of names and looked up on the wiki and tfu.info if they had been used. A lot of them hadn’t to my surprise so I showed them to James and he liked them. I then came up with a head sketch of them, and mentioned which ones were female and which ones were male, and he liked them. then I set out to design them.
These are the design I came up with. I wanted there to be a lot of different looking bots. First I started with Firestar. She is the more traditional look for a female TF, but where her main difference is her height. She is a very tall bot. She towers over most of the others. Not as tall as Megatron or Ultra Magnus, but she’s taller then Rodimus and most of the other Lost Light crew. I also had the idea to give her fire hair since in alt mode her head is the where the exhaust of the car. It also help add a little more emotion to the character since I can have the fire doing different things when she’s feeling different emotions. I thought it was different and something interesting to play with. With her torso design I decided to give her the same style of split canopy that Nautica has since it solved a design issue I was having at the time. Also I like the idea of some of the characters sharing similar design features :)
Next is Javelin. She was fin to draw since I wanted something very different looking. I enjoy the look of the head where is a single eye. i thought can we have a character with a single eye and not be a victim of empurata? why not?.
Next we have Proxima. When I described her to James I said she would be the equal of better of Perceptor. She would be a extreme multitasker. With her e4 head design she has main visor style eye, but 3 other eyes where 2 can move around her head.
Roadmaster was fun to design. I wanted a big characters that looked like she would bend and break you if you looked at her the wrong way. She is the biggest of the characters I’ve designed so far, matching Ultra Magnus in height (well to his head, not shoulders) When I was working on this character I thought an interesting variant would be to make a strika out of her, but then I would want strika to be a bit bigger then her. But the idea is in the back of my mind so maybe I’ll work something out of it?|
Last character who isn’t on the cover, but I saw that she was partially shown on a post on the credit’s page is Velocity. Another fun design where I got to play around with features that I don’t normally see with many TF’s :)
Thats it for now
Enjoy :)
Unique Megatron and Optimus Prime character biographies from the UK’s 1986 Transformers Annual.
“Not in the face!” says Megatron.
Cross-contributed to Disciples of Boltax…
Fresh from 1984 - and imported over the Atlantic, besides - have a trio of promotional mini-posters featuring Soundwave, the Decepticon jets, and Megatron, made using stills from the earliest Transformers comic and toy commercials. These ridiculously high-resolution scans were made, respectively, from Marvel UK’s Transformers #4, #5 and #6.
I actually scanned these some time ago, but at the time wrote them off as being useless because, due to the terrible color reproduction involved, they were incredibly red-tinged. However, I recently learned about Photoshop’s “Variations” tool (which is kind of embarrassing, given how long I’ve had the program), and my new stab at fixing them up produced much better results. Megatron is still terribly yellowish, though.
Fun fact: in these scans, Starscream is the one with the grey chest and white/red wings! These early ads seem to have been the source of his first Marvel Comics color scheme, which appears to have switched the grey to blue because of comics’ limited color palette at the time.
There were also mini-posters featuring Optimus Prime and the Autobot cars, but their animation designs didn’t change as drastically, so I didn’t scan them at the time. Might go back and do them anyway now…
The cover for the Transformers IDW Chistmas Special is flat out fantastic, but there are two things I really wanted to draw attention to.
MEGATRON GOT RAVAGE A BONE IN CUTE PURPLE WRAPPING
RAVAGE GOT MEGATRON A NEW FUSION CANNON <3
This is too fucking cute for me to handle omfg
RAVAGE IS A CAT
WHY IS HE GETTING A DOGGY TREAT
THIS IS NOT CUTE, IT IS MISSPECIESIZATION
Here’s a bit of fun for ya!
1- A look at what the ‘flats’ to some of my earlier MTMTE stuff was like
2-More flats! I
3- This was just something I did for fun. Alex had done up the design and a color guide and the one on the left is just me adding some shading and highlights to the pic. I also toyed around with the idea of changing Megatron’s color scheme since he’s an Autobot now. I dont think I ever shared this with the rest of the MTMTE team as it got kinda late in the game [and I felt like the general consensus would be to keep the classic colors anyway so!]
4- Whirl flats!
5- Oh I just took a panel and sorta re-colored it. Looking back now I’m not too terribly happy with how my colors turned out for that issue [it was really rushed] so. Thus this!
And thats it for now! Just ran across these while going through some folders :D
While you were out partying, I studied THE BOAT.
unpretty
