Spotlight: Kup

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File:IDWSpotlight Kup cover.jpg The Dawn of the Dead or just a bad dream?
"The Transformers: Spotlight Kup"
Publisher	IDW Publishing
First published	April 25, 2007
Cover date	April 2007
Written by	Nick Roche
Illustrated by	Nick Roche
Colors by	Andrew Elder
Letters by	Robbie Robbins
Edits by	Chris Ryall & Dan Taylor
Continuity	IDW continuity
Chronology	Escalation

Kup is in danger. The threat? Himself.

Synopsis

A spaceship crash-lands on a desert planet covered in yellow crystals. Among the wreckage, a mechanoid survivor sees a vehicle approaching, which transforms into Kup. However, Kup ignores his pleas for assistance and decapitates him with a club. From Kup's interior monologue, we learn that his spaceship also crashed on this planet, that he has no hope of being rescued, but that the strange crystals fill him with a sense of well-being so that he gives little thought to anything else. As the suns set, he returns to a makeshift shelter, which contains the remains of Outback, a fellow survivor of the crash who was killed when a generator meltdown caused the crystals to go critical. Kup is clearly not in his right mind, as he has a conversation with Outback while wielding his severed arm as a weapon.

At night-time, as Kup powers down, an apparition emanates from Outback's corpse, informing Kup that "we're coming to get you!" Outside, Kup sees zombie robots, from which he defends himself until sunrise. In the daylight, he emerges and lies within the crystals, feeling himself becoming more alive. The following night, the 'zombots' reappear. With Kup having forgotten to secure his shelter's shutters, they easily enter. Kup fights them off with unforeseen strength. Only one escapes, fleeing as Kup's sparkcore threatens to go into meltdown.

The zombot is revealed to be Siren, who, after returning to his ship via orbital jump, angrily berates first Perceptor and then Springer for the loss of his team and the pointlessness of the task. The radiation that has damaged Kup's mind also restricts his would-be rescuers to cumbersome protective armor that makes him think they are zombies, and any energy discharge, from their weapons or from Kup's damaged body, could detonate the crystals in a catastrophic chain reaction. Yet Springer, who is the 'ghost' attempting to communicate with Kup, is determined to rescue his former mentor because of what he and the entire Autobot army owe to his training. Both Prowl and Perceptor, in their respective ways, advise Springer to give up this quixotic quest before any more Autobots lose their lives, but then he learns that the 'specialist' he requested has arrived...

Once again at nightfall, the 'zombots' reappear, and once again Kup wreaks havoc among them—pushed over the edge by the accidental destruction of Outback's corpse, the exertion driving his sparkcore into meltdown again. However, the appearance of Trailbreaker, minus rad-armor and protected by his forcefield, shocks Kup momentarily, permitting Trailbreaker to secure him and prevent disaster. Back on board the Ark-17, Springer and Trailbreaker consider the situation—although Kup has been rescued, his mind is broken, his body is severely damaged and too outdated to repair, and his spark is being maintained by artificial means. Springer wonders whether bringing him back in this condition, and at the cost of so many other lives, was worth it.

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots
Kup (1) Outback (2) Siren (3) Perceptor (4) Springer (5) Prowl (6) Sizzle (7) Trailbreaker (8)

Notes

• A page was cut where Kup drives to a cliff every day to dump the "zombie" heads into a lake so they will stop staring at him. That was cut by Roche, not editorial... but only because another scene needed more room!
• The unnamed planet on which Kup and Outback crashed may be one of those seeded with Ultra-Energon by Shockwave before the ruin of Cybertron. As well as driving Kup insane, the energy from the crystals gives him immense power in a manner similar to Ore-13. If so, this planet may be representative of all those seeded by Shockwave other than Earth, since he was prevented by the Dynobots from stabilizing any of the other worlds.
• Kup—and his visions of zombies—are drawn in a different style from the "real world", such as the scenes on-board the Ark-17. Kup's nightmarish world is rendered with messy black cross-hatching and shadowy splotches, colored with either primarily orange tones (for daylight) or blue (at night), and the panels are given thick, jagged borders. In contrast, the "real world" events are cleanly rendered and colored normally. When the two "worlds" collide with Trailbreaker's arrival, even the dinged-up Trailbreaker looks polished compared to the been-through-hell Kup.

Always look on the briiiight side of death!

• Springer makes reference to the events of the Stormbringer series as being the reason he was late arriving on the scene.
• Outback dying in this story forced a change to the second issue of Megatron Origin, which was written semi-simultaneously but published after Spotlight: Kup was released. Outback and Bumper had been written to be the first Autobot victims of Megatron's illegal underground deathsports, which obviously would cause continuity problems. Thus, the creation of "Fastback", who looks a hell of a lot like Outback but totally isn't, really.
• The issue includes 5 pages of sketches by Nick Roche.
• Roche had the idea of writing an I Am Legend with Transformers, and Kup seemed like the best fit. He has also stated that due to concerns about trying to "dive in" to pre-existing continuity, he wrote the story as if it could be slotted into any continuity.
• Years later, James Roberts, Roche's partner on Last Stand of the Wreckers, would think up the Shimmer, a ghostly green entity that Autobots believe visits you as a sign of oncoming death. Which Springer's hologram is often mistaken for. Hmmm...

Errors

• A bit of Trailbreaker's shoulder is clipping through Springer's on the final page.

Covers (4)

• Cover A: Kup attacks zombies; art by Nick Roche and Josh Burcham (colors).
• Cover B: Kup in swamp; art by Alex Milne and Josh Perez (colors).
• Cover RI-A: Uncolored cover A
• Cover RI-B: Uncolored cover B

• We'll get you, Kup!
  We'll get you, Kup!
• Kup, smelling swampy.
  Kup, smelling swampy.
• Cover RI-A
  Cover RI-A
• Cover RI-B
  Cover RI-B

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• Star Trek: Klingons: Blood Will Tell
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Space Between
• Adventures in Oz comic
• Angel: Auld Lang Syne comic
• Classics toys
• IDW trade paperbacks (Infiltration, Stormbringer, The Gathering, Hearts of Steel, War and Peace, Generations) (back cover)

Reprints

• 2010 — The Transformers: The IDW Collection Volume Two

External links

• Kup's MySpace page, maintained by Nick Roche