Neo-Knights
- The Neo-Knights are a group of superheroes from the Generation 1 continuity family.
Assembled by industrialist G.B. Blackrock to use their powers to make a difference in the Transformer war on Earth, the Neo-Knights are:
- Circuit Breaker/Josie Beller
- Dynamo/Hector Dialonzo
- Thunderpunch/Lee Gruber
- Rapture/Katrina Vesotsky
Fiction
Marvel Comics continuity
The Neo-Knights were assembled by G.B. Blackrock to combat the Decepticon threat to Earth, and had the official backing of the United States government to replace the defunct RAAT. Thunderpunch and Rapture were the initial members, with their first mission to hire Dynamo; on the way, they picked up Circuit-Breaker. The Human Factor!
The President of the United States ordered them to intervene in a Decepticon Civil War that threatened New York City, which accidentally caused them to be warped with the Transformers to Cybertron... just in time for the attack by Unicron! At Thunderpunch's urging, they helped battle Unicron... well, tried to and sucked at it. Circuit-Breaker, however, saved the planet by electrocuting the Chaos-Bringer for a brief few seconds.
After the battle, the Transformers basically ignored them. Unnoticed, they helped Hi-Q/Optimus Prime awaken the Last Autobot and thus helped save Cybertron.
Notes
- In 1991, in the letters page at the end of the final issue of the Generation 1 comic, Simon Furman sorrowfully reveals that this will almost certainly mark the end of the Transformers franchise forever, but that he wants to work on a dedicated Neo-Knights series at Marvel. Funny how things work out, huh?
- Speaking of which: the Furman/Wildman plan was to rework the Neo-Knights into a team called Techno-X, who would serve not only as a team but a base of operation for cameo appearances from every mechanical or cyborg superhero and supervillain in the Marvel universe. The art accompanying the pitch showed Circuit-Breaker and Thunderpunch would be getting redesigned costumes to better fit the early-90s "shoulderpads and guns" aesthetic, with Thunderpunch in particular undergoing a sort of binary-bonding uplink to a cartoonishly oversized semi-sentient cannon named Symbiosis. Rapture would now be wearing a coat, and the team would have been rounded out with the addition of new character Phase, a humanoid supercomputer. The Transformers would have been explained away as having actually been computer-simulated training programs, meant to teach Techno-X how to fight their "real" evil robot enemies, particularly Ultron; similarly, Dynamo would have been written out of the story as a mere invention of that simulated training program because the writing team could no longer think of anything to do with him. G.B. Blackrock would have had a deep dark secret which would have been so deep and dark that even now 20 years after the story was canceled we still can't tell you what it is. And he would have fought Tony Stark too. Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club issue 41. We're not sure what the "X" signified, except maybe "hey, the X-Men are popular".
