BW Media Spotlight

In this installment of Free Comic Inside I was planning to return to Cybertron and the Unicron Trilogy, but by going into Dreamwave’s run of Transformers Energon comics. However, I just remembered another bunch of stories featuring the Mini-Cons that would work for our little mini-comic review series, or at least the Microns. “Micron” is the Japanese name for the Mini-Cons because they like to be special or something, with Transformers Armada instead being called either Micron Legend or Legend Of The Microns depending on the translation. I discussed this back during the Many, Many Intros Of Transformers.

For the first run of Micron Legend DVDs the distributor added two extras. Each DVD came with a special Mini-Con repaint, creating a whole new character exclusive to that first run. They also came with the miniseries “Linkage”, a three to four page mini-comic that told the stories of these exclusive Mini-Cons. They formed teams just like the regular Mini-Cons and make a human ally as they wake up and do battle with each other. The series was written and drawn by fan-turned-creator Hirofumi Ichikawa, but the story was never translated for Western audience. We in the US got full season box sets for the regular series and the “Unicron Battles” season for example. No minicomics for us, but luckily for this series Greg “M Sipher” Sepelak, a fan who has also gone on to do official Transformers tales in magazines and books (reviewing fans may also recognize him from the YouTube series The Isle Of Rangoon as the puppeteer behind Sunny Jim as well as playing Jim’s human roommate) made contact with Ichikawa getting his script and notes on how the characters should be written. These were handed off to Transformers fan and comic editor/translator for Antarctic Press Doug Dlin, and together they produced the translation I’ll be using.

With such a small page count among the thirteen issues I’m doing this in two parts, issues one through six today and seven through thirteen tomorrow. Sadly there’s no way I could find to divide them equally and this is ultimately what I chose to go with. In order to read them (at least in this translation) I had to go to the Internet Archive, so read along on this lost Transformers adventure and lets see if Ichikawa does a better job with the Mini-Con gimmick than the cartoon and other comics did. Note that each paragraph represents a different issue.

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