The Beast Within Part 2, Consequences
From Transformers Wiki
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 Thank Christ the Beast was on the back cover... | |||||||||||||
| "The Beast Within Part 2, Consequences" | |||||||||||||
| Publisher | Metrodome | ||||||||||||
| First published | August 2004 (included with Season 3 & Season 4 DVD set) | ||||||||||||
| Script | Darren Jamieson | ||||||||||||
| Art | Dylan Gibson | ||||||||||||
| Special Thanks To | Jane Lawson | ||||||||||||
The Beast falls down a hole.
Contents |
Synopsis
With many Autobots having fallen to the Beast, a small group of survivors attempts to flee the scene huddled inside Optimus Prime's trailer. But Prime is not fast enough—the Beast rips his trailer open like a tin can with one swipe of his massive claw, and Skids is torn from within and meets his end in the creature's grip. With Prime running on rims, salvation arrives at the last minute in the form of Jetfire, who swoops in to pick up the Autobots and transport them to safety. Although Bumblebee urges Prime to climb aboard as well, he speeds ahead, to the rim of a crevasse, while Jetfire slows the Beast with a burst from his afterburners. The Beast emerges from the flames, and Prime calls out to his former troops, but with no response save a monstrous snarl, he opens fire. The Beast lunges at him and they grapple, until Prime shifts the monster's weight and causes both it and himself to topple into the chasm. At the last minute, Jetfire soars to the rescue again, plucking Prime out of mid-air as the Beast topples to the bottom of the pit and shatters into fragments. As Prime observes the smoking wreck, Jetfire inquires if it is over, to which Prime responds—"Is it ever really over?" All hope it is.
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Autobots | Decepticons |
|---|---|
|
Notes
Continuity notes
- Jetfire appears to have picked up the corpses of Wheeljack and Springer on the way; Springer is shown in a close-up panel lying on the battlefield at the start of the comic.
- The key role Jetfire plays in this comic was added at Gibson's request, as Jetfire was his favorite character.[1]
Transformers references
- The Matrix of Leadership is seen hanging inside Prime's truck cab.
- Optimus Prime draws his ion blaster from a compartment on his back—a concept that comes directly from the original Dreamwave miniseries.
- Prime's characterisation as a badass leader forced to make difficult choices was Jamieson's interpretation of the character from classic media. He highlights issue #24 of the Marvel comic, "Afterdeath!", in which Prime commits suicide over having allowed a video game character to be killed, as a piece of classic characterisation that he strongly disliked.[2]
- Jetfire's design hews mostly to the revised look he had for the cartoon/comics, but keeps the original toy's helmet antennae. Note that he's called Jetfire, and not Skyfire!
Real-life references
- The panel of the Beast as seen in Prime's wing-mirror is a reference to the same beat from Jurassic Park. The genetically-reconstructed dinosaurs in that film are portrayed as something that never should have existed, tying into Jamieson's conception of the Beast.[3]
- The general premise of the second part of the story—a car chase through a desolate wasteland—was inspired by Mad Max.[4]
Other trivia
- This comic sees Gibson draw in a style he is more accustomed to, remarking that it better fit the "darker more atmospheric" nature of the story. Jamieson agrees that the art in the second part was a substantial improvement as a result.[5]
- In a similar vein, Jamieson's Comic Sans lettering is replaced with hand-lettering by Gibson. While not as perfectly legible as the professional digital lettering Transformers fans were used to, it's still a substantial improvement.[5]
- Relative to the first part, this instalment has two fewer pages to work with, consisting of just six small-format pages in total! Jamieson aimed to use that pagespace to tell a frantic story taking place over just a few minutes,[4] but found it more difficult than he expected to wrap up the story in this space, and was unhappy with the final confrontation between Prime and the Beast, which he felt would have been different if he'd had more room to work with.[6]
Cover
- Optimus and Beastie stand amongst a few deactivated bodies, by Dylan Gibson.
...And through the barricades.
References
- ↑ "It was almost like it- well it was like a What If...? If you take it that way. [...] But that's what it was, it was a What If...?, I knew it was gonna be a one-off comic, so I knew it didn't matter what I did. And I could effectively kill characters if I wanted to. You mention Jetfire- Jetfire was in there purely because Dylan wanted to draw Jetfire. So Jetfire's not in the first comic, he's in the second comic, solely because Dylan came to me and said, "Look, I want Jetfire in this second one, because I love Jetifre, and I wanna draw him in a comic." "Okay, I'll see if I can get Jetfire into the storyline for you." So that's why Jetfire was in there. Twin Twist... is Twin Twist in-? I didn't write Twin Twist in there. Dylan would've drawn him in, then. [...] I was specific about some Transformers. I was specific about Starscream, for example, being the one that gets away. When the jets are attacking the Beast, they get swiped out, but Starscream aaalways manages to get out of it."—Darren Jamieson, Our Worlds are in Danger, "I'm Big Enough, and Ugly Enough", 2023/10/31 - 32:07
- ↑ "There's one bit of the comics, I didn't like, and there's this one episode where Optimus Prime doesn't do what it takes to win- or he does, sorry, but then he backs out of it and doesn't like it- the video game. Where they all get digitised, yeah, and a video game character gets killed as a result of Prime winning, and he won't accept it, and then he gets exploded at the end."—Darren Jamieson, Our Worlds are in Danger, "I'm Big Enough, and Ugly Enough", 2023/10/31 - 37:53
- ↑ "That is 100% a Jurassic Park reference, yeah. The visual of the Beast was meant to be something horrific, that shouldn't exist. As many people have commented online, yeah—it shouldn't've existed."—Darren Jamieson, Our Worlds are in Danger, "I'm Big Enough, and Ugly Enough", 2023/10/31 - 26:28
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Those little details, that was Dylan, Dylan was doing that. He loved putting in little stuff like that. No, the things I put in were more sort-of the filmic style, so I was very specific on the fact that I wanted the Beast vision in the wing-mirror, because that was a Jurassic Park thing. The whole concept of the second part of the comic was essentially a car chase, because I wanted- I was very keen- when you're at film school, this is the best way for you to actually tell a story, is to tell it in as little time space as possible. So if you can tell a story that takes place over a few minutes, then you're going to make something that fits really well as a narrative. If you try and drag it out over like three weeks or a year, then it's going to be very disjointed. So it was done over a very short timespace. So that second part of the comic probably took place over just a few minutes. And it was a car chase, it was meant to be action all the way. And it was a little inspired by Mad Max."—Darren Jamieson, Our Worlds are in Danger, "I'm Big Enough, and Ugly Enough", 2023/10/31 - 33:44
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Both [the artstyle and the lettering in Part 1] are my fault. I can't blame Dylan for that one at all. The first one, I specifically asked Dylan to do it in a Pat Lee style. I wanted Optimus Prime and Megatron to be as big and chunky as possible, I wanted them to tower over the other Transformers to show their power. I really liked Pat Lee's style, at the time—let me stress that, at the time!—because it was different to what I'd seen before. I don't like it now, but at the time- it was a fad, what can I say, I was young, I was impressionable, so what? I asked Dylan to do it in that style. In the second one he did it in his own style, so that's why the second one looks very different to the first one. Dylan went, did his own thing in the second one, and I think it looks much better, what Dylan did, to what I told him to do. The lettering in the first one, again, that's my fault. I thought Dylan was gonna do the lettering, 'cause he's the artist. Dylan sent me all the panels across, but without lettering, and said, "I don't know how to do the lettering, and I don't wanna do it." And I was left with, I don't know, a couple of days to go, "How the hell am I gonna fix this?" I've been to art college, but I'm not an artist. So I did what I could with a PC and Dylan's artwork—layered artwork—and yes... that was a mistake. I probably should've put it back to Dylan and gone, "No, mate, look, you're the artist, you do the lettering. Please. You do the lettering, you do NOT want me doing the lettering." But that is what happened. It would be nice, maybe, to re-do it maybe with the lettering done properly. In the second one, I believe Dylan did his own lettering in the second comic. Which is why the second one, again, the second one looks different, looks a lot better visually than the first one."—Darren Jamieson, Our Worlds are in Danger, "I'm Big Enough, and Ugly Enough", 2023/10/31 - 43:03
- ↑ "So it was always going to be two comics, so I knew I could end it on a clfifhanger—if you'll pardon the pun with the way the second one ended. But what I didn't know at the time was that the second one had to be a shorter pagelength. So I think the first one is- was it eight pages, and the second one is six? Or the first one is ten, and the second one is eight? I knew I lost two pages. I lost two pages, basically. And I didn't realise how difficult it was to wrap something up in such a short pagelength when the comic is so small as well. So I probably didn't appreciate that at the time. 'Cause I know there's a lot of writers, even like established classical writers [...] Euripides had this thing that people would mock him for, that he would write these really difficult setups, for his tragedies, and then at the end in order to resolve it he would always have a god would come down and sort it out. [...] So I was aware of that while I was doing it, and I wanted to be careful that I didn't fall into that trap, and to be honest... I'm not satisfied with the way that the second one ended. I'm not. Because it- I think it needed another two pages, quite frankly! But Jane wouldn't give me those other two pages, so I couldn't do it the way I wanted to do it, so yeah. I'm really happy with the way the second one starts, I love the bit in the truck- "the truck", Optimus Prime... I love the chase, I love the fact that he gets ripped out of the back. I love the Jurassic Park reference. I even love Jetfire coming in and saving the other Autobots so that Prime can deal with it by himself. It's just those last couple of panels... I wish I had more time to do something different."—Darren Jamieson, Our Worlds are in Danger, "I'm Big Enough, and Ugly Enough", 2023/10/31 - 39:45
