#226
This comic introduces one of the most notorious
characters…Bugbite. It was another toy included in the 2007 Botcon box set and
while I was waiting for the set to arrive I went back and forth several times
on whether or not to even include Bugbite in the comic. After I got the package
and admired the toys for awhile, I read the comic book that is packed in with
the Botcon sets. I wasn’t all that impressed with Bugbite’s portrayal, being
little more than a throwaway character from an alternate universe (even if it
was a fairly big nod to rival transforming toyline Gobots). Now of course its
not like I haven’t pulled the alternate universe card MANY times over the years
in this comic but in an official ‘serious’ publication I guess I expected more.
I was determined to come up with a better back story for him, so I came up with
the idea of giving him schizophrenia…the appearance and niceness of Bumblebee
coupled with a large dose of Megatron’s unpleasant demeanor. To achieve this, I
gave a small nod to Scourge’s creation in the Robot’s in Disguise cartoon in
which he scanned both Optimus Prime and a tanker truck. Having the neutral
Protoform scan both Bumblebee and Megatron made it extremely easy to explain.
The first thing that comes to mind when I look at the
pictures for this comic is how pleased I was about the ‘scanning’ panels
turning out the way they did. I turned out all the lights and pointed a bright
LED flashlight at the Protoform. I didn’t know if the picture would have ended
up blurry or not but when I downloaded the pictures I definitely breathed a
sigh of relief.
What’s on the computer is hard to make out in the
Peanut Gallery panel, it’s a screen shot of the Beast Wars episode ‘The Spark’
which introduced Airazor. Hot Shot, Hound and Cliffjumper are still doing
research on what exactly a ‘Protoform’ is (although to be fair, Hot Shot should
already know since Protoforms were mentioned by name in the Armada cartoon,
mental capacity notwithstanding).
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