#nick roche

"It was never going to be Perceptor, was it? Or Springer or Impactor or Kup, if they were here. No, it was always going to be one of us - the second stringers."

"Yeah, just because we're not famous - not Ark-worthy - one of us has to bite the bullet."

Last Stand of the Wreckers is a story about redshirts.

A redshirt (not that anyone reading this needs it spelt out) is a "character" - and here the term is used reservedly - who arrives on the scene without baggage or backstory, and who tags along with the lead cast until their inevitable death. From the moment this one-dimensional nobody joins an established team of much-loved characters one thing is obvious to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with genre conventions: this person will die early on, in a sudden but perfunctory manner, laying down their barely there life in service to the story.

More than canon fodder , they are on narrative fodder: They exist purely to show what fate might await the characters you actually care about.

Pyro, Ironfist, Rotorstorm, and Guzzle are redshirts - or at least that's how they're presented to begin with. Painfully obscure (non-) characters (the first three are based on action figures that were released in Europe in the early '90s), the only one with any past form, in terms of comic book appearances, is Guzzle, the 'Sparkler Mino-bot' who appeared in a handful of Transformers comics. When the most famous of your rookies is Guzzle , you know you're in for a challenge.

That challenge, specifically, was to help these four new recruits transcend their redshirt status; to make them rounded, three-dimensional characters who are just as worthy of page-time (I.e. 'life') as Springer, Kup, Perceptor and the rest. In short, the challenge was to make readers care when one of them died.

When the Wrecker's roster was announced with the unveiling of the cover for issue one, many fans were quick to predict the deaths of the four nobodies: The established characters would make it out alive and the newbies would bite the bullet, sacrificed so that the series lived up to its name. In response, we set ourselves a goal: by the end of issue four, we wanted readers to care about the redshirts so much that they were hoping that they would be spared at the expense of the A-Listers. In other words, "I don't care if Springer dies, so long as Ironfist lives."

Did we succeed? Who knows. But hopefully Ironfirst the fanboy, Prime-obsessed Pyro, gun-loving Guzzle and the braggart Rotorstorm touched a chord with readers. It was certainly satisfying to see that the figure given free to attendees of Botcon 2011 was Fisitron, in his Transformers Animated guise. And who'd have thought that a Sparkler Mini-bot from 1988 would be reborn as a Dark of the Moon Cyberverse figure? Take a bow, Commander Class Guzzle.