Comic Book / Transformers: Wings of Honor

In 2010, the Official Transformers Fanclub finally ended their five-year "Nexus Prime" saga which took place over several different universes, and switched to a new continuity scheduled to last for three years. Taking a page from Classics, this new continuity also revisits the original Generation 1 universe as part of its storyline, but using the cartoon instead of the comics. The story Wings of Honor (May, 2009) is considered the debut of this timeline.

So far the storyline is in two parts, with the rest being "just like the cartoon except where it's not":

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The "Wings of Honor" portion, which serves as a prequel to the cartoon. The Great War has just barely begun, with Megatron and his rebels having gained in force enough to cause serious troubles for the High Council, and dangerous Decepticon leaders popping up all over the place.

To combat this new menace, two separate projects are formed. One is council member Magnum's "Elite Guard", various teams of skilled soldiers charged with protecting the civilians and hunting down and eliminating the Decepticon resistance. The other is Alpha Trion's "Prime Initiative", dedicated towards giving the Autobots a strong military leader who will unite all of the Autobots against the Decepticons. The two projects don't have a lot of regard for each other, to put it mildly. The stories mostly focus on the Elite Guard squads, though Prime's unit comes more into play in the second half of the arc.

This series/universe provides examples of:

Wings of Honor

• The Ace: Over-Run thinks he's this. The reality is somewhat different.
• Action Girl: Lyzack.
• Adaptational Badass: Lyzack was originally just an obscure Decepticon, who only appeared at the end of the Victory manga as the weepy younger sister of Leozack. Now, while she seems to suffer from the Cybertronian equivalent of depression, stemming from the capture of her brother, and gets zero respect, she's actually capable with a sword (If not exactly durable). In particular, she takes on and nearly kills Magnum.
  • The Combaticons, while usually effective, they tended to become succumb to some sort of Decay or amass many defeats. Here, they're the special forces, strong, effective and brutal. Bruticus (you knew he was coming) is at his deadliest here.
• Affectionate Parody: Leozack is one to anime heroes and villains, with everything from Calling Your Attacks to a BFS to having a bold, Japanese-esque font in his Speech Bubbles in the comic-based stories. The writer of his initial comic even wanted to have him actually speak only Japanese, but the editor decided that might be pushing it just a bit.
• Ambiguous Situation: The story is careful to leave the question of whether Dion or Magnum is Ultra Magnus.
• Ascended Fangirl: Lancer is an annoyingly enthusiastic Elite Guard groupie who gets drafted into helping them during a fight. She's so Squee about it that she doesn't even mind being used as The Bait.
• Amazon Chaser: As Side Burn puts it upon seeing Lyzack, "A femicon with a sword... hot!"
• Attack Drone: Over-Run collects these and has them fight for him on the battlefield. It later backfires on him when Bruticus catches one of his drones and throws it at him with deadly force.
• Ax-Crazy: Charger ends up becoming this in "A Team Effort" after Roadgrabber's constant cover fire when nobody's following his group grates on Charger's last nerve. Deconstructed as his rampage towards Sprocket allows the Autobot to punch him out and later on, Charger's insanity lets him short out the Decepticon's stasis cuffs.
• Badass Bookworm: The Elite Guard later ends up taking two "desk jockeys" into their ranks when they're starving for members. One turns out to be a crack sharpshooter, while the other once dispatched some Decepticons with a desk stapler. Sadly it doesn't go well for one of the bookworms.
• Badass Crew: The various Elite Guard squads.
• Big Bad Ensemble: There are a bunch of Decepticon leaders all vying for power, Gutcruncher is the Big Bad of a text story, then Deathsaurus of the regular continuity. Some Warlords are captured, like Blue Bacchus and Gutcruncher, others are killed by Deathsaurus to become the top dog (like Straxus and Cannonball). In the end, Megatron Defeats Deathsaurus and takes power for himself.
• Big Damn Heroes: Big Bang, Ironfist, Rumbler, and Sprocket turn out to be Not Quite Dead and burst in out of nowhere to save the afts of Magnum and his troops.
• Bittersweet Ending: While the first ending may count as this, it's far more of a Sudden Downer Ending, but the second ending fits this trope more. Magnum and Dion are both shot, one of them is revived as Ultra Magnus, and the other dies, leaving it ambiguous as to who. Megatron and Devastator are defeated, as is Deathsaurus. Rumbler is killed, and Sprocket never picks up on it, and still talks to Rumbler if he was still alive. The Autobots and Decepticons leave the planet en masse with some Medics, Landshark and Sprocket heading to the planet which they intend to be called Paradron. Alpha Trion encases many of the autobots in stasis, save Kup, who offers to defend them, but the lack of Energon will make him age faster.
• BFS: Leozack has one, as part of his anime character parody status.
• Calling Your Attacks: Leozack, again to keep with his anime theme. His sister Lyzack also gets into the act when she later takes up her brother's sword for him.
• Canon Immigrant: Sentinel Major is one for Transformers: Animated 's Sentinel Prime. Since the G1 cartoon already had a separate Sentinel Prime, he's a distinct character implied to be a relative of the former Prime.
• The Captain: Thunderclash & Metalhawk
• Captain Crash: Landshark's (lack of) landing skill is legendary.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • The Decepticons invent a chemical weapon that turns anyone under its influence into one of these for a while
  • And Metalhawk still has his moments even when "sober".
    Magnum: "You really expect me to believe [this mission report]? Gods, dragons... and here it says that you all died!"
    Metalhawk: "Well, I may have taken a few liberties..."
  • And the Stealth Team's Sprocket is this trope in spades. Among other things, he enjoys talking to imaginary friend versions of real people, remembering impossible situations as if they sincerely happened to him, and talking to non-sentient spaceships as if they were sentient (although this last has shades of possible The Cuckoolander Was Right).
• Crazy Enough to Work: Sprocket's response to an Ax-Crazy Charger rushing straight at him to kill him? Stand his ground to punch Charger out. This works due to Charger's rampage making him easier to hit (and it's also implied because Sprocket's also nuts).
• Decoy Protagonist: The war has just broke out, and in the end, Magnum and Dion aren't the heroes of the story, though the narrative focuses on them, neither is Metalhawk or Thunderclash, Optimus is. Metalhawk dies, either Dion or Magnum die as well, and Thunderclash fades into obscurity for most of the war. Even the Antagonist is a decoy, Deathsaurus tries to be the Big Bad, but in the end, Megtron takes the title, and he keeps it for the majority of the war.
• Doomed by Canon: The pluckily adventurous Elite Guard made up almost entirely of characters who never show up in the cartoon and trying to stop the civil war, while scoffing at the useless "Prime Initiative" and having the Combaticons as one of their squads? It wasn't a question of if they're all doomed, it was just a matter of how.
• Face–Heel Turn: The Combaticons start out as willing and (sort of) moral members of the Autobot Elite Guard. We just were waiting to see how the shoe drops...
  • *drop* And guess who just decided that tearing Sentinel Major apart is a perfect exchange for a snazzy new gestalt form?
• Fem Bot: In one story, two (all-"male") Elite Guard squads find out that their latest mission involves protecting an all-femme group of scientists and their Brawn Hilda security guard. Despite, y'know, everyone being a robot, some stereotypical hilarity still ensues.
• Glass Cannon: Lyzack, quick and deadly with a sword, but she was built as a support mech, and can't take much damage (a single punch sends her flying).
• Handsome Lech: Swindle seems to like the femmes as much as he likes money. Side Burn also has a thing for fembots, especially red ones that transform into shiny sportscars.
• Heel–Face Turn: Rage's lackey Drench decides to defect to the Elite Guard after deciding he's just not cool with his boss carelessly playing around with crazily dangerous monster things.
• The Hero Dies: Dion's the protagonist of Wings of Honor, Magnum is the protagonist of Battle Lines, both are fatally wounded, one dies, the other becomes Ultra Magnus.
• Implacable Man: Even after Ironfist throws his entire arsenal of explosives at it, Brimstone just keeps on coming...
• In Love with Your Carnage: Side Burn lusts after Lyzack even more after seeing her almost take down Magnum in a wild swordfighting fury.
• Intoxication Ensues: See Cloud Cuckoo Lander above.
• Killer Rabbit: In one story, the big hyped-up ultimate dangerous Decepticon the Elite Guard finally meets up with turns out to be a knee-high cute little dragon. But just as they start to relax and be amused it starts breathing horrible atom-decoupling plasma projectiles which sends everyone running away in sheer terror again.
• Let's Mock the Monsters: See Killer Rabbit.
• Mood Whiplash: The text stories are light-hearted and coincide with the first half of the first arc, the second half ends with a Sudden Downer Ending. Also in the text story The Flames of Yesterday there's the Decepticon's chemical guns, high pressured water guns that shoot hallucinatory chemicals. They are incredibly silly, with the Con's pointing out that they're just fancy water-guns that require pumping. When they spray Vortex and Metalhawk, they descend into gibberish ramblings, talking about tasty colors or rabbits. Then one con shoots Glyph in the back with a narrow focused blast, it pierces through her laser core and kills her.
• More Dakka: One of Flak's philosophies is that you can never have too many weapons.
• Mythology Gag: Ricochet's death is an homage to Scorponok's death in The Transformers (Marvel).
• New Meat: Kup and Dion are the youngest Elite Guardsmen, and often the subject of teasing and/or kicks in the skidplate as a result—both friendly and otherwise.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Landshark is based on Chevy Chase.
• No Indoor Voice: When Comm Officer Big Bang speaks, everyone listens whether they want to or not.
• Officer and a Gentleman: Thunderclash, with a bit of Southern-ness mixed in.
• Please Wake Up: Outback's reaction to Ricochet's death.
  Flak: "He's offline."
  Outback: "Just like Rico to take a stasis nap during a fight."
  Flak: "No, Outback. He's... gone."
  Outback: Oh! ...oh."
• Prequel: To the Sunbow cartoon, though in Broad Strokes.
• Sanity Slippage: Crasher undergoes this in "A Team Effort" thanks to Roadgrabber's constant cover fire.
• Shout-Out: The Elite Guard's Stealth Team is based on The A-Team.
• Sibling Team: Rumbler and Sprocket, and Leozack and Lyzack.
• Similar Squad: Thunderclash and Metalhawk's squads are composed of similar personality archetypes, and the two leaders have a friendly rivalry.
  • The Captain: Thunderclash & Metalhawk
  • New Meat/Wide-Eyed Idealist: Kup & Dion
  • Quirky Pilot: Landshark & Over-Run
  • The Big Guy/More Dakka Person: Flak & Ironfist
• The Strategist: Onslaught.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Ironfist is always on a quest to develop and use ever bigger and louder bombs, to the point of making even his teammates extremely nervous.
• Tastes Like Purple: While under the influence of a Decepticon chemical (see Cloudcuckoolander above) one of Metalhawk's crazy ravings involves saying that "the fuzzy petrorabbits taste like yellow".
• Ultimate Salesman: Swindle is, if anything, even more outrageous in his attempted salesman tactics as an Autobot than he will be as a Decepticon.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: The fandom jury is still out on whether Ironfist's accent is supposed to be British, Australian, Scottish, or just plain weird.
• Would Hit a Girl: Thunderclash, though he does bemoan that it feels rather ungentlemanly having to do so. And the Decepticons have no problems with hitting or even killing the girl, of course.

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The "Generation 2: Redux" portion, which serves as a sequel to the cartoon. Following Optimus Prime and Galvatron leaving Earth for other venues, with only a skeleton crew left behind, the humans and Nebulans teamed up to use Vector Sigma technology to create their own new generation of Earth-born Transformers. Manufactured in various places around the globe, these Transformers are "born" free of the Great War, instead placing their allegiances and cultural backgrounds in various countries.

So, of course, these kiddie Transformers decide the best thing to do with their young lives is split up into two factions and start shooting at each other. Leading the Autobots is "Sir Pyro Ignatius Spark", an eccentric and somewhat mischievous British (and knighted) "teenager" with a noble streak. Meanwhile, the Decepticons have Clench, an ill-tempered sadist with a Texan accent.

During one of their battles, a fight inside the Large Hadron Collider involving the Decepticons' experimentation with a power-enhancing substance results in a mishap which grants all of the Earth-born Transformers (and some of the older Transformers who stayed behind) with new strange superpowers (and new eye-blinding paint jobs), making them all a "new Generation".

This series/universe provides examples of:

Generation 2: Redux

• Adaptational Heroism: Jhiaxus, surprisingly enough. Compared to his tyrannical portrayls in past media, here he's a Well-Intentioned Extremist who creates an army to unite Cybertron against him. He succeeds for the most part.
• Aliens of London: Justified—amazingly enough for a Transformers series—all of the Cybertronians with a pronounced Earth regional accent developed it by either being "born" and raised in the country or region in question, or otherwise having spent enough time there to pick up the accent.
• Bad Boss: Clench.
  Clench: "You [Sky-Byte] and Breakdown are gonna be the next test subjects. If you both survive, I nominate myself for augmentation."
• The Captain: Pyro.
• Child Soldiers: The Earth-born Transformers in Redux are minors even by Earth standards.
• Cool Old Guy: Well, more like "Cool Middle-Aged Guy", but Streetwise is one of the few adult Cybertronians in the mix, respects the "kiddies" and lets them mostly lead themselves, and mainly serves as a badass advisor and helper to Pyro.
• Fake Memories: All the 2nd generation Transformers (Jhiaxus's troops) have memories from whomever they were cloned from, it's the worse with Frenzy, who continues to flashback to the war, and trying to climb inside of his partner Soundwave's chest.
• French Jerk: Slicer.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Rapido peppers his speech with this.
• Interquel / Sequel: The Redux stories are a sequel to the Sunbow cartoon, and may be an interquel if it turns out Beast Wars is part of the timeline.
  • It is an interquel, especially when you see Tarantulas coming out of one of the four mysterious that were recovered by Sky Byte
• Jive Turkey: Streetwise talks like this, as an homage to Shaft.
• Magical Particle Accelerator: The central aspect of the initial BotCon comic's plot.
• Mass Super-Empowering Event: In the BotCon comic, a large number of Transformers end up being granted various superpowers by Forestonite gas. Some of the known ones:
  • Aquafend: Making a Splash/An Ice Person
  • Beachcomber: Fertile Feet
  • Breakdown: Gale-Force Sound Hand Blast
  • Bumblebee: Power Floats
  • Clench: Gravity Master
  • Electro: Electrically-charged sword
  • Meanstreak: Agony Beam
  • Pyro: Combat Clairvoyance
  • Rapido: Super-Speed
  • Sideswipe: Shapeshifting (beyond normal Transforming)
  • Sky-Byte: "Tsunami Blaster" from his chest
  • Streetwise: Phasing
  • Windbreaker: Blow You Away
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Clench is based on Jack Palance.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Lampshaded. When Pyro guesses that Clench wants to use the Large Hadron Collider to create a black hole to destroy the Earth, Clench points out that, not only is that impossible, he and his Decepticons are still on the Earth. Pyro concedes the point (although it's implied he was being a smart aleck with his guess anyway).
• Precision F-Strike: Upon finding out that he was deceived by Shattered Glass Wheeljack, Slicer exclaims Merde, which is French for shit.
• Shout-Out: Pyro's personality is based on the Tenth Doctor, Streetwise's is based on both Shaft and a page from the TFWiki, and Slicer is a take on the French Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• The Strategist: Rapido.
• Tastes Like Purple: After getting his new powers, Pyro says that they "feel somewhat purple◊".
• Team Dad: Surprisingly, Jhiaxus, though an angry one. Most of his team consists of clones he made and calls his children, the Battlechargers who are child-like in their stupidity, and Side-Burn who doesn't have any memory.
• Too Dumb to Live: Runamuck has wings installed, but only as an aftereffect of his alt-mode (He's afraid to fly). Despite being told that they do not work, he keeps jumping off of high places in hopes he'll fly.
• Unknown Rival: Breakdown is absolutely obsessed with fighting Streetwise in a The Only One Allowed to Defeat You sort of way, to finish off the Stunticon-Protectobot fight that sent the rest of both their teams offline. Streetwise, meanwhile, has decided that since the war is over he just wants to move on, and is more amused and bemused by Breakdown's vendetta than anything.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Optimus Prime and Galvatron's fates are left hanging without resolution as to whether they recovered from their injuries.
  • Rodimus is rather noticeably absent from the Machine Wars storyline despite being one of the higher ranked Autobots.

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Pirates VS Knights stories

• Did Not Think This Through: When Canonball crew went into the future. they didn't realize they went to far forward as the planet is Techno-organic, and no longer runs on energon.

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