COUNTDOWN TO REGENERATION ONE #81 (DAY 4)

Only a matter of days now until Transformers: Regeneration One #81 hits comic book stores and download outlets (on Wednesday, July 11^th), and my pre-release teaser-fest continues with…

Regeneration One #80.5 — DECONSTRUCTED, pt 4: the final part of my behind-the-scenes look at what went into making the Free Comic Day bridging issue. Spoilers ahoy, so beware:

Page 12: In one review of #80.5, I saw this whole end sequence described as being like the pre-credits segment of a Bond movie, and I kind of like that. That’s definitely the vibe. And there’s a satellite, which immediately makes you think of Diamonds are Forever or Die Another Day. Up till now, it’s been a lot of (necessary) re-establishment of characters and settings, laying the groundwork for Regeneration One #81, but here/now things start to kick into gear — and these next three pages of action seem a better fit as the first three pages of Regeneration One proper. This is where it begins. The action plays out at the Kalis-Baird Beaming Transmitter, another location I culled from an old UK story, City of Fear. No huge significance to this, except that the whole idea of zombie Transformers was on my mind, for reasons that will become apparent in #82. Overall, I just liked the idea of re-using actual (already established) locations, rather than creating new ones. A couple of ‘red shirts’ quickly get wasted and Soundwave’s crew are in. I took a great deal of pleasure in bringing back the Firecons as part of his squad. They’d only appeared in the UK series before and I kind of liked them.

Page 13: Whatever Soundwave was going to do now, I wanted it to play to his strengths as a character. It’s unexpected. Cunning. A low value target that’s likely to have had only a skeleton security crew. And his plan involves communication, or rather supplying false communication to an unthinking bit of space hardware. And the fact that Cybetron even has asteroid-smasher satellites plays into the nature of the planet’s original rough ride through space (which led to the creation of the Ark), a scene we see played out on the second of the flashback spreads. See, most things are there for a reason. So Soundwave realigns the satellite and it prepares to fire. But on what? Or who?

Pages 14-15: Our final flashback spread brings us right up to date, and is probably the most important of all, as it establishes — the corrupted Creation Matrix (yes, I know I call it the Matrix of Leadership, but leadership is a very important concept in RG1, so didn’t feel too bad adopting this alternative description), Thunderwing’s brief ownership of said corrupted Matrix, Unicron, Prime’s death, the idea that Galvatron is Megatron’s future self, the Last Autobot (there he is again, just in case you’d forgotten his appearance on page 4) and the defeat of Bludgeon on Klo. All, in their own ways, loose ends, which is coincidentally what the first story arc is called.

Page 16: Then… being very careful not to cover J-P’s extra-bright ‘star’ with a Zero Space caption — Krakadoom! My favourite sound effect from the old days (say it out loud, in its three syllables). Possibly with the exception of Ba-Throom! There goes the Last Autobot. Problem solved. Everyone has to now sit up and take notice, surely. Even Prime. And playing with the whole End and Beginning thing (as on page 1), we have the beginning of the end. Which this most definitely is!

Look out for my Regeneration One #81 – Script (W)rap, soon…