Go! Go! issue 42
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| Publisher | Kodansha | ||||||||||||
| Published in | TV Magazine | ||||||||||||
| First published | September 20, 2024 | ||||||||||||
| Manga | Haruka Oda | ||||||||||||
| Editor | Minoko | ||||||||||||
Bumblebee discovers the shocking truth behind how Optimus and Megatron went from best friends to bitter enemies.
Synopsis
[edit]Returning to Autobot headquarters after a patrol, Bumblebee spots Optimus Prime and Elita One looking over an old photo album. After a brief look at his own baby pictures, Bumblebee finds something unexpected – a picture of Optimus and Elita as much younger bots, posing with a bot he realizes is the younger self of their enemy Megatron! Optimus regales the tale of how he and Megatron went from friends to enemies...
Back when they were in school, Optimus (then Orion Pax) and Megatron were best friends. Megatron often accompanied Orion on his reckless pranks that angered their teacher Alpha Trion to no end, such as making topiaries out of the school's bonsai trees. One of those pranks involved drawing all over a bronze bust of Alpha Trion, a task both friends enjoyed with great gusto until they were caught red-handed by Trion himself. Lecturing Orion for being a bad influence on his studious friend Megatron, the old teacher punished his students by making them wipe the statue clean. Needless to say, they didn't really put their sparks into it and Orion even broke one of the bust's horns off by accident. A passing Elita remarked that such carelessness is going to get someone hurt... an idea that Orion went to town on, as he formulated a plan to get revenge on their teacher by making him slip and fall on slippery oil balloons.
This ambitious plan promptly went wrong when the cloth Orion was using to carrying the balloons came undone, causing him, Megatron, and Elita to trip and slip out of control. The trio were sent sliding straight out through a window and down the side of a building... which was when the sparks caused by the friction between Orion's metal body and the building ignited the oil covering Megatron and set the poor bot on fire! A furious Megatron declared that he hates Orion just as the trio all fell into a pond.
In the present day, a bashful Optimus concludes his story by remarking things have been awkward between him and Megatron since then, leaving Bumblebee aghast to discover the truth behind the two leaders' bitter rivalry.
Featured characters
[edit](Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Autobots | Decepticons | Others |
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Notes
[edit]- This very special prequel story was published as the September 2024 issue of the web comic and pointedly pushed back from Go! Go!'s usual "15th of the month" publication date to coincide with the Japanese premiere of the year's blockbuster film Transformers One.
- The issue eschewed the usual advertisements with the exception of plugging the comic itself in the form of the Transformers Fan Book 2024 and the first collected edition of Go! Go!.
Transformers references
[edit]- Bumblebee's baby photo sports stubbier, squared-off horns and a pacifier in his mouth, making him resemble his counterpart in the Bumblebee movie.
- Oda largely dispenses with her usual toy-accurate approach to character design to pull "baby" forms of the cast from a variety of sources:
- Orion Pax (the artist ultimately known as Optimus Prime) sports a design mostly based on his appearance in "War Dawn," the episode of the original Generation 1 cartoon detailing the origin of Optimus Prime, with the prominent exception of a head pulled from first bespoke Orion Pax mold in the Thrilling 30 toyline.
- The young Elita One sports a hybrid design composed of the distinctive "ponytail" head crest and shoulder pads of her "Ariel" form in "War Dawn" combined with the Arcee-style "earmuffs" specific to the "cog-less" version of her One incarnation, all done up in a color scheme reverse engineered from "adult" Elita's usual appearance, itself derived from her War for Cybertron Trilogy toy.
- Megatron, lacking a larval form in the Generation 1 cartoon, sports a design based on the "Miner Megatron" retool of his War for Cybertron: Siege toy found in the Legacy: Evolution toyline, now done up in the colors of One D-16.
- This unusually irascible incarnation of the kids' prewar mentor Alpha Trion appears here in a design that is pretty much his Generation 1 cartoon character model verbatim.
- The one bit of slavish toy accuracy comes to us in the form of the young Ironhide, here drawn as his own Siege toy.
- Finally, young Jazz comes to us with an interesting character model referencing his appearance in the opening scene of the pilot of the Generation 1 cartoon, but reverse engineered from applying his usual transformation scheme to his pre-Earth vehicle mode rather than using the (bluntly recycled from his Earth character model) robot mode seen in the original story.
- The prank gone wrong that leads to Megatron and Orion's initial falling out in the world of Go! Go! features a brief sight gag wherein Megatron takes on the appearance of cosmic arch-villain the Fallen when inadvertently lit on fire.
