Shortpacked! by David Willis
Toys are serious business.
Convention appearances:
Calgary Expo Calgary, AB: April 26-28
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
Phoenix Comicon Phoenix, AZ: May 23-26, 2013
BotCon San Diego, CA: June 28-30
San Diego Comic-Con San Diego, CA: July 18-21
SPX Bethesda, MD: September 14-15
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Sorcery 101
Templar, AZ
The Transformers Wiki
Hail to the Slash
80 page GIANT
Axe Cop
The Book of Biff
Butt-Taco
Comics Curmudgeon
College Roomies from Hell!!!
Diesel Sweeties
Dinosaur Comics
Dr. McNinja
Dresden Codak
Fans!
Fleen
Gastrophobia
Girl Genius
Girls with Slingshots
Goats
Hark, a vagrant
Hijinks Ensue
Intrepid Girlbot
Legend of Bill
Medium Large
Not Invented Here
Octopus Pie
Overcompensating
Penny Arcade
PhDcomics
Power Nap
Questionable Content
Real Life
Rob and Elliot
Bad Machinery
Schlock Mercenary
Sheldon
So Far Apart
Something Positive
Two Lumps
Wapsi Square
Wonderella
Wondermark
Frumph.NET
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And now we know the rest of the story.
–Good day.
And knowing is half the… wait… sorry, wrong series.
Yes, but they’ve teamed up often enough.
G1, anybody?
Unicron: Now connect me to the Earth, it shall serve as my new body.
Starscream: Ha! Do it yourself!
Why is Arcee pink and who is the other guy?
There was an NYCC exclusive pink Arcee deco.
I don’t know what bugged me more. That she’s pink (despite G1 Arcee being pink, Prime Arcee’s supposed to be blue, dammit), or that, despite that, I want her, nonetheless, and there was no way I was going to get her…
I know about the NYCC Arcee, I’m wondering why it’s in this comic.
Because the cartonist actually found a way to make those colors look decent on her?
I would disagree.
I’m just repurposing that toy as a different, nameless character.
It could serve as Arcee’s Cybertron mode, as WFC Arcee was pink.
She’ll be up on the Hasbro Toy Shop website soon, I betcha.
In my little bubble, Arcee still is – and always has been – a rather stereotypical Pink / White anyway. Why, what colour is she now?
Blue and black, with a few pink highlights. And she turns into a kickin’ motorbike.
So wait… a “female” toy that’s primary coloration is black an blue? and this passed by the lawyers how? Is her in fiction bf a pimp or something?
Are you for real?
Seriously, I haven’t seen this thing yet. I thought I’d been all over the wiki and I’d never heard of it. then to hear it’s black an blue with pink highlights… what the hell? from the description it sounds like one head to toe bruise.
I’m unsure why that description of Arcee’s deco would make you think ‘bruise’, and also why you would expect a company that’s had at least a dozen characters over the last 25 years with primarily blue/black decos (including a prior Arcee) without anyone ever saying ‘doesn’t that make you think (s)he’s been beaten to heck’ to go to the same place.
The guy what tries to beat on Arcee better run in fear. This girl’s scarier than Bulkhead in a fight…
Your psyche worries me. That is a disturbed connection to make.
Is there a law against making a female black and blue now?
I don’t know Transformers all that well, as I liked the original show and sorta the new movies, and that’s really all I cared to look into (had Turtles and GI Joe and Johnny Quest and…).
But, even I knew that ‘small pink/white robot = Arcee’.
…And that’s why we won’t be seeing Nightbeat in Prime. He started working with Arcee, and we all know what THAT means.
(Clever use of the Pink NYCC Arcee, BTW.)
Is that Transformers: Prime’s version of Tracks and Elita-1? (Or Arcee in New York colours?)
I’m pretty sure it’s Arcee and Nightbeat, sometime between WFC and Prime (Arcee had basically her G1 looks and colors in WFC, so I’m presuming the Prime design in the G1/WFC colors is deliberately meant to suggest this, as well as being a nod to the NYCC exclusive toy.)
WFC and Prime clearly aren’t in the same continuity. I know Hasbro says that they’re in the same “continuity family” (like G1 marvel comics and the G1 cartoon), but I don’t even buy that. The premise, focus, character designs and art style have nothing in common beyond the things that every incarnation of Transformers has in common.
I view Hasbro’s claim that these are related in the same light as Takara’s claim that the Michael Bay movies, Animated and G1 are all in the same continuity. If you say so…
If you think there are no links between the two, you’re clearly behind on some fiction.
(And if you think the PREMISE is different, then you haven’t seen anything of either!)
Fair enough. I’ll admit I haven’t seen a huge amount of WFC. I’m just baffled by people (and apparently actual canon books?) focusing on meaningless easily explainable differences between the two when there are giant Unicron sized holes in the idea that WFC happened and then Prime happened. Answering questions like “Why don’t Bumblebee or Soundwave talk any more?” when you’ve got Megatron and Starscream discovering a brand new thing called “Dark Energon” and experimenting with its use……….. a few million years after Starscream was an elite guard over a giant stockpile of the stuff and Cybertron was destroyed by it.
“No! Master, we don’t know what it would do to you if you use it on yourself! Like you did already! While I was watching. Actually it was so awesome that it’s the whole reason I switched to your side.”
All I know is that in the most recent episode has a flashback that depicts the poisoning of the Core of Cybertron with Dark Energon, like in the game. And Prime traveling to the Core and receiving the Matrix, like in the game. And that the sequel game has so far given us preview art featuring Cliffjumper with his Transformers Prime head and a design for the Nemesis that’s a direct yank from the cartoon.
The design team has admitted as much that the reason their games tend to look more like G1 is because, while the story is very much entrenched in the Transformers: Prime series bible, they want to sell this thing to people my age who just want to play a damn Generation 1 video game. And as a dude who grew up on the Marvel comic where the style of art changed from artist to artist, that varying stylistic interpretation is something that really doesn’t bother me.
It’s a design choice that worked on me.
Man I need to watch the last few episodes and actually finish the game. That Starscream and Megatron discovering Dark Energon all over again thing just immediately lit up in my brain as Berlin wall of non-continuity. Maybe they’re retconning it? Well I guess that’s not always unwise.
WFC predated Prime by quite a bit.
It’s probably more analogous to Beast Wars and G1. The events of _a_ War for Cybertron happened at some point prior to Prime. The specifics might have been different in the Prime universe, but the broad strokes are the same.
Bee and Soundwave’s non-traditional vocalizations are easy enough to fanwank…
I just assume that with Bee, it’s like in the movies – at some point between the game and the series his vocal processor was damaged, and they either couldn’t fix it or didn’t think it was an appropriate use of their meagre resources, since he can communicate just fine in R2-speak.
Soundwave…the most interesting explanation I can come up with is he personally modified his vocal centre so he could devote more of his resources to the espionage-related stuff…thus the perfect recordings of other beings.
Yeah, according to the game’s novelization, he lost it the same way he lost it in the movies: defending the AllSpark against Megatron.
As for Soundwave, he can talk. He just chooses not to.
I saw the end of the three-parter, Soundwave clearly justifiably feels that he can make himself understood just fine without any talking.
I just figured that Soundwave sounds the way he does because he never bothered to update his voice softwear.
There fiction is a lie!
Seriously, if you think about it, nothing is fiction since it’s all relative to a person’s beliefs. If you believe something, it’s fact, not fiction, until proven otherwise (sorta like the ’round vs flat’ world view.) Until they prove otherwise, the fans are going to go by what they believe, instead of what they’re told.
On a side note, it’s too late for me to reply without at least a few crazy ideas and screw ups :3 Good luck sorting through that mess I call a comment.
As Mr Willis has pointed out, there have been quite a few links in Transformers Prime. Some subtle, some outright blatant. The season 1 3-part finale has some really good tidbits (which I won’t spoiler here).
Disappointed you didn’t tag this as Nightbeat.
Maybe he’s not Nightbeat! I mean, Airachnid’s not Blackarachnia.
Ahh this must be Drumbeat then!
Or possible Deadbeat, given that he seems to be something of an easily-amused slacker.
I shall call him Muzzle to fill the dramatic irony quota for the day.
Or Himnerva.
Well only because the writers didn’t want the viewers to confuse the character with earlier incarnations. Beast Wars & Animated had a good/evil dynamic to the character, so they changed the name.
They only would drop the name Nightbeat if they lost the Trademark. If that happened, maybe they could use the name Beat-Off?
Yeah, not a fan of this show. Ponderous, lackadaisical animation and action sequences, truncated cast, violently irritating or two-dimensional sidekicks, and boring, redundant storylines.. I realize that a huge issue with this show is the same problem that plagued BW, that being the limitations of pushing the limits of what CG animation can offer, but shouldn’t somebody have learned from that? Beyond those problems, the writing renders this show a massive, sleep-inducing dial tone to me. Not as bad as the Unicron trilogy (though the plots are arguably worse), but I’d rather be watching Animated; hell, I’d rather be watching Beast Machines.
I haven’t been watching Prime. What am I missing here?
Earth has a surprisingly large number of Cybertronian artifacts on it. This explanation is arguably the best one for why everything important the Transformers ever lost shows up here.
It’s also impossible to land a ship or shuttle on Earth without crashing it.
Seriously, it’s something like 80% of incoming spaceships crash in fiction.
I’m amazed the Nemesis is still flying. I can only assume that, were it to attempt to land, it was promptly crash.
To aliens, everywhere on Earth is The Savage Land.
You’d think an advanced civilization would have enough porn to keep their citizens entertained enough to avoid “mindlessly throwing shit up”… Truly, Primus has failed.
Maybe they’ve suffered some kind of pornularity, in which all pornography is now tied into fetishes so specific that everybody now has exactly one pornographic film that fits their tastes. Eventually, everybody became bored watching one porn, and now here we are.
Sorry, I’ve been watching too much Futurama.
Wouldn’t a pornularity be more like everyone is watching porn, all the time. That would kind of explain why he’s distractedly tossing stuff into the air….
I lol’d
This is so true it’s barely a comedic exaggeration. In the movies the All Spark just happens to fall on the exact same planet where the Fallen just happened to leave his Sun Harvester, a planet which just happens to have a moon where a Cybertronian ship just happened to crash land.
Quite an astonishing series of coincidences…
Clearly, Earth’s a happening place!
That’s…not a coincidence at all. The Ark and AllSpark were following the Star Harvester.
According to the secondary materials. The movies themselves give no such explanation. The adaptations and comic book addendums tried to retcon logic into it after-the-fact.
Oh, right.
You kind of have to use the secondary materials for RotF and DotM to make any kind of sense with respect to Movie, though, don’t you?
You have to use secondary materials for RotF to make any kind of sense, period. (And even then, the secondary materials contradict the movie itself in various details.)
To be fair, Unicron didn’t land on Earth; Earth landed on Unicron.
And all that was left was a giant pair of ruby slippers.
Great… Now I’m expecting Optimus X to show up with a pair of browline glasses on and talking about how “the Ark didn’t land on a volcano in Oregon, a volcano in Oregon LANDED on US!”
This is all your fault.
Well, if you look at the history of scifi and fantasy, Cybertron is hardly the first to use Earth that way. We’re really the dumpster of the galaxy it seems.
That explains SO MUCH!
(In more ways than one.)
Yes friends, act now, destroy Unicron! Kill the Grand Poobah! Eliminate even the toughest stains!
yes! ahahahahahahahaha
Not only are we the galaxy’s garbage heap, we’re also an Alcatraz, a vacation home, and the number one most popular invasion destination fifty years running.
The title page of a sf comedy novel, co-written and illustrated by Phil Foglio, showed Earth with an INVADE ME sign taped to one hemisphere.
Nightbeat as a repaint of Prowl? WANT!
Also, THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.
I have to say that both today’s strip and the comments have entertained this guy(who is both sick and tired) on a Monday morning. Good day to all.
LOL.
It’s funny, I like how Beast Wars, the movies, and Prime each handled the “why the hell is Earth so important?” issue in different ways, each requiring that Megatron knew a lot more than every other character.
Don’t forget Robots in Disguise.
(with Animated, at least, the only apparent importance to Earth is that the AllSpark seemingly wanted the Autobots to crash there. Everything Cybertronian on Earth either arrived with them, or arrived with others who were following them.)
I don’t think Prime Megs knows more than anyone else (haven’t seen the last ep, yet, though)…he seemed to be bumbling along just as much as everyone else…he was even a bit more ignorant than Starscream, who seemed to pick up a lot of information in the time Megatron was elsewhere.
And by “elsewhere”, you mean “strapped to a table on life support”.
Still not as much stuff as Pre-Crisis Krypton.
and the Earth in Doctor Who cannon for that mater. The amount we have burried under us is just insane.
I immediately thought of The Racnoss when The Earth’s relationship with Unicron was speculated upon. Specifically, I thought: “Cor blimey!”
Ah “Transformers:Prime”.
Its giving Beast Wars/Machines a run for original way of doing traditional TF series plots. Lets hope it only gets better.
*fingers crossed*
Wow, it all kinda makes sense now. Props for the TF Prime refrence, but what about the mass amounts of normal Energon that’s also on Earth?
Fucking Earth. How does it work?