Assembly (OMAM)
| This article is about the comic story. For the location on Cybertron, see Assembly. |
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| "Assembly" | |||||||||||||
| Publisher | Fun Publications | ||||||||||||
| Published in | Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #67 | ||||||||||||
| Writers | Jesse Wittenrich & Pete Sinclair | ||||||||||||
| Pencils | Dan Khanna | ||||||||||||
| Inks | Jake Isenberg | ||||||||||||
| Colors | Evan Gauntt | ||||||||||||
| Letters | Jesse Wittenrich | ||||||||||||
| Managing editor | Pete Sinclair | ||||||||||||
| Continuity | Of Masters and Mayhem | ||||||||||||
| Chronology | 2020 | ||||||||||||
Five years after their dimensional displacement, the Pretenders and Spike continue to try to learn where they are as an old enemy reawakens...
Synopsis
Spike glumly walks the streets of the city of Merida, reflecting on how the humans of the Classicsverse and their human-like Pretenders first arrived on this Earth in an alternate universe, an Earth with identical cities and its own native animals—but no humans to be found. He's shaken out of his reverie by a nearby car-crash, where he's able to pull a father and daughter out of the wreckage with the aid of Vroom and Crossblades. After lending a helping hand, they step into the crowd that's gathered to observe the crash—though not without being noticed by a mysterious stranger...
Back at the apartment, Spike, Vroom, and Crossblades call home, they're immediately questioned by Metalhawk about their activities before Elizabeth informs Spike that she has his brother on live vidchat. After a brief discussion over Spike's apparent rebellious nature, Spike uses the distraction of Buster's son saying hello to put the call to an end, and lead the Pretenders and Elizabeth out for dinner. Over Italian, the five of them discuss how little progress they've made on figuring out the mystery of this Earth. After finishing their meal, they prepare to walk back home... But as they're leaving, a man grabs Elizabeth and holds them at gunpoint, demanding their money. When none of them cough up any cash, the mugger pulls the trigger, and a dark stain spreads across Spike's chest...
Elsewhere, Ramjet awakens from another stellar cycle of meditation, failing to understand the current universe he finds himself in. Despite being trapped in solid matter after he teleported to this universe, he's conserved enough energy to break free of his physical prison and reformat to a new body. As he muses on the lack of Unicron's touch on this universe, he senses something else that has been touched by evil, and resolves to find it, so that together they may tear this dimension apart!
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Autobots | Humans | Others |
|---|---|---|
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Quotes
Notes
- Where are Spike and the Pretenders? The existence of this Earth and the universe they're currently in is regarded as unusual, as its native animals, though not shown, are apparently different from those we're used to.
- It has been five years since everyone was sent here. Production team comments on Another Light placed that arc in 2015, which would logically place Of Masters and Mayhem in 2020. However, the exact in-universe year of this story goes unspecified, and universe-jumping in Transformers has often been accompanied by time-jumping.
- Spike and friends have garnered a stalker from the looks of it! Just who exactly is this older fellow?
- Ramjet highlights the uniqueness of this reality by claiming that it is and always will be devoid of Unicron.
Errors
Continuity notes
- Spike, the Pretenders, and the rest of Classicsverse humankind vanished in "The Future Buried..." thanks to Gaea, much to their fellow Autobots' confusion.
- Spike refers to Fortress Maximus being dead, but the last we saw of him in "Invasion", the two of them were still merged together. Though in "The Future Buried...", Spike wasn't wearing his binary-bond armor...
- We last saw Ramjet in "Revelations Part 2", where Vector Prime banished him to...somewhere in interdimensional space. When we see him at the end of the issue, it looks like he ultimately landed in the universe that the Classicsverse humans now finds themselves in. Doesn't look like Ramjet's four Mini-Cons survived, though.
Transformers references
- The Pretenders seen thus far, Crossblades, Metalhawk, and Vroom, are regular human-sized instead of the usual height of Pretenders, in what is probably a nod to Super-God Masterforce. Additionally, the Mega Pretenders, along with Skyhammer, take traits of the other Autobot Pretenders from Masterforce: Vroom has a fashion model girlfriend named Ximena, placing him as the counterpart to the ladies' bot, Lander; Skyhammer is based in Germany, mirroring Phoenix; the connection is a bit weaker for Crossblades, but him being the stocky, somewhat relaxed guy in the group places him as being inspired by Diver.
- Elizabeth's ethnicity and role as Spike's girlfriend point to her being the Classics version of Lisa from "Rhythms of Darkness!".
- This is not the first story to have a "Galen Witwicky", having been preceded by the Beast Wars: Uprising story "Head Games" a year before. In that story, though, Galen Witwicky was implied to be Daniel Witwicky's son, not Buster's.
Real-world references
- Metalhawk says that they're currently in Yucatan, a state in the country of Mexico. It's not until the next issue that it's clarified that they're in Merida.
Other trivia
- As noted previously, this series is a promotion for the Collector's Club toys for 2016, with the new toy for Ramjet being shown off at the end of the issue.
