Micronauts (franchise)
| This article is about the comic series. For the fictional team of heroes, see Micronaut. |
Micronauts is a 2016 ongoing comic series by IDW Publishing, based on the 1977 toyline by Mego. Though it isn't the first licensed Micronauts comic, the Marvel Comics Micronauts series coming before it, it uses a different cast of characters and characterisations thanks to Marvel's ownership of the characters they created for their series.
The series crossed over with IDW's Transformers titles in 2016 as part of the Revolution event, with the titular characters travelling from their universe to the Transformers'.
| Micronauts issues with Transformers content: |
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| Micronauts: Revolution |
Overview
Micronauts focuses on the titular team; a group of misfits from the tiny universe of microspace, who aim to save their world from the entropy stom while dealing with the war between Baron Daegon's Ministry of Science and Baron Karza's Ministry of Defense.
Micronauts: Revolution
Seeking to save their universe, the Micronauts have flown into the entropy storm, from which nobody has ever emerged, and survived... only to come under attack from the Reptos, a group of alien scavengers. Though they are overwhelmed, they are saved when one of the cryptic, godlike Time Travellers intervenes, killing two of the Reptos by aging them to the point of death and driving the others away, before projecing a vision of the past and future and vanishing.
As the Micronauts' ship flies on, Microtron scans for additional energy sources to fuel them, and detects "something big". As the crew heads towards it, though, they are hailed... by none other than Baron Karza, the man they fled into the storm to escape. Though it has only been a few days since they entered the cloud for the Micronauts, it seems that it has been years for Karza, and that he has discovered the secrets of their universe. Microtron interrupts, as they've reached the energy source he had detected... but it's also the source of Karza's transmission. As Oz struggles to comprehend what he's looking at, Karza informs him that it is the birthplace of Microspace, and that it will allow them to be as gods... the body of their progenitor: Micronus Prime.
Franchise notes
The Micronauts line debuted in 1977 as Mego's first original series after finding success with licensed toys. It proved to be needed, too, as Mego had just rejected a licensing deal for a then-upcoming science fiction film. Mego pushed the interchangeability of the toys, licensed from Takara's Microman figures, as the core play pattern, encouraging kids to build their own toys using the Micronauts pieces. This meant that kids (or rather, their parents) had to buy more sets and figures to build bigger and better creations. Micronauts ran successfully until around 1980, when Mego began to lose sales and ultimately shut down in 1983. However, there was one particular influence that the toys had: much of their engineering was borrowed by Hasbro for their G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero line.
Five years before The Transformers did the same thing, Micronauts received a comic book from Marvel Comics, written by Bill Mantlo (who would later write the popular ROM: Spaceknight series); it ran for a total of 61 issues from 1979 to 1986, even after the toyline’s cancellation. Unlike Marvel's Transformers series, Micronauts was fully integrated into the mainstream Marvel Universe, with Mantlo introducing new original characters in addition to the toy-based ones. This, coupled with the terms of the license[1] allowed for several Micronauts characters to continue being published in Marvel stories even after Marvel lost the license. Later on, other publishers such as Image Comics and Devil's Due Press picked up the Micronauts license, though neither run met with much success.
By 2009, Hasbro had acquired Micronauts and announced that they were planning a revival, with a new toyline and film series. Nothing new came of it until 2011, when the Micronauts characters were used as the key players in Hasbro’s Unit:E crossover, which sought to merge a number of Hasbro properties, including Transformers, into a shared universe. Unfortunately, for reasons likely involving the change of direction with the Transformers: Prime cartoon, Unit:E was never followed up on. However, during Hasbro's 2015 Investor Day event, the company unveiled Transformers: Micronauts under their "New Brands" slides, along with a mysterious figure that appeared to be a new toy of Micronauts character Biotron.[2] As of right now, no new information has been revealed.
Later in 2015, IDW Publishing announced plans for a new Micronauts series, which debuted in March 2016; IDW later revealed that Micronauts would be folded into their new shared Hasbro universe as part of the Revolution event, along with titles like The Transformers, G.I. Joe, and ROM. The Micronauts characters were tied into the previously established Transformers continuity in the Micronauts: Revolution one-shot, which revealed that the Micronauts' home universe of Microspace was actually created by one of the Thirteen original Transformers, Micronus Prime.
References
- ↑ Unlike the Transformers license, which gave Hasbro ownership of any characters that debuted in the comic, the Micronauts and ROM: Spaceknight licenses gave the rights to any characters originating in the comics to Marvel.
- ↑ http://news.tfw2005.com/2015/11/16/tfw2005-coverage-of-hasbro-investor-day-2015-305388
