Conquerors Part 3: Helden

	"Conquerors; Part 3: Helden"
Publisher	IDW Publishing
First published	December 2, 2015
Cover date	December 2015
Written by	John Barber
Art by	Andrew Griffith
Colors by	Josh Perez
Letters by	Tom B. Long
Editor	Carlos Guzman
Continuity	2005 IDW continuity
Chronology	Current era

D.0.C. and Buster's Excellent Adventure!

Synopsis

In the Earth Defense Command's Bikini Atoll base, unable to understand Buster's barking, D.0.C. tries to shoo the animal away and get on with his mission to rescue Jetfire and the other captive Autobots. The pair are found by Thundercracker, who believes D.0.C. is just one of multiple Cybertronian drones provided to the organization by Soundwave; unable to communicate with the ex-Decepticon in words, D.0.C. tries to make him aware of recent events by projecting holograms of the Autobots' defeat in Antarctica and the capture of the Ark-7, topping it off with an image of the source from which he received the information: Soundwave himself. Thundercracker is concerned by what he sees, but Marissa Faireborn interrupts D.0.C.'s picture-show and, unaware of the drone's true nature, tells Thundercracker to leave it alone.

D.0.C. continues probing through the base, but Buster goes after him. Thinking the dog is attempting to communicate, D.0.C. follows her into the base canteen and watches as she receives a meal from a computerized food dispenser. Able to tap into the base systems via the machine, D.0.C. downloads a schematic of the facility and deduces the location of a secret room far below. Faireborn and Ayana Jones then enter the room, but a timely bit of bladder relief from Buster distracts them long enough for D.0.C. to slip out. As he heads deeper into the facility, however, D.0.C. is snagged by one of the base's drone maintenance trucks and trapped inside it. Deciding that the strange little robot is her friend, Buster scampers after the truck—through a control room where Sanjay Bharwaney and some techs are puzzling over a signal coming from the Jupiter commune—catching up to the vehicle and jumping aboard. D.0.C. succeeds in directing her to bite through the electric coupling holding him in place, allowing the drone to free himself. As soldiers come running in response to a "runaway drone," Buster indicates a nearby grating in the wall, which D.0.C. blasts open so they can both escape through the shaft on the other side.

The vent brings Doc and Buster to a seemingly empty room, beneath the secret room that D.0.C. previously detected. The drone fires up his laser and slices open the roof so he can access the hidden room, but a flood of black liquid comes pouring through the hole he cuts open. Realizing that Buster will drown, D.0.C. grabs the dog and flies her up through the hole into the room above, where he finds the bound forms of Jetfire, Sky Lynx, Kup, and the badly-wounded Jazz. At Jetfire's instruction, D.0.C. cuts them out of the room and they all burst through the ceiling directly in front of Faireborn, Jones, and Thundercracker, who are shocked to discover Autobots in the base. Before a fight can break out, D.0.C. and Buster put themselves between the two groups and explain the situation, their bleeps and barks translated by Jetfire and Thundercracker. Unaware that any Autobots had been captured, Faireborn immediately knows who is responsible...

In Spike Witwicky's cell, Garrison Blackrock continues urging the former soldier to help him figure out his true nature. The exasperated Spike doesn't even understand what makes him to well-suited to this task; Blackrock tells him it is because he has seen "the best and worst" of Cybertron, but Spike doesn't understand what that has to do with anything...until suddenly, he realizes: Blackrock must be Cybertronian, but somehow unaware of it. Blackrock rejects the notion, pointing out that he is trying to rid the Earth of Transformers, at which point the combined forces of the Autobots and Faireborn's team smash their way into the cell. Spike takes advantage of the situation to seize Blackrock, allowing Marissa to grab his datapad and discover what he has been up to without their knowledge. Before they can do anything, however, Galvatron and Skywarp suddenly teleport in, and Galvatron seizes Blackrock. He too knows the secret of the "human": he is a sleeper agent placed on Earth by Onyx Prime, given false memories to make him believe that he is truly human, sent to find the Enigma of Combination and to summon Onyx to the planet. But Galvatron now has his own plans for Onyx's minion...

Featured characters

Characters in italic text appear only in D.0.C's recordings.
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots	Decepticons	Humans	Others
Jetfire (4) Jazz (5) Sky Lynx (6) Kup (7) Cosmos (9)	Soundwave (10) Galvatron (16) Skywarp (17)	Marissa Faireborn (11) Ayana Jones (12) Sanjay Bharwaney (13) Spike Witwicky (14) Garrison Blackrock (15)	D.0.C. (1) Buster (2) Thundercracker (3) Seeker clone combiners (8)

Quotes

"Buster! There you are! Why are you hanging out with a drone? Those things aren't very bright. It might try to... I don't know, update your software or something."

—Thundercracker

"That stupid animal."
"Cut her some slack. Her daddy's a big stupid robot."

—Jones and Faireborn react to Buster's bathroom habits

Notes

Continuity notes

The EDC kitchen has a poster encouraging you to "VISIT POVERTY FLAT", presumably from before it got wrecked by robot fighting.
Skywarp has at last been freed from the machines into which he has been plugged since the start of "season 2" of the series, following the worsening of injuries he sustained all the way back in issue #16.
Galvatron refers to the ancient alliance of Onyx Prime and Nexus Prime, which we learned about in issue #34.

Transformers references

Marissa's coffee mug features a caricature of series colorist Josh Perez. Mugs like this appeared before in More than Meets the Eye #43.
A Cybertronian masquerading as a human calls to mind the Pretender concept, which has featured before in the IDW continuity, but specifically human-sized Transformers in disguise hearkens back to the size changing Autobot Pretenders of Super-God Masterforce or Alice from Revenge of the Fallen.

Real-world references

This issue's title drops the "celestial mechanics" theme of the previous two chapters, going with "Helden", which is German/Dutch for "heroes".
Faireborn and Jones spend this issue in green fatigues specifically based on those worn by G.I. Joe member Lady Jaye, who is Marissa's mother in the original Generation 1 cartoon continuity.

Errors (?)

The anagram-sentences that fill human speech bubbles during the portion of the story told from Buster's POV (see below) all unscramble to spell real sentences, but there appear to be several typos. One character says "should" without an "l". Another asks for a "status report" with only one "s" in "status". One tech reports "The weird signals from the Jupiter colony are continuing", but "signals", "colony" and "continuing" are misspelled (with a missing "s", an added "e", and a missing "i" and "n" respectively). Reluctant to call Faireborn over the matter, their boss responds "We'll wait for something important," but important is missing its "p". Of course, these might not be errors at all, it's kinda hard to tell.

Other trivia

Portions of this story are told variously from D.0.C. and Buster's perspectives, allowing the two normally-wordless characters to have actual dialogue that can be understood by the audience (even if no-one else in the comic can understand them). Panels from D.0.C.'s point of view have yellow borders with slanted corners and a static overlay effect, while Buster's panels have grey borders and curved corners, and a muted palette representing the dog's partial color-blindness; additionally, while D.0.C. is capable of understanding human speech, Buster can only understand snippets of it, and most human dialogue in panels from her POV is jumbled into nonsense-anagrams. Panels showing the scene from the normal audience's perspective have white borders with squared-off corners.

Covers (3)

Regular cover: D.0.C. and Buster by Andrew Griffith
Subscription cover: Archie, driving Hot Rod, does a 180 and screeches to a halt in front of Betty and Veronica, as Optimus Prime looks on. Art by Andrew Pepoy and Jason Millet; part of a series of Archie-themed covers for several IDW titles in December, celebrating the character's 75th anniversary.
Retailer incentive "Countdown to 50" cover: Sky Lynx, Starscream, Wheeljack, Rattrap, and Arcee, by Alex Milne and Josh Perez; the first in a series of variant covers "counting down" to the release of the 50th issues of the The Transformers and More than Meets the Eye in February 2016.

Duh, stay outta Riverdale!

Reprints

The Transformers Volume 9 (June 29, 2016) ISBN 163140668X / ISBN 978-1631406683
- Collects The Transformers (2012) issues #46–49.
- Bonus material includes covers from each issue.
- Trade paperback format.

Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 67: Conquerors (July 24, 2019)
- Collects The Transformers (2012) issues #43–49, and Combiner Hunters #1.
- Bonus material includes development art by Andrew Griffith, a cover gallery and an intro by Simon Furman.
- Hardcover format.

The Transformers: The IDW Collection Phase Two: Volume 11 (June 17, 2020) ISBN 1684056403 / ISBN 978-1684056408
- Collects The Transformers Holiday Special: "Silent Light", Redemption, The Transformers (2012) issues #46–50 & "New Worlds Order", and More than Meets the Eye issues #50–55 & "No Guns, No Swords, No Briefcases".
- Hardcover format.

Volume 9 – cover art by Andrew Griffith and Klaus Scherwinski
The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 67: Conquerors – cover art by Don Figueroa and Andrew Griffith
The IDW Collection Phase Two: Volume 11 – cover art by Marcelo Matere