wada sez: Drag Strip’s plotline is kind of the odd one out, in that it doesn’t directly play into his weaknesses from his original Budiansky bio. Note Drag Strip’s line about a “Masquerade”...

wada sez: We jump forward to the present day, where Drag Strip is trapped in a cell, being interrogated by Jazz, Sideswipe, and Windcharger. But what connects these characters...? Matt Marshall has given Sideswipe his inverted Generation 2 color scheme, for some reason; it’s technically possible that he was inspired by The Death of Optimus Prime, released just over a month prior and featuring that same color scheme, but that would depend on lead times for the project. Drag Strip’s plotline is the main thread of the comic, which originally intercut between this and the other team members—so don’t worry, we’ll be revisiting him shortly. Unfortunately, Tumblr puts a limit on the number of images that can be in a single gallery, which is why I’m splitting the comic across multiple posts. It made sense to organise these by plotline for tagging purposes, and speaking more subjectively, I personally found the wildly different artstyles between the different threads—which don’t have meaningful transitions on a script level either—to be jarring.

wada sez: Hankey has done a find-and-replace on various wrestling terms to create this Transformers Animated strip. “CGE” stands in for WWE, “Crackdown” is just Friday Night SmackDown, and Motormaster is Hulk Hogan, with “Motormania” being his “Hulkamania”. I think that’s Scrounge in the second panel, predating his official debut, though I’m not sure who the purple, orange, blue, or red robots are. Presumably they’re generics.

wada sez: Just a little character piece set indeterminately in the cartoon’s second season. The main point of interest is the green robot in the first panel, who most readers took to be an interpretation of Cosmos, whose eventually appearance in the show would naturally end up looking very different. This is a very common theme in Animated fanworks, with creators attempting to emulate the show’s distinctive style and character-design sensibilities to varying degrees of success.

wada sez: Perhaps the most striking dropped plot thread from Simon Furman’s Marvel UK work was that of Professor Morris, who took over Swoop’s body in “The Icarus Theory” and later became the pilot of the government super-robot Centurion in “In the National Interest”, during which he locked himself inside a bunker. He briefly showed up again piloting Centurion in “Fallen Angel”, but after that was never mentioned again! Hence, this strip provides some, ah, closure.