Hail and Farewell

Hail and Farewell is a Transformers: Mosaic strip written by Simon Furman, drawn by Steve Buccellato, and published on Furman's blog. When it was published, it was meant to be set some two years after the "present" in the IDW Generation 1 continuity, foreshadowing a number of events to come. However, some editorial changes in plan ended up rendering it and some of its foreshadowing impossible.

Synopsis

Hunter O'Nion touches some family photographs on a dresser, musing to himself about how he's saying goodbye to what little of a life he'd had. He stands in a bedroom, dressed in a trenchcoat and trucker cap, and thinks about his lost family: His father died when he was eight, and his mother descended into alcoholism. He and his sister had put on a good face, but she split as soon as she could. Hunter, on the other hand, had stayed right to the end, his only source of sanity being his dream of finding something bigger. Then, two years ago, he did.

As Hunter heads to the front door, he loosens his trenchcoat to reveal his metallic chest. He ponders how everything had changed back then — how he had changed. Stepping outside, he drops his jacket and hat and leaps into the air, transforming into Sunstreaker's head. As the Autobot catches and attaches him, he thinks about how "Hunter" had ceased to be, as an individual, his memories overlapping with Sunstreaker's. Since the fusion, the merged Autobot/human had traveled to other worlds (even another dimension), battled Scorponok, allied with the Dinobots, and faced a Decepticon invasion. This house had become so very small, and truly he couldn't go home again.

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots	Humans
Sunstreaker (2)	Hunter O'Nion (1)

Errors

• These are only errors in retrospect, but several events have been made impossible (or at least severely unlikely) in the time since this was published:
  • Hunter and Sunstreaker are shown still being partnered two years after Hunter either met the Autobots or became a Headmaster (the wording is unclear). Yet All Hail Megatron, set only one year after that general timeframe, has their bond having been fully severed. More importantly, Sunstreaker DIES in All Hail. Granted, giant explosions are notoriously non-lethal for robots, but it would be an enormous about-face in terms of both logic and drama for Hunter and Sunstreaker to return to their previous state after All Hail.
  • The "other dimension" that Hunter said they'd gone to was probably going to be the Dead Universe. However, that storyline was heavily truncated in the rushed Revelation miniseries, and neither Hunter nor Sunstreaker ended up going there.
  • The only "full scale Decepticon invasion" to happen yet is the one in All Hail, which, as previously stated, is the series that makes this Mosaic strip so impossible.
  • Hunter hasn't even been to another planet at this point, though he was last seen on a spaceship, so there's still a chance.
  • Hunter turns into the same type of head as the Machination's Headmasters, but in Devastation he turns into a replica of Sunstreaker's original head. This mistake occurred because "Hail and Farewell" was drawn before the relevant issue depicting Sunstreaker's Headmaster head had been released.

Items of note

• The foreshadowing that did come true was the Scorponok-facing and the Dinobot-allying, both in the Maximum Dinobots miniseries.
• When Furman originally posted this Mosaic strip on his blog, he said it was emphatically canon to the IDW Generation 1 series. Furman was apparently unaware that his plans for Revelation and Expansion had been constricted in favor of Shane McCarthy's All Hail Megatron series. IDW soon said that "Hail and Farewell" wasn't canon.
• As nothing yet contradicts the childhood given for Hunter, TFWiki.net is counting at least THAT bit as applicable to the IDW Generation 1 continuity. The rest, if we consider it canon at all, is relegated to a splinter timeline.