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.

Nick Roche Reveals A New Print For Auto Assembly That Summarizes Everything That Is Absolutely Perfect About More Than Meets The Eye.

On his Twitter feed this morning, Nick Roche showed off the lineart for a new print he’ll have for sale at the UK’s Auto Assembly convention. Titled “The Wake”, it’s a concise summary of everything that makes More Than Meets The Eye such an incredible comic.

The Wake

You can see the original post here, but really, if you’re not already following Nick Roche on Twitter what are you doing with your life?

Featured Discusson: So What’s Next?

Are we seeing the end of the Aligned universe already? What does it mean that Transformers Prime has finished without another show on the horizon?

Come on over to the forums for wild rumors and baseless speculation in this week’s Featured Discussion!

Preview ‘n Review: Robots in Disguise #20 [Spoiler-Free]

TF_RiD20_cvrBWith his “friend” Metalhawk dead at his feet and all Cybertronians who refused to renounce their prior allegiances exiled to the dangerous wilderness outside of the city, Starscream finally got what he wanted – control of Iacon, the last bit of civilization on Cybertron. But even in peacetime being leader isn’t easy, and Megatron’s Most Troublesome Lieutenant soon has infrastructure failures, treacherous hangers-on, and worst of all, the media to deal with, all in the course of one long night.

Continue reading

The BotCon Experience

It’s 1999 and I’m standing on the sidewalk outside a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota. The sun is beating down from a cloudless sky and I’ve just embarked on one of the greatest adventures of my life thus far. My dad had chaperoned me as far as St. Paul, but now he’s dropped me off for the weekend while he does his own exploring.

I’m attending a BotCon, currently the only Transformers convention around. It’s not my first convention, I attended last year, but that was with an older friend who had traveled with me from Sweden, so I still had that kind of safety net. But this year, I’m on my own. Continue reading

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Third Party Transformers

ThirdPartyLove

Third Party Love.

“Third Party” Transformers – Transformers-inspired toys made in relatively small runs by fans with pretty clear disregard for copyright law – are a pretty contentious business in the community. A lot of fans draw a line between the add-on sets like iGear’s IDW-style Kup heads that require you to own an official toy and standalone toys like most of what Fansproject makes. At BotCon 2012 both types were strictly prohibited from the dealer room, though a distinction was made between them and artistic fan-works like, say, the Starscream dakimakura being sold at one table. This year (possibly due to the departure of Aaron Archer from Hasbro) there were no such restrictions.

For the first time I came face to face with these Third Party toys, and I fell into the abyss.

Continue reading

Welcome!

I’m still doing a lot of work on the backend of the site, so things are liable to change if you so much as refresh the page, but feel free to register for the forums and let me know if anything’s broken, either through @trixter or trixter@gmail.com.