Revisitation 176: Facing the Past.

2/2/2025

This week, Orion Pax is on a special mission from his good friend Zeta Prime in the aftermath of the most exciting and epic Transformers story you'll never read.

Plus, we start on a dark path and Nightbeat finds the oldest Autobot Trion his patience, all in my look at Spotlight Orion Pax!

2 Comments

T-Wing link

3/2/2025 07:01:04 pm

I always wondered if Pax was just holding that makeshift mouthplate at the end in with his teeth.

Llama God

5/2/2025 11:41:04 pm

Well this is certainly an odd one, isn't it? For a couple of reasons.

First of all, when you listed this issue as being the next one on the blog I was confused, since in my memory this doesn't come until much later. But, indeed, here it is. Maybe I'm getting confused as to when I picked it up a second time with the Orion Pax figure. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

(Although flicking through the Wiki it also shows that we're about to hit the period labelled as the "prelude to Dark Energon", which also confused me since I thought that was mostly 2014... and it turns out I was right. There was just essentially a nearly year-long prelude. Which is terrifying on many levels.)

The second reason this is odd is that this issue really shouldn't exist at all. It only exists really because the editors were asleep and didn't notice that Alex Milne had drawn the wrong body for Pax in Chaos Theory. If he'd drawn this version, then this story wouldn't need to exist at all. Well. It wouldn't need to exist in this form, anyway - it'd have to be some other stand-alone story for a pre-Prime Pax.

The fact it does exist though continues to irk me, and shows how off the ball the editorial team were. As I remarked at the time, Pax being turned into Prime by the Matrix in Autocracy has no impact at all, since he looks exactly the same before and after (just a little less dead). Had that been the moment he'd turned from the Coller Pax to the Figeuroa Prime there'd have been a lot more impact. But no. I really should let this go, but it irks me. And meant we had to wait more than a decade for the Pax design featured in the Chaos... stories.

But anyhoo.

It's probably telling that I'm bitching more about this comic's need to exist instead of the comic itself. It's not that this story is bad or anything, it's fine. But that's all it is. Fine.

It does come across very much as "we have to justify why we're selling you this toy of a figure design that hasn't really featured at all ever", but on the flip side it is an interesting insight into that brief phase between major events in Pax's life, so there's that to it. And the dialogue is, as ever for Roberts, fast moving and entertaining, so it's not boring either.

The artwork is also fine for this one. Nothing stand out here, but it does work. Although Nightbeat having an Earth car as his alt-mode is somewhat... jarring. And I don't think you can even blame that one on the toys, because I don't think his figure was out until the Dark Cybertron promotion, so this is just an odd choice. But that's my only complaint, really.

So yeah, this is, indeed, fine. Not the best issue ever, but not the worst Hasbro-enforced tie-in comic we got, so I'll allow it. And worth it probably for the whole thing about Megatron's comments when tired alone...

Revisitation 176: Facing the Past.

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