Collections

 

Writer: Jesse Wittenrich

Publication date: May 13, 2015

 

A three-page webcomic published on Twitter, Collections catches us up with everyone's favorite fake Beast Wars character, Packrat, in the aftermath of the Beast Wars. He has somehow recovered the Axalon's security program AI, Sentinel, even though it was destroyed when Tigerhawk blew up the Predacon base, and installed it in the abandoned Maximal base next to the Ark. Packrat spends his time collecting rubbish, most of which grotesquely seems the discarded body parts of dead Beast Wars characters, and plotting to break in to the Ark so he can plunder the treasures of history or something. Sentinel is his only companion, so I assume Onyx Primal must be dead somewhere.

Suddenly, a guy named "Thrustinator" appears, looking like Waspinator merged with a few pieces of his future Vehicon incarnation, Thrust. This is a character from the TransTech continuity, a Transformers sub-franchise based on the unused toy designs from the canceled follow-up series to Beast Machines. He grabs Packrat and opens a portal to return to the TransTech universe, reporting to someone named Heinrad that he has located the timeline anomaly they were looking for. Apparently these jabronis have been going around abducting time-displaced Transformers from damaged timelines in an effort to repair continuity. 

According to the Transformers wiki (sourced as a dead link to an old forum post), the writer's intention was that the Packrat in this story was a duplicate of the real Packrat from his original comic appearances, created by errant temporal energy or something. None of that made it into the comic, presumably because someone realized it was way too stupid. So we can take authorial intent into consideration and shunt this story off entirely into some AU retelling of the Beast Wars, or we can ignore it and accept Collections as a very short post-Beast Wars Packrat adventure. I'm not sure which option is less satisfying.