The Transformers Menagerie issue 3

« The Transformers Menagerie »
Publisher	Fun Publications
Published in	Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #51
First published	June/July 2013
Script	Jim Sorenson
Art	various
Continuity	Wings Universe

Perceptor goes over the Insecticons and their origins.

Synopsis

Four million years ago, Perceptor notes, the Ark and the Nemesis plummeted into prehistoric Earth. Three of the Decepticons, however, did not go down with the ship. Boarding an escape pod, the three fell into the southern hemisphere, where they lay dormant for some 2.5 million years. Eventually, their idento-computers interfaced with the escape pod's computer in an attempt to find suitable alt-modes. When no mechanical items were found, the computer's range began to broaden, and scanned the local insect life, which Perceptor muses are the closest nature has to offer to mechanical items. Thus the Insecticons were brought online. Their unique physiology allowed them several abilities, including the ability to convert organic matter into a low-yield form of energon, and the ability to produce semi-autonomous clones of themselves, an ability that has evolved over time. Eventually, the Insecticons were apparently offlined in the Battle of Autobot City, although reports have surfaced of their continued existence. Whatever the case, their legacy lives on in the Sweeps, who were reformatted from some of the Insecticons, and possess a similar cloning ability. Perceptor believes that the Insecticon's abilities point to the value of organic/Cybertronian hybrids, and wonders if they can reverse-engineer a similar way to scan organic alt-modes as their escape pod did...

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots	Decepticons
Perceptor (1)	Bombshell (holo-slide) (2) Shrapnel (holo-slide) (3) Kickback (holo-slide) (4)

Notes

• Characters mentioned include: the Sweeps.

Continuity notes

• The Insecticons' origin from The Transformers episode "A Plague of Insecticons" is recounted here. Originally, it was attributed solely to the idento-computers for their beast modes, but here it is retconned that they interacted with the ship's computer to do so.
• The Insecticons were offlined and reformatted into the Sweeps in The Transformers: The Movie. However, they were seen several times in the movie later, along with appearances in The Transformers season 3 premier "Five Faces of Darkness", something that is brought up here.
• Initially, the film only showed two Sweeps, reformatted from Kickback and Shrapnel. Over the film and the rest of the cartoon, however, more Sweeps would appear, and their Insecticon origins are indicated as the source of their increased numbers.

Transformers references

• The way the Insecticons got their alt-modes, and Perceptor's musings on how to reverse-engineer it, are obviously depicted as a primitive form of the way beast modes were scanned by stasis pods in the Beast Wars cartoon.