Neo-Knights

The Neo-Knights are a group of superheroes from the Marvel portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Shame about the name. And the logo. And the... everything.

Assembled by industrialist G.B. Blackrock to use their powers to make a difference in the Transformer war on Earth, the Neo-Knights are:

• Circuit Breaker/Josie Beller
• Dynamo/Hector Dialonzo
• Thunderpunch/Lee Gruber
• Rapture/Katrina Vesotsky

Fiction

Marvel The Transformers comics

The Neo-Knights were assembled by G.B. Blackrock to combat the Decepticon threat to Earth, and had the official backing of the United States government to replace the defunct RAAT. His plan was to recruit mutants to directly engage Transformers on their own, mutants that... well, they just existed, don't ask questions. Thunderpunch and Rapture were the initial members, though not really fully on board with the cause yet, with their first mission to hire Dynamo; on the way, they picked up Circuit-Breaker who had been trying to recruit Dynamo for her own crusade. Blackrock put them in spandex costumes so they'd "look the part" as real-life comic book superheroes. The Human Factor!

The President of the United States ordered them to intervene in a Decepticon Civil War that threatened New York City, ...All This and Civil War 2 during which most of the team had limited effectiveness but Circuit Breaker once again proved a threat to Autobot and Decepticon alike, until Blackrock could steer her to zapping Shockwave. After this battle, to their shock, they were accidentally warped with the Transformers to Cybertron! Out of Time!

Almost immediately, Circuit-Breaker had a mental breakdown about being stuck on a planet of robots and the rest of the Neo-Knights had to listen to talk on an incoming Unicron. They asked to be sent back home but, to Thunderpunch's amusement, Primus completely ignored Optimus Prime's request to do it; this left Prime suspicious about Primus' attitudes. All this became academic as Unicron popped up! The Void! At Thunderpunch's urging, the Knights helped battle the fiend... well, tried to and sucked at it. Circuit-Breaker, however, saved the planet by electrocuting the Chaos-Bringer for a few seconds. On the Edge of Extinction!

After the battle, the Transformers basically ignored them. Exodus! Unnoticed, they helped Hi-Q/Optimus Prime awaken the Last Autobot and thus helped save Cybertron. The Last Autobot? The Last Autobot took them to Klo, where they helped the Autobots defeat a last squad of Decepticons under Bludgeon's command and managed to do some damage. Optimus, restored to giant form, said the Neo-Knights would be returned to Earth. End of the Road!

Notes

• Legal indicia in the Marvel comics claim "NEO-KNIGHTS" is owned by them instead of Hasbro, but only from #74–80.
• While the Knights are completely MIA when Earth is invaded in Generation 2, they're implicitly involved in the later and unrelated sequel series Regeneration One: Circuit-Breaker makes an obscured cameo. (Evidently, they failed badly!)
• Furman cheerfully admitted to Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #41 that superheroes were in The Transformers because he and Andrew Wildman wanted to work on superhero comics.
• In 1991, in the letters page at the end of the final issue of the Generation 1 comic, Simon Furman sorrowfully reveals that this will almost certainly mark the end of the Transformers franchise forever, but that he wants to work on a dedicated Neo-Knights series at Marvel. Funny how things work out, huh?

Speaking of which:

Techno-X

Huh huh. They look cool. They need grey T-shirts with AC/DC on, then they'd kick ass.

Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #41 would reveal that the Furman/Wildman plan was to rework the Neo-Knights into a team called Techno-X, who would serve not only as a team but a base of operation for cameo appearances from every mechanical or cyborg superhero and supervillain in the Marvel universe.

We're not sure what the "X" signified, except maybe "hey, the X-Men are popular".

The art accompanying the pitch showed Circuit-Breaker and Thunderpunch would be getting redesigned costumes to better fit the early-90s "shoulderpads and guns" aesthetic, with Thunderpunch in particular undergoing a sort of binary-bonding uplink to a cartoonishly oversized semi-sentient cannon named Symbiosis. (Big guns were in!) Rapture would now be wearing a coat. The team would have been rounded out with the addition of new character Phase, a humanoid supercomputer with his own agenda.

The Transformers would have been explained away as having actually been computer-simulated training programs, meant to teach Techno-X how to fight their "real" evil robot opponents, with Circuit-Breaker's origin tied to a Marvel robot villain; similarly, Dynamo would have been written out of the story as a mere invention of that simulated training program because the writing team could no longer think of anything to do with him. A "machine war" was coming due to a computer virus running amok in Marvel Comics' robots-and-cyborgs population, forcing G.B. Blackrock to create a team that could restrain the raving 'bots to be cured (or put them down if necessary). What Blackrock would be hiding is that he'd accidentally caused the virus to be released in the first place. Techno-X would clash with Ultron and also Tony Stark, with Blackrock and Stark as counterparts of each other.

If this had got the nod from Marvel, it could've caused a big copyright spat as, based on what's known of the Transformers comic license, they (other than Circuit Breaker) would have belonged to Hasbro instead of Marvel. Trademark indicia do claim "G.B. BLACKROCK, THUNDERPUNCH, RAPTURE, DYNAMO [and] THE NEO-KNIGHTS" as Marvel trademarks, but only from issue #73 onwards, several issues after the team first appeared in "The Human Factor!" and many years into Blackrock's creation. Reprints of the stories revert to only listing Circuit Breaker as belonging to Marvel and Blackrock would since show up in IDW's comics. (None of the others though. Nobody loves you, Thunderpunch.) Furman likely assumed this had all been taken care of.