Author's Reflections - Comic #110

 

#110

 

I thought a good ending for the short ‘sub-story’ would be for Hot Shot to inadvertently talk Megatron out of the truce. It worked out in Unicron’s favor, who was the one who initiated the whole three ghosts storyline, and it really doesn’t sit right to have Optimus and Megatron be friends so I really never intended that to last long anyway. I really like Hot Shot’s line in the Peanut Gallery here.

Author's Reflections - Comic #109

 

#109

 

I wanted Hot Shot’s introduction to be short and funny. It wasn’t as short as I would have liked and not quite as funny either. But I still thought Hot Shot giving Megatron a ‘finger gesture’ and the lines “You’ll poop your processor” and “Up shut” were pretty good. Hot Shot has said ‘up shut’ a few other times since I first used it here.

Author's Reflections - Comic #108

 

#108

 

I like Megatron and Hound’s dialogue in this one as well, but I like Cliffjumper’s better. I did enjoy writing Hound’s increasing frustration with Megatron as the strip goes on, and the obvious joke of Starscream trying to take over every time Megatron was away worked really well for this particular strip. The reason the other Decepticons aren’t in the background of panel 6 is that I had taken all the pictures for the ‘three ghosts’ story at the same time and when I downloaded them and started to put them together I realized I had forgotten to take the picture for it and had to go back the next day and do it. I didn’t want to set all the other toys up again so I just took the picture without them. 

Author's Reflections - Comic #107

 

#107

 

The only standout line in Hound’s introduction is of course “Peace through Boobies”, a play on the quote from the original Megatron toy’s packaging tech specs. I honestly thought I was being clever with hot Shot’s line, but I had forgotten there was a similar joke (played out in a much longer way of course) on a Family Guy episode. You definitely can’t win them all!

Author's Reflections - Comic #106

 

#106

 

In the original cartoon the Constructicon characters never did get a definitive origin. In their first appearance it was said they were created on Earth after the Autobots and Decepticons crash landed. Another episode showed them years before the Transformers came to Earth on Cybertron in a flashback sequence as neutral characters before Megatron turned them evil. And yet another flashback sequence showed eight of them (there were only six of them) around a table as the creators of Megatron. This joke is another one the fans like to throw around, and that’s the entire premise of the first three panels of this strip.

 

The rest of the panels were just my excuse to re-do the first strip using photoshop to create a space background and show the characters in a better scale as they were seen in the 1986 movie. Skywarp (the black and purple jet just up above Megatron in panel 4) is shown without most of its accessories as an homage to the TF2005 Funnies Moderator Buzzbeak who created ‘Incomplete Skywarp’ for his own comics. I think out of the three ‘ghost’ visions, Cliffjumper’s is my favorite just based on the dialogue between him and Megatron!



Author's Reflections - Comic #105

#105

 

Rather than jump right into the visions, I thought I’d give each Peanut Gallery member a chance to introduce themselves as the ghosts. Cliffjumper’s here turned out great, I really tried hard to have both characters gruff personalities play off of each other. Although I wanted to use Cliffjumper, Hound and Hot Shot in the actual strip I didn’t necessarily want to leave them out of the commentary panel either. I treated it as sort of a ‘recorded from a live earlier telecast’ type of deal, and let them comment on themselves at the same time. I really ended up liking that aspect.

Author's Reflections - Comic #104

#104

 

At this point I was at a loss of exactly where I wanted to take it so I thought I’d throw in the old ‘Christmas Carol’ story as a bridge until I was satisfied with a resolution. It ended up working out great since of course I had my three ghosts obviously set up with Hot Shot, Hound and Cliffjumper so I decided I’d stretch it out to a few a strips. Megatron’s last line was originally supposed to be “…so bad it gave me The Clap” firstly in reference to a similar Futurama joke, but The Clap is the name of one of my best friend’s musical duos. For some reason I changed it to leukemia instead…I don’t have any clue why I did, and I really wish I’d have left it as it originally was.

Author's Reflections - Comic #103

#103

 

There’s really nothing about this strip that stands out in my opinion. I wanted to get Optimus out of the picture so Unicron and Megatron could have an exchange on their own, and having him tell Unicron he’d go get the Matrix was the easiest way to do that. I remember in panel 4 where Unicron is holding Optimus upside down I took a bunch of rubber bands and wrapped them around Optimus’ feet and Unicron’s hand and had to pull off some funky balancing maneuvers to get both of them to stand up. I think I established a bit of tension between Unicron and Megatron in the last couple panels, though I do wish I had have put Unicron in a ‘talk to the hand’ type of pose for the last one!