Monthly Archives: August 2013

TFCC Reveals Nick Roche Turnarounds For Upcoming Chromedome Figure

ChromedomeHeadTurnaroundsThis morning the Collectors’ Club Twitter account shared some more news on the upcoming Subscription Service toys, specifically the turnaround art for Chromedome – designed by none other than fan favorite Nick Roche! They also revealed that one other toy for next year’s Subscription Service will have a Roche-designed head sculpt. Does this mean another MTMTE character is in the works for the FSS? Share your baseless speculation in the comments!

More Than Meets The Eye Vol. 1 & 2 For Kindle On Sale

For those of you who’re Kindle-inclined, Amazon has More Than Meets The Eye Volume 1 and Volume 2 on sale for $3.99 each right now. There’s nothing saying how long this sale will last, and Barnes & Noble and comiXology still have it listed for their usual prices, so if you want these digitally, have a Kindle or something with the Kindle app, and for some reason haven’t picked them up yet, here’s your chance to get a deal!

Bot Shots Website Gives Us Another New Lady Predacon!

 

Bot Shots Buzzclaw
“Unquestioningly loyal to the PREDACON cause, BUZZCLAW crushes her enemies and leaves their circuits burning with her mech-venom!”

So the official Transformers: Bot Shots website updated, and the biggest surprise is a redeco of Stormrazor Skystalker named Buzzclaw – who is not only an obvious homage to the Beast Wars Fuzor of the same name, but a brand-new female Transformer! Well… “brand new,” it turns out. Her character bio is in fact Transformers Prime: Beast Hunters Ripclaw’s on-package bio with the name changed out. Well, uh, maybe they’re sisters? They do have the same last name…

The website update also brings us Hydrax, another new character… whose bio is just Beast Hunters Lazerback’s with the name swapped out. Well, that’s an annoying trend – but not as annoying as the fact Bot Shots seems to be kaput in the United States, making the prospects of finding either of them incredibly slim.

(oh and there’s also new Bot Shot versions of Prowl, Smokescreen, Soundwave, and Strafe, but pfft, they aren’t TINY ROBOT DRAGONS)

Next Wave Of TCC Subscription Service Figures Announced

Over on the Transformers Collectors’ Club Twitter account, they’ve announced three of the toys for the “2.0” version* series of Subscription Service figures:

TFSS Announcement

I’m not sure who’s “so out of left field” there – They’ve done two of those characters already, if possibly in different universes, and everybody loves Chromedome right now (and then they die tragically). But there you have it. They also confirmed that Chromedome will have a new head.

UPDATE: The site has been updated with a picture of Treadshot’s head, which uses Warpath’s sculpt with an Action Master Treadshot deco. <pedant> Updated Action Masters are also not especially out of left field.</pedant>

 

*C’mon, guys, do you even computer?

In Stores Today – 8/14/2013

There are no individual-issue Transformers books out this week, but hitting stores is the TPB collection of the Spotlight one-shots, Spotlight: Megatron, Spotlight: Orion Pax, Spotlight: Bumblebee, Spotlight: Thundercracker, and Spotlight: Hoist, under the title of “Dark Prelude”.

Also in stores this week is Jim Sorenson’s Transformers 30th Anniversary Collection, a massive hardcover looking back at 30 years of Transformers comics. At $50 this might be one for the Christmas wish-list, but it’s a beautiful collection that’s well worth having.

We Have A Tumblr Now!

Okay, I try to keep the horn-tooting to a minimum, but since we’re just warming things up here I’d like to let everyone know that we now have a little annex over on Tumblr, iaconunderground.tumblr.com. In addition to links to our new posts, I (and whatever other staffers get involved) will be reblogging other fun Transformers-related things, from fanart to official art to news…art. If you do that whole Tumblr thing give us a follow – we follow back!

Beware the Chartnado

Sitting on my desk is a lanyard and a memo pad.

The lanyard, purchased from Five Below is green and has multi colored robots covering it. The memo pad contains a planning list of items to purchase. Both are in anticipation of my upcoming trip to the Transformers convention Charticon (combining Charlotte North Carolina and Sharkticon). Inside my head is the list of things to have ready for when I leave out Friday morning.

My sling backpack waits hanging on my closet doorknob with a fresh bottle of Germ X attached (because germs are everywhere), waiting to be worn while walking around the convention floor for storage of those items on the memo pad list and any instabuys as well. My 3DS sits on my nightstand receiving the newest system update, which will be important over the weekend. The new update updates SpotPass, which will be necessary as conventions provide ample SpotPass opportunities and I don’t want to miss out on any potential content.

I guess everybody’s 3DS will be having their own con.

My cars oil was changed yesterday (a must for any road trip) as well as the safety system firmware was updated (because… safety). Aside from packing and some last minute printing (backup mapquest, confirmation materials, etc), all there is now is the wait.

Damn the wait.

The last few days is like Christmas Eve night when you’re 7. Sitting, waiting, hoping the time will pass and the culmination of all this waiting will show and all will be right with the world for a few days.

Anticipation is a killer.

A con is a great thing, you get to spend a few days immersed in your fandom with your fandom friends. Checking out the panels. Scouring the dealer room for things you’ve been wanting and things you’d want. Talking to the guests and getting to know them more as a person than just a contributor. Seeing old friends and making new ones. Those group outings where everybody wants pizza and the place doesn’t have enough seating. That trip to a local store where you find that Generations Sandstorm (hoping) and your friend buys antacids (the pizza was spicy). The blur of a few days that will be over before you know it and the next week is filled with slight moping from post con depression.

Man, post con depression. Post con depression saddled with that sense of ‘well, what do I do now’ that follows after the con is over and all that waiting is over.

Then you wait for the next one.

Friendly Reminder: FOR THE LOVE OF PRIMUS DON’T EMAIL YOUR CARD INFO

There’s been some chatter lately about the technologically challenged folks in charge of the Transformers Collector’s Club suggesting people email their credit card information to them if it needs to be updated for the subscription service but their club membership is lapsed. “IF you email this information,” the site says, “please break it up into 2 emails so that all of the data does not travel together.”

No. No no no no no no no.

Please. Don’t email them your credit card information. Do not email ANYONE your credit card info. It doesn’t matter if “the data does not travel together” or not, it winds up at the same destination and sits there waiting for someone to hack the email account. The fact that they’ve posted this suggestion with the email address in question makes it almost certain someone has hacked the account by now; it’s an open invitation!

So this is just a reminder, if you haven’t heard about it from anyone else yet: Don’t do it. Yes, I know they said you should. They don’t know what they’re talking about. If you’ve gotta have the toys that bad and your club subscription has lapsed, just take the time to call them.

Renegade

Animated CyKill

As my first post on this Transformers-themed website, here is a sketch of Renegade GoBot leader Cy-Kill by Derrick Wyatt (art director of Transformers Animated), drawn on request at BotCon 2008. Contrarian!

For a while, I had a theme of asking for GoBots character sketches from Transformers artists, but I stopped this practice when the prospects of getting anything more GoBot-y out of mainstream channels seemed to become nil. Of course, now the Transformers Collector’s Club is doing a new GoBots text story, so we’ll have to see just what that means for the situation…

Roberto Orci Says Some Vague Things About The Next, More “Kid-Friendly” Show

Over on IGN, Roberto Orci confirmed in an interview that he and Alex Kurtzman will be staying with the cartoon wing of the Transformers franchise, continuing on as executive producers on the as-yet-unnamed (at least publicly) new cartoon along with much of the rest of the Prime crew.

Something that’s sure to raise a lot of fandom hackles is his assertion that the new show will be less “intense” and more “friendly to the family” than Transformers Prime. Though we’ve been spoiled on that lately, with Rescue Bots catering to the younger audience while Transformers Prime gave us something much more sophisticated than we usually get in a main-line Transformers cartoon, this seems like a return to the norm of the main show being much more “for kids”. There was nothing said by Orci about whether this more kid-friendly show from the Prime team would run alongside or replace Rescue Bots.

It sounds like we haven’t seen the last of the Aligned continuity after all, as Orci seems determined to stay in continuity as much as possible with Transformers Prime despite the change in tone. He’s also hoping to keep Peter Cullen and Frank Welker on in their classic roles as Optimus Prime and Megatron.