In the beginning came the beasts, and all that creeps, crawls, and flies...
While the Beast Wars wage on, a separate band of Transformers stage their own battle.
Beast Wars: The Gathering Issues #1-4
Script: Simon Furman
Art: Don Figueroa
Lettering: Tom B. Long
Colors: Josh Burcham
Editor: Chris Ryall and Dan Taylor
- Major characters (in order of appearance): Magmatron, Razorbeast
- Originally published: February, 2006 (#1); March, 2006 (#2); April, 2006 (#3)
| The Gathering issues: |
|---|
| #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 |
 Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow. |
Synopsis
Predacon general Magmatron travels back to the era of the Beast Wars on prehistoric Earth. He's supposed to pick-up where Ravage failed and retrieve the rogue Megatron, but his actual plan is to gather an army from the Axalon's stasis pods and return home to conquer Cybertron. Leo Prime has inserted Razorbeast into the Predacon forces to stop him. Razorbeast manages to keep some of the awakened protoforms Maximal and then stalls for time and tries to contact Cybertron. Finally the new Maximals arrive in the nick of time and defeat the Predacon forces. Magmatron is sent unwillingly back to the future, while Razorbeast all the other characters settle down in the past, to wait and see if Cybertron got their call and will send help.
Errors
- The cartoon suggests that most of the stasis pods were either damaged or destroyed, so their undamaged status is something of a minor retcon.
- The writers of the series, in explaining Depth Charge as a Transmetal, said the Earth's atmosphere was permanently charged by the Planet Buster explosion, causing the process. In light of this (and even regardless of it) how the pods spew forth 'standard', Transmetal and Transmetal 2 Transformers is a mystery.
- K-9 is featured, even though Alsatians wouldn't exist for another 4 million years.
Items of note
- This series takes place during the third season Beast Wars cartoon and disregards the finished and unfinished 3H Botcon/OTFCC Comics. Both comics play around with this era and the non-show BW characters.
- Razorbeast's decision not to fool with the timestream by eliminating Megatron is questionable at best, since Megatron was originally from his era and was himself messing with time. Though it might be argued that any changes Megatron were going to make in the past had already been made (from Razorbeast's perspective) when Razorbeast went back and so stopping him now could theoretically affect the future from which Razorbeast came. Yeah, time travel gives me a headache too.
- The control art for the robot mode of 6" Titanium Optimal Optimus can be found among Don Figueroa's concept work in the back of the collected volume.