Beast Wars - The Unpublished

Pretty interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing.

The world could always use more Beast Wars! I'm looking forward to this.

Very cool. I would love some more beast wars comics!

Beast Wars Is Awesome

Not sure what's better. The DW pre-Gathering script or seeing this image in the news article?

Simon Furman's understanding and grasp of what makes Beast Wars what it is has always been extremely lacking (to put it politely), so... I don't really care about this unpublished comic, because I'm pretty sure it would have been terrible.

This could be interesting...

A very good point. : D

Sadly, sadly agreed.

He wrote the last episode though and I liked it.

Case in point.

This was the second time in two days I had the chance to use it. Made me pretty excited to

Ya think? I liked the Gathering. The Ascending felt very rushed, I didn't like it as much. I'll agree with you there.

Interested to see how he planned to bring the cast back to earth.

I've also love to see something similar from James McDonough with his story. (he should gone back to TF comics dammit)

More beast wars is more beast wars!

Nice! I'll make sure to pick up one of these when I see Mr Furman this summer!

But hang on, Furman already released the script to his DW BW #1. On his own blog!

(Quick, grab it before it gets taken down!)

aaaaaaaaaaaand grabbed, thanks for the heads up

The crew returning to Earth between Beast Wars and Beast Machines? That sounds bad. Like, too-much-happening-off-screen bad.

I like Furman's work, and I'm sure I would have enjoyed this, but the premise makes me cringe. I'm glad the IDW series went the way it did.

Shell Game (Dreamwave) - Transformers Wiki

Except he was being a d*** about revealing anything to fans about where he was going.

Plus, his worked sucked IMHO.

It certainly did.

Thanks for the heads up on the script. Looks like all the non-main cast stuff was lifted into Gathering pretty much intact (and it's good stuff). The B-story with the main cast is strangely creepy! Much as it seems to over-complicate the story, I think an ongoing comic with the BW main cast sounds very tempting.

I dropped a small nugget reading this news.

The problem is that he's trying to force a story inbetween the cracks of the cartoon continuity instead of telling his own story from scratch. I love BW probably more than any other TF show, and I have high regard for the stories and characters, but if it were me, I would've ignored the show and done my own thing. IDW had already established its own separate G1 universe. Why not do the same for BW?

And I will admit that I liked Simon's work on Nemesis part 1 and 2. Proof that, with a couple head-writers/editors looking over his work and having to write within the constraints of children's TV, he can produce excellent work. And even then he still got to sneak some mass slaughter in.

interesting... i'd be interested in this, it'd be nice if IDW could release it as a 1shot book or something...

The way I see it, The Gathering was an example of the best of Furman, while The Ascending was an example of the worst of Furman.

It really seems like this story would have been more like The Gathering, and therefore a good read. And I think DW would have insisted on keeping the stories tightly connected with the cartoon series, so we wouldn't have had characters killed off with one blast, as well as someone actually using either "Maximize" or "Terrorize" when they transformed. (Which are the things that bothered me the most about IDW's Beast Wars)

Frankly I hated the BW comics they did. I could give a flying crap about non-show characters. Was it too hard to come up with a story involving the show characters? Set it between episodes. There were more then enough spots they could have set it.

It seemed some of the times, they were just trying to fit as many toys into the shot as possible then they'd all dissapear a panel or two later.

These two posts might as well be in spanish to me.

The Gathering was an okay transformers story, but a terrible Beast Wars story. You expect a certain kind of spirit with a Beast Wars story, and that was completely lacking in the comic. It did not have the same feel as the Beast Wars TV show.

Some might say that's due to a difference in media, but.. no. The Animated comics (both Arrival and Botcon) captured that series sprit perfectly. They felt like Transformers Animated.

Furman just doesn't "get" Beast Wars, and that's what was wrong with The Gathering.

The Gathering and the Ascension just fail on so many basic levels. Not only does he fail to "get" what makes Beast Wars work, he just goes and crams every single last non-show character into the things that he can. There's no way to create any characters that people are going to care about in that kind of scenario.

Like, hey, here's Razorbeast! He's our star, and here's his 100 buddies and the 100 Predacons they're fighting! OMG, Unicron! OMG Razorbeast is dead! Isn't his death so touching and tear-jerking? Well. . . no. It's not. I never got to know Razorbeast really. He comes across as just a good Maximal that's good at his job. Nothing else, really.

Meanwhile, an episode of BW like, "Proving Grounds" with its primary cast of. . . 3. . . tells a far more personal and character-oriented story. What was at stake? The fate of the universe? Time and history as we know it? No, it was all about how Blackarachnia wasn't fitting in with the Maximals and was about to leave them. That's all. Nothing Earth-shattering. But it feels more poignant and important than anything in Simon's BW comics.

The Gathering felt like a set up for a new series to me. New cast of characters ending up stuck on pre-historic Earth after a botched attempt to recover the stasis pods... I think there was a lot of potential in that set up personally. Granted, it introduced a huge cast of characters compared to what the show had, but there was a focus with smaller groups of characters. The majority of the Maximals didn't even arrive until the last issue, and the Predacons focused mainly on Magmatron's inner circle. And I'd point out the show didn't exactly flesh out all of its characters in the first two episodes either.

Unfortunately, The Ascending didn't live up to the potential that The Gathering started. It rushed the story by pulling an 'epic universe shattering' bit rather than keeping things down to Earth, so to speak. Not to mention the mass killing off of characters we didn't even get to know yet.

At any rate, I've always been curious to see what the DW BW comic would have been. Great that Furman is releasing the script for fans to read.

To me, it seemed like they knew they weren't going to get an ongoing BW comic, and so he just threw everything and the kitchen sink in.

Well The Ascending does leave some loose ends seeing as there are still Maximals and Predacons stuck on pre-historic Earth at the end of the story, which would seem to indicate room for more, had it been more successful like The Gathering had been to warrant another sequel. And the way IDW was publishing TF comics at the time was one mini-series to the next rather than an ongoing.

Cool. Not a fan of Grimlock though, and was unhappy that he was thrown in to The Gathering/Ascending/Whatever.