Primus: You, Me, and Other Revelations

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"Primus: You, Me, and Other Revelations"
Publisher IDW Publishing
First published September 12, 2012
Cover date August 2012
Written by James Roberts
Art by Jimbo Salgado & Emil Cabaltierra
Flashback art by Guido Guidi
Color by Juan Fernandez with Joana Lafuente
Letters by Chris Mowry
Editor John Barber
Continuity IDW continuity
Chronology Current era (2012)

The dead rise, Ultra Magnus smiles, and everything you know is wrong!

Synopsis

1: Signs and Portents

It's just another ordinary day on the Lost Light: a swarm of long-dormant Nanocons, hidden inside Ultra Magnus's body for years, have suddenly become active again, and Brainstorm has shrunk Rodimus and a team of Autobots with his mass-displacement gun so they can enter Magnus's body and wipe them out. They are unable to stop the Nanocons before they reach Magnus's mouth, however, and at Ratchet's direction, Magnus is forced to smile to crush them in his mouth-pistons and prevent their escape. Unfortunately for Magnus, this makes him a laughingstock aboard the ship, and he does not take it well.

Once everyone is back at full size, preparations begin for the day's other big event: having passed his Autobot Code exam, Tailgate is getting his probationary Autobot badge. While Cyclonus silently rebuffs an invitation to the Act of Affiliation ceremony, the other attendees deal with their own problems: Rewind helps Chromedome through the shock of an inherited memory of death, Swerve goes looking for Red Alert in the bowels of the ship and is horrified when the corpse of Ore—still enmeshed with the quantum generators—begins talking to him, and Drift tries to convince Rodimus that he's saying "'Til all are one" a bit too much. As Rodimus and Drift move to discussing their impending arrival on Theophany, home of the Circle of Light, Magnus enters, threatening to leave the ship over his mockery at the hands of the crew. Rodimus calms him down, and Magnus then voices his concern about their failure to make contact with the Circle of Light, despite Drift's assurances that the Circle can take care of themselves.

2: Sacraments and Ceremonies

Tailgate's ceremony begins, with the audience members taking bets on how long it will take Rodimus to say "'Til all are one" (Brainstorm wins after five seconds). As Rodimus recounts his own Act of Affiliation, Skids notices that Ambulon is absent, and is informed by First Aid that he is in the medibay, where a group of offline Autobots have suddenly reactivated and begun clutching their ears. And that's not the only strange thing going on: Cyclonus arrives just in time to see Rodimus bend to draw Tailgate's Autobot symbol onto his chest, only for him to instead scrawl some words that Rewind translates as "Let me out" in Old Cybertronian. As Rodimus immediately has no memory of doing so, Drift suspects he was possessed by something, and Ratchet's attempts to be rational are drowned out by word coming through on the comm from Swerve of Ore's sudden return to life as well. Perceptor instructs Swerve to keep Ore calm, lest he panic and trigger the quantum generators, so the talkative little 'bot tells the blinded Ore that he's just in the medibay. When the Duobot misidentifies his voice as Pipes, and says he sounds like "that Lug-Nut Swerve", Swerve seizes on the mistaken identity and proceeds to confess all his hopes, fears and disappointments, particularly the guilt he carries following his accidental shooting of Rung.

As if things weren't bad enough, the Lost Light is then hailed by the Galactic Council ship The Benign Intervention, whose captain K'gard informs the Autobots that, as members of a race blacklisted from the council for their war, they are trespassing in one of their sectors. K'gard shocks the Autobots by revealing that the Circle of Light have disappeared from Theophany, and Ultra Magnus—known and respected by the captain—is able to provide legal precedent that grants the Autobots an hour to investigate. Without discussion, K'gard teleports Rodimus and a team down to the planet's surface, where they discover Crystal City in ruins. Drift, having maintained an unrelentingly positive attitude about everything up until now, finally begins to crack and furiously stabs the ground with his Great Sword... causing a subsidence that dumps the Autobots into an underground cavern below Crystal City. Simultaneously, K'gard brings Magnus to The Benign Intervention and extends him a surprising invitation: to join the Galactic Council!

3: Epiphanies

Underground, Rodimus and his team discover that the Circle of Light have been powering their city with a Metrotitan, one of the living city-ships of the Knights of Cybertron, and they promptly venture inside its gigantic body, straight to its brain. Musing that he used to pray in the shadow of Metrotitans, Cyclonus is convinced by Rewind to recount the "Primal Sacrament," the Transformers' creation myth, and so tells the tale of the Guiding Hand: how the creator-god Primus split his life-force into five, creating Mortilus, Solomus, Epistemus and Adaptus. Following their creation of the Transformer race, Mortilus turned on the rest of the Guiding Hand and was destroyed after a brutal, costly war that saw Primus required to merge with Cybertron itself to survive, while Solomus became the Creation Matrix, and Epistemus and Adaptus became the prototypical brain module and transformation cog that would be the basis of all others. The first Cybertronians blessed with these traits were the Knights of Cybertron, who set out to spread their gifts across the universe aboard their Metrotitans. Ratchet's complete dismissal of the story as utter nonsense finally brings him and Drift to blows, but before things get physical, Rodimus separates the two and takes Drift for a walk, on which Drift confides that he knows Rodimus is going to be very important in the future.

Spurred by Cyclonus's story of their race's origins, Skids and Chromedome talk about the meaning of life and how it is shaped by interactions with others. Chromedome proceeds to tap into the Metrotitan's brain to find out what happened to the Circle of Light, and is assaulted by a horrific vision of Crystal City being razed by Legislators. Worse still is the distressing revelation that the Metrotitan is still alive, psychically screaming in terrible pain, having heard the call to return to the reformatted Cybertron, but lacking the power to teleport its massive bulk after being drained by the Circle of Light for so long. A destructive beam bursts from the tortured titan's eyes, shooting up into space and clipping The Benign Intervention, prompting a furious K'gard to cry treachery, return Magnus to the Lost Light, encase the ship in an incineration shield, and teleport a squad of troopers down to Theophany to finish the Autobots off. The troopers arrive just as Skids is realizing that the Metrotitan's psychic scream is responsible for all the recent weirdness—the offline Autobots and Nanocons reactivating, the message written by the "possessed" Rodimus (which Cyclonus notes actually said "Set me free")—and Drift and Rewind are trying to stop Chromedome re-entering its brain in the pursuit of proof of God, and battle breaks out. Believing the destruction of the Lost Light assured, Magnus contacts Rodimus to say farewell, but Rodimus has an idea and has Swerve put on the line. He instructs Swerve to tell Ore the truth of his situation, hoping that doing so will cause him to panic, jump-starting the quantum drives and teleporting the ship away to safety, but after Rung, and the long discussion he has had about life and death with the revived Duobot, Swerve refuses on the basis that Ore may die. With no options left and no guarantee of their own safety, Rodimus acquiesces to Brainstorm's original suggestion: shrink the Metrotitan with his mass-displacement gun in order to make him small enough to teleport away. The gun flares, and everything goes white...

It's just another ordinary day on the Lost Light. After the Metrotitan shrank to a small enough size, it teleported away, sending the Autobots back to the Lost Light and taking the psychically-linked Ore with it, in turn triggering the quantum drives and jumping the ship out of the council's clutches. Or as Swerve relates to Rung, to hear Drift tell it, the Autobots' act of kindness restored the Metrotitan's faith in them, and he sent them all to safety and Ore to the Afterspark. Whatever the case, the mystery of what happened to the Circle of Light remains, and the Lost Light sets course for the Argon Nebulae to investigate a possible Decepticon lead. The universe is too hostile for Rodimus to wing it any more: it's time to take control of their situation.

Back aboard The Benign Intervention, Captain K'gard reports his findings to a superior officer, proposing a "regime change" off the back of his discovery that the Autobots forces are split between Cybertron and the Lost Light. He relates that Magnus turned down his offer to join the council, despite his K'gard's warning that staying with the Lost Light crew would only change Magnus into something he was not. To that, Magnus had nothing to say... he just smiled.

(Characters in italic text appear only in flashbacks.)
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots Decepticons The Guiding Hand Galactic Council Others

Quotes

Notes

  • This issue contains the first of two interlinking stories with the title prefix of "Primus", told through the 2012 Transformers annuals. The stories' unifying theme is that of exploring and revealing a lot of new information about the earliest days of life on Cybertron, embodied in the presence of the Metrotitan, which appears in the Robots in Disguise annual following its disappearance at the end of this issue. The flashback sequences in both these issues are drawn by Guido Guidi in a retro style gloriously evocative of the original Marvel Comics series—particularly the inking work of Ian Akin and Brian Garvey and the limited-palette, not-always-entirely-inside-the-lines coloring of Nelson Yomtov—which he has also showcased in the variant "B" covers of Regeneration One.
  • Initially solicited for release on August 15th, this double-sized issue eventually arrived three weeks late.
  • A sketchbook section in the back of the issue includes designs for the Guiding Hand by Guido Guidi.
  • This brings Ultra Magnus's lifetime smile count up to three.

Transformers references

  • Nanocons were first mentioned in "Zero Point", where it was left ambiguous whether or not they really existed or were just figments of Roadbuster's imagination.
  • While perusing the A's of the crew manifest back in issue #1, Ultra Magnus warned against letting an unnamed character anywhere near a crossbow. That character is implicitly revealed in this issue to be Atomizer, a character first mentioned in James Roberts's prose story "Bullets", making his first pictoral appearance here.
  • Skyfall's death by drinking Gideon's Glue also took place in "Bullets".
  • Rodimus's "'Til all are one" montage gives us a few glimpses of scenes "between the panels", including him welcoming Fotress Maximus onto the ship after issue #5, and cradling Rung's body between the last few pages of issue #6.
  • The Cybertronian game of Fullstasis is mentioned, which first appeared in issue #69 of the original Marvel series.
  • The epigraph to chapter two is a quote from Beachcomber that identifies him as hailing from Ibex, a Cybertronian polity previously only seen in issue #77 of the Marvel US series. The quote is from a work he wrote on the Primal Prophecies, which were mentioned in Roberts's "Chaos Theory Part 2".
  • While the Galactic Council were first mentioned in "Chaos Theory Part 1", the notion of other alien races hating and shunning the Transformers was previously seen in IDW continuity back in "Spotlight: Drift".
  • Rewind is able to tell that Drift "sounds upset" by listening to him as he transforms, backing up Chromedome's claim from issue #6 that Rewind can determine a Transformer's mood from the sound of their transformation.
  • The epigraph for chapter three is a quote from "After the Ark: Nominus Prime and the Illusion of Progress", a tract written by Megatron and mentioned in part 1 of "Chaos Theory".
  • During Cyclonus's story about Primus and the Guiding Hand, he stops to ask Rewind a question when he's about to name Primus's "opposite." He never does give the name, but we can guess who it might be; a certain chaos-bringer is keeping up his track record of not being mentioned by name in IDW continuity thus far.
  • The Guiding Hand's war is revealed as the alleged reason for the loss of Cybertron's first moon, first mentioned back in issue #1 and in multiple places since. It is noted that Rodimus once vowed to find it; presumably this was the "moonquest" Swerve said he'd been on in that same issue. However, back in "The Death of Optimus Prime", Optimus attested that the disappearance of Luna 1 was not something which happened in the "ancient past".
  • The story concept of a Metrotitan which appears dead but then "comes back to life" is likely a reference to the old fan-misconception that the original Metrotitan character in Zone was a "zombie Metroplex".
  • Rewind shows Cyclonus an image of Cybertron as it existed in his time, including annotated images of the Pious Pools and Warrior's Gate, locations Cyclonus specifically pined for back in issue #1.
  • Swerve refers to the Afterspark, first mentioned in "The Death of Optimus Prime". Where that issue implied it to be a hellish, barren wasteland, here, Swerve refers to it with some degree of hope. Really, it's probably just yet another name for the communal afterlife dimension, given that the name it was originally known by, the "Allspark", has become nothing but confusing since the introduction of the physical AllSpark object in other continuities.
  • The Argon Nebulae originate from the Marvel UK story "Robot Buster!".

Real-world references

  • Whirl's graffiti makes mention of doing something to a shiny metal bodypart of his. This is probably a reference to Bender from Futurama, who's catchphrase is "Bite my shiny metal ass!"
  • Drift's lengthy list of the virtues of Crystal City's denizens, and inability to give a similar list for his own crew, tailing off with "...and us with our... with our...", leading to his crewmates' put down is very similar to an exchange in the UK sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf VI episode "Legion".
  • The fleet of ships in the background of the panel where Mortilus melodramatically gestures the advance of his warriors includes the recognisable silhouettes of vessles from several other science-fiction franchises, such as the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, Serenity from Firefly, the "derelict" from the Alien franchise, and a Cylon raider from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.
  • The above-mentioned epigraph quote from Megatron paraphrases the famous Karl Marx quote, "Relgion is the opiate of the people."

Errors

What are you looking at, baldy!
  • The artist appears to have misinterpreted how Alex Milne drew Ore's trapped head in issues 2 and 3 — instead of being trapped across the forehead such that the entire top of his head is stuck in the engine and his right cheek is free, his head drawn far more vertically, and the slice above where the top of his head had been embedded is drawn as "bald", missing the helmet he shares with Shock.
  • First Aid is erroneously colored as Swerve in the first panel on page 11.
  • Skids is drawn with no left hand on page 15.
  • Rewind appears to be flying in data slug mode at the top of page 18. James Roberts later clarified that the panel was "misleading", and that Rewind lacked this ability;[1] obviously, he's just falling with style.
  • On the same page, Drift's entire body is colored gray, save for his head.
  • On that same page again, Chromedome is blue.
  • Cyclonus sports green eyes on pages 20 and 21.
  • Swerve appears on page 24 on the Metrotitan's face despite the fact that he's supposed to be talking to Ore on the Lost Light. This appears to be a script error rather than an artistic one, since the dialogue exchange in this panel uses the terms "Crusadercons" (which Swerve came up with in issue #2) and "brain-quest" (matching up with Swerve's love of quests)... exceeeept that means the bubbles appear to be switched, as Rodimus says these things and Swerve replies.
  • Likewise, Tailgate is seen standing with Swerve on the Metrotitan's face despite not being in the group that teleports to Theophany's surface. Indeed, he's later shown to be still on the Lost Light with Ultra Magnus when the Metrotitan teleports everyone away.
  • Also on page 24 Rewind reacts with (perhaps sarcastic) surprise when Cyclonus speaks, yet on page 20 he's right there when Cyclonus reports in to Rodimus and Drift.
Wait 'til e-HOBBY see this...
  • Blaster is erroneously colored pink with a purple head on page 31.
  • Ratchet's hands are colored red on page 35.
  • Ultra Magnus's shoulder missiles disappear between panels on page 39.

Crew manifest

  • Ore briefly returns to life before being teleported away with the Metrotitan.
  • Swerve is having trouble locating Red Alert, who said his "last words" in "Rules of Disengagement"
  • Although Hyperion and Polaris were the only casualties, First Aid confirms that several Autobot sucked out of the ship in issue #1 are off-line and in the medical bay.

Covers (3)

  • Cover A: Hot Rod & co. look at the collapsed Metrotitan, by Tim Seeley
  • Cover B: A fantail of pictures showing the cast with Crystal City at the centre, by Alex Milne
  • Cover RI: Ultra Magnus, Rodimus, Ratchet and half a Metrotitan, linking with the Robots in Disguise Annual 2012 cover, by Jimbo Salgado
  • Cover A
    Cover A
  • Cover B
    Cover B
  • Cover RI
    Cover RI

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References

  1. ↑ James Roberts: I'm afraid this is a misleading panel. Rewind can't fly in giant dataslug mode.
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