Dawn of Future's Past

Writers: Pete Sinclair and Forest Lee

Publication date: September 28, 2006

Okay, forget all that other crap we wasted so much precious time on. Those don't count or maybe they kind of do but they don't matter, because this is the One, True, Official, Definitive Beast Wars Prequel Story, In Every Universe and Every Continuity, From Now Until the End of Time.

Just like The War Within will always be the definitive G1 prequel.

Oh... wait, no.

 

Dawn of Future's Past begins almost exactly where Theft of the Golden Disk left off, with Megatron having finally laid hands on the Golden Disk and Maximal security closing in. And one of those Maximals is Tigatron! For some reason! Here he's just referred to as "Unit 2." I assume this is just his call sign and not intended to be his official pre-tiger name. He's also sporting a version of his normal robot head from Beast Wars rather than the incongruous tiger head he had in Dawn of the Predacus.

Megatron, Dinobot, and Clamps/Scorponok rendezvous with Terrorsaur and Waspinator, who have stolen a transwarp-capable ship for their getaway and spontaneously named it the Darksyde. Cryotek mentioned having found this ship for them in the previous story, but Cryotek isn't mentioned at all in this one. Also, whenever Cheetor got accidentally teleported into the Predacon base and Terrorsaur said, "Welcome... to the dark side," I always thought he was just doing like a cheesy dramatic thing, but apparently someone decided that he really meant that the name of the ship was the Darksyde. So, you know.

With the Predacons space-borne, Tigatron attempts to commandeer a Maximal ship to give chase, and the first one he sees just so happens to be the Chromia-10, the same ship from The Razor's Edge, owned by his very own lady love Airazor, I mean Wing Saber, although she isn't called by either name here. Also, this scene gives every indication of being the first time these two characters have ever met, despite them already being soulmates in Dawn of the Predacus 300 years earlier. Why did they write that comic like that?

Elsewhere, Optimus Primal and the crew of the Axalon have been docked aboard a Maximal space station for some weeks, and are now finally loading up their top-secret cargo: the stasis pod containing homicidal psychopath Protoform X, Beast Wars' future Rampage. The Maximal High Council contacts the Axalon and tells Optimus that, as the only ship in range with a transwarp drive, they must pursue the renegade Predacon ship and retrieve the Golden Disk at all costs. They go to intercept the Darksyde, but are suddenly attacked by a ship representing yet another Transformers faction, one whose identity isn't even properly explained in this comic.

Aboard the ship are Laserbeak and Buzz Saw, former Decepticon cassettes who lived inside Soundwave's chest, now full-sized Predacons who have hands and can talk. They have been dispatched by an unnamed character, apparently another G1 Decepticon called Divebomb, to stop anyone trying to interfere with Megatron's mission. The Axalon gets the shit blown out of it, but the Chromia-10 suddenly appears, and together the two Maximal ships are able to blow up the Predacon ship, apparently killing two classic G1 characters forever, despite both of them having incarnations in the Beast Wars toyline.

But the Chromia-10 was severely damaged in the battle, and Tigatron and Airazor/Wing Saber have suffered irreparable injuries. Rhinox says that all he can do for them is transfer their sparks into two of the stasis pods stored aboard the Axalon containing blank protoforms, although when reborn in their new bodies they are unlikely to retain any memory of their previous lives. So, wait a minute. What was even the point of having those characters in this story? You bend space and time to create a loophole so you can use characters in this Beast Wars prequel who weren't even "born" until the events of Beast Wars proper. But then they lose their bodies and their memories and just end up back where they already were anyway? Why even bother?

 

Also, if we consider Dawn of the Predacus (which we really, really shouldn't), are these stasis pods in the Axalon's hold the same ones Optimus Primal took custody of when the Tripredacus Council hit Cybertron with a stupid weapon that turned a bunch of Transformers into protoforms? Has he just been carrying their brain-dead bodies around with him for 300 years without making any attempt to revive them? Why would he do such a thing? Why is the Axalon knowingly carrying stasis pods with blank protoforms? When they found the two blanks in Beast Wars it seemed like a fluke. Now they had at least four of them and they already knew about them beforehand? Why didn't they just throw those ones away?

Anyway the Predacons are ready to make the jump to lightspeed or whatever. Megatron reveals that his whole Cybertronian alt mode is really like an exo-suit or something by detaching it and stepping out of it, assuming the smaller, slighter robot body he had at the beginning of the first episode of Beast Wars, before acquiring his beast mode transformation. This is kind of cool, but also kind of weird. Like can any Transformer just detach from the mechanical pieces of their alt mode at any time? Wouldn't that make them less transforming robots than robots who wear transforming suits? But I digress.

Megatron hails the Axalon and there's a nice little scene where he introduces himself to the Maximals. The Darksyde opens a transwarp portal and jumps inside with the Axalon in hot pursuit, leaving off almost exactly where Beast Wars begins.

We then leap forward in time like hundreds of years or something, to an unexplored era after the conclusion of Beast Machines. Megatron and Optimus Primal are both dead and Cybertron, along with every Transformer on it, has been reformatted into a technorganic paradise. We see that this Divebomb character is still around and still following the machinations of his master, who is at last revealed to be RAZORCLAW, leader of the original Predacons, the Decepticon Combiner sub-group who could form Predaking and were otherwise useless and forgettable. What dastardly plans are these losers cooking up to spoil the perfect world that Optimus Primal gave his life for? Didn't Predaking die when Pentapredacus stabbed him with a giant sword? Who cares!

Not perfect, not great, not ideal, but pretty good. Most importantly, this comic looks great. The space battles are a little confusing, with a disappointing lack of establishing shots of the ships, but for the most part the images here are crisp, clear, and amazing. The Cybertronian redesigns of most of the characters look awesome, especially the Maximals (although Cheetor's spot are a little questionable). Sadly, none of them transform during the story to show off their vehicle modes.

Although this comic released before the finished Theft of the Golden Disk, that animation was in production longer, so while most of Megatron's crew have similar Cybertronian designs (including Megatron's massive shoulder-mounted cannon that is bigger than his entire body), Scorponok/Clamps looks drastically different, to the extent that he's pretty much just drawn with a scorpion stinger and claws despite not yet having his scorpion alt mode. Also Dinobot still has his stupid backhoe arm but it's not as egregious here as it was in the animation. The best Cybertronian Dinobot design is probably the quick glimpse we get of him in the Dreamwave More Than Meets the Eye comic.

The character voices are also spot on, with few needless REMEMBER THIS??? callbacks. Rattrap says "We're all gonna die" because it's something Rattrap says. No one makes a big deal out of it because why would they? More importantly, no OC shows up to steal Megatron's thunder. His plan, his victory, his evil genius. Yes.

 

I dug this quite a bit, and am more than happy to take the Cybertronian character designs as Beast Wars canon. Some points I'm still not sold on, like Tigatron and Airazor showing up too early for no reason, or the weird subplot with Laserbeak and Predaking that goes nowhere, but barring a few elements I could see this story or one very similar to it playing out as the immediate lead-in to the Beast Wars cartoon. That's the highest praise I've given to any of these extended media tie-ins so far, and unfortunately it's probably the highest I'm ever going to give.