Transformers Volume 2 Preview

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Publisher	Dreamwave Productions
First published	December 4, 2002
Writer	Chris Sarracini
Penciler	Pat Lee
Inker	Rob Armstrong
Backgrounds	Juan Malera, Trang Dang, Gary Yeung
Colorist	Pat Lee, Ramil Sunga
Continuity	Dreamwave continuity

Whales die and Optimus Prime has an epileptic seizure.

Synopsis

The Gulf of Alaska, 5.51 A.M. local time. An fishing boat, working for an American company named Concord Fisheries, is about two days ahead of its quota, and the crew is wondering whether they should dock early and unload, or try to continue their lucky streak. The boat's captain, meanwhile, is distracted and keeps thinking about his family.

Suddenly, the boat hits an obstacle. As the captain orders a code red, the crew realizes they have run across at leas a dozen dead whales, each of them with a shard of metal sticking out of its back. The crew proceeds to lift some of the whales onboard to examine their bodies and realizes that their flesh looks burnt, as if they had been torched. Eventually they notice a shard of metal sticking out of one of the bodies. Upon realizing that one of them sports an Autobot insignia, the captain decides to call the Coast Guard.

Why are my feet so swollen? Why do my chest windows look like boobs?

Meanwhile, Optimus Prime is standing on a hilltop in the desert, staring at an electric storm at the horizon. Spike climbs up to talk to him, joking about getting older. Prime isn't listening, however, as he is having an inexplicable feeling that a huge threat for the Autobots, unlike anything they ever encountered before, is headed their way. Suddenly Prime has a seizure, loses his balance and falls off the hill, crashing onto the ground.

Some time later, back in the Gulf of Alaska, at 8:33 P.M. local time, a Coast Guard boat has arrived, and the crew starts questioning the fishing crew, who deny having seen anything out of the ordinary until the collision. The Coast Guard captain decides to send divers down to investigate. Although the captain of the fishing boat objects the use of live divers, the Coast Guard captain insists that clearance for mech use takes too long, and he wants to find out what's going on underwater as soon as possible. As the three divers reach 140 feet, they discover a large spaceship sporting a huge Autobot insignia. One of the divers calls the Coast Guard captain via radio, asking for assistance.

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots	Humans
Optimus Prime (2)	Human fishermen (1) Spike Witwicky (3) Coast guard personnel (4)

Quotes

"Kill this many? That'd have to be one huge explosion."

—Fisherman who for some reason failed to see all those large metal shards thus far.

"Don't get macho, gentlemen. I don't care what it is. If you find a message in a bottle that looks suspicious, get your butts back up here… that's an order."

—Coast Guard captain, warning his divers not to take any risks.

Notes

• This eight-page story has never been published as an individual issue. A preview was made available online in December 2002, lacking all text captions and speech bubbles. The story was published in the Prime Directive trade paperback collection which came out the same month, and is also included in the reprint by IDW Publishing.
• This story appears to be setting up Chris Sarracini's originally intended plot for the (at that point still unnamed) second Generation 1 mini-series, which was hinted in a Wizard's Edge article and would have featured Omega Supreme and Unicron. When Sarracini was replaced by James McDonough Brad Mick as the writer of the second Generation 1 mini, that story direction was dropped and replaced by an entirely new plot. Therefore, this preview is pretty much pointless in retrospect. The solitary vestigial reference to this preview in the finished War and Peace mini-series is in the text prologue printed on the inside cover of the first issue, noting that Prime's vision (the fit he suffers in this story) has brought the Autobots to the Arctic, but the ship is never mentioned, essentially "replaced" with a stasis capsule containing Scourge.
  • The lingering mystery of the ship would not be resolved until over a year later, in issue #5 of Dreamwave's ongoing Generation One series, wherein it was revealed to be the ship that brought Jetfire and Omega Supreme to Earth, and the origin point for Scourge's capsule.
• The fishing crew appears to suffer from collective sight impairment. First they fail to notice an area filled with dead whales until they literally bump into them. And then they fail to notice the giant shards of metal sticking out of their bodies until they have lifted them on board. Considering they're steering through an area full of icebergs, one wonders how they have managed not to bump into one of them yet.

Errors

• When Optimus Prime is having his seizure, Spike appears to be looking into the wrong direction when he asks him what is wrong, based on both their relative position in the previous panel and the direction of the pointer of Prime's speech bubble.
• Prime falls off the hill head first, with the front side of his body facing the hill, yet he somehow manages to hit the ground flat, with the front side of his body facing the ground.