War and Peace

War and Peace is a six-part miniseries published by Dreamwave Productions, set in the main G1 Dreamwave continuity and following up on the successful Prime Directive miniseries. The plot follows the Earth-bound Transformers as they return to Cybertron, where Shockwave has united the Transformers.

«	War and Peace issues:	»
Preview #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6

Overview

An Autobot-Decepticon battle on Earth ends when Shockwave arrives and announces that the war is over. Most of the Earthen Transformers are eventually captured and returned to Cybertron, where both factions are united under Shockwave's ostensibly peaceful banner. But the Decepticon leader's machinations run deep, and soon open war emerges again.

The series seems to repudiate some of the perceived mistakes made by its economically successful but oft-criticized predecessor. An early sub-plot with Optimus Prime having some kind of visions appeared in previews, but was dropped. Wheeljack's somewhat perfunctory "death" is retconned as a near-miss, and the overall story veers in a completely different direction.

While not as economically successful as Prime Directive, sales were still high enough to lead to an ongoing series.

Items of note

• The series was originally to be penned by Chris Sarracini, who wrote the previous volume. According to a Wizard's Edge article, Sarracini's plot would have featured Omega Supreme and Unicron. When James McDonough Brad Mick replaced Sarracini as the writer, he took the story in a different direction.
• A preview story that was published in the trade paperback collection of the first volume, featuring a spaceship with a large Autobot insignia crashed in the Arctic Ocean and Optimus Prime suffering some kind of seizure, was mostly ignored by the actual War And Peace story. Issue 1 only briefly references the events of the preview story in the prologue printed on the inside cover, noting that Prime's vision (the fit he had sufferred in the preview story) has brought the Autobots to the Arctic, but the ship is never mentioned, essentially "replaced" with a stasis capsule containing Scourge. The mystery of the ship would not be resolved until over a year later, in issue #5 of Dreamwave's ongoing Generation 1 seriesseries, wherein it was revealed to be the ship that brought Jetfire and Omega Supreme to Earth, and the origin point for Scourge's capsule.
• War and Peace contains many references to 1986's The Transformers: The Movie—Starscream throws an injured Megatron out into space; Scourge, Ultra Magnus, Hot Rod, Springer, Kup, Blurr, Arcee, Wheelie and the Sharkticons are featured; the Matrix and Unicron are seen; even Wreck-Gar makes an appearance in the epilogue.
• The series also makes reference to the cartoon with Shockwave's capture of Alpha Trion and Vector Sigma.

Creative team

The series was written by James McDonough under his pen name of "Brad Mick", and penciled by Pat Lee and Edwin Garcia.

Collections

• War and Peace Dreamwave TPB (Jan 2004) (ISBN 978-0973381702)
• War and Peace IDW TPB (Mar 2006) (ISBN 978-1933239828)