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Magnificus and Ga'mede are hunted down in Iron Town.
Synopsis
In the isolated village of Iron Town in the year 2034, Decepticon outcast Magnificus and his companion Ga'mede find themselves under attack by the ferocious Pretender Oilmaster, out to claim the bounty on Magnificus's head. Though the acid extruded from Oilmaster's shell threatens to eat his joints as the Pretender clings to him in vehicle mode, Magnificus insists on carrying the battle outside the town to protect its civilians, where he transforms and hurls a small projectile at his enemy. Oilmaster scoffs, but Magnificus then uses his matter-enlarging scope to expand it to full size, revealing it to be a large missile. The detonation sets Oilmaster's shell aflame and his furious inner robot bursts out, but as he lunges for Magnificus with blade in hand, he is shot out of the air by a mysterious newcomer who only identifies himself as "Hawk". Hawk explains he is not interested in bringing Magnificus in; rather, his superior wants to recruit the outcast to his team to put his talent for psychometry to work. With the offer on the table, Hawk doesn't press the issue, merely warning that a new war is coming before departing, leaving a case containing some energon and a repair kit for Magnificus as an incentive. Magnificus uses his psychometric skills on the case to get a reading on what has brought Hawk looking for him, and sees a vision of what appears to be a cloaked Skyquake tasking a 'bot named Eagle Eye to find him...
Featured characters
Characters in italic text appear only in flashbacks.
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
Notes
Continuity notes
- Iron Town previously appeared in the first episode of the Victory cartoon, "The Brave Hero of the Universe - Star Saber".
- This story takes place one year prior to Operation Combination and United EX. Understanding that is key to fathoming the implications of the story's final page!
- The being that Magnificus believes to be Skyquake is actually the Decepticon High Regent Scrash, who was shown to resemble Skyquake in the third United EX chapter, "Prelude to the Siege" (though later chapters added a dash of mystery to his true nature). In one year's time, Scrash will be leading a splinter faction of Decepticons who launch new attacks on the Autobots in the Operation Combination and United EX stories; this is the approaching "new war" Hawk speaks of.
- As the final panel tells us, "Hawk" is the Generation 2 Skyscorcher Eagle Eye, using the alternate name his toy was released under in Europe as an alias. However!! There are enough clues in the story to expose his true identity: he's really the Generation 1 Micromaster also named Eagle Eye! While the psychometric vision Magnificus has shows the character drawn to the specifications of the Generation 2 toy, in the rest of the comic, he's got the G2 toy's body, but the head of his Micromaster self.
- Why is this important? Because Eagle Eye was conspicuous by his absence from the United EX storyline, in which all three of his team-mates on the Micromaster Air Patrol appeared in new upgraded Master Class forms. Now we know that this is because he had defected to Scrash's Decepticons at least a year prior—and obviously took the secrets of the Master Class and Power Core Combination with him, given that Scrash's forces had all already been upgraded to corresponding complementary forms before the story even started!
- Whatever decision Magnificus and Ga'mede make regarding Hawk's offer, note that when we next see Ga'mede, he'll be working with the Autobots to help create Eldedroids in the post-Generation 2 era.
Transformers references
- Oilmaster is based on the unproduced Gorilla Double Pretender toy. The story doesn't go the Double Pretender route with the character; his inner robot appears to be an original design.
- Magnificus takes down Oilmaster with a "Mebion warhead", Mebion being the region of Cybertron he hails from per his bio.
- When "Hawk" introduces himself, Ga'mede quips that he "doesn't look like a Pretender", referring to Masterforce character Metalhawk, who went by the abbreviated name "Hawk" in his human guise.
- Hawk/Eagle Eye alludes to his past as a Micromaster by calling other Transformers "guzzlers", an epithet the diminutive 'bots used for full-size fuel-consumptive Transformers in Dreamwave's Micromasters miniseries.
- The idea of Eagle Eye abandoning his Air Patrol team-mates and defecting to the other side probably owes something to the idea that he was an utterly rubbish leader that none of them liked, per Dreamwave's original write-up for him in their More than Meets the Eye profile series.
Real-life references
- Psychometry is the paranormal ability to divine information about an object by psychically "reading" it. Magnificus has never been shown to have these powers before now.
Other trivia
- The story labels Magnificus as a "Decepticon" (ディセプティコン) when in the Japanese Generation 1 continuity, the Decepticons are called "Destrons". This difference is the result of being a tie-in to the Japanese Generations toyline, which uses Hasbro's faction names.
External links
