I think you got a bargain (PART 1 CONCLUDES)
There is currently no Transformers comics licensee. That means I can do ANYTHING I WANT. See you tomorrow!
[UPDATE: Since this blog post was written in early May 2023, there is now a Transformers licensee and you will have to see who does it better, me or Daniel Warren Johnson.]
[UPDATE UPDATE: for legal reasons, please use the term “generic cyber changers” in all correspondence.]
Of course, the car may have its own ideas about whether it is owned by anyone.
Also, I love the transforming sound effects!
“Unbranded cyber changing” effects pls
In my head, I hear “Chet, Chut, Chot, Chu-Chu” in the same rhythm as “Eep, Opp, Ork, Ah-Ah”, Jet Screamer’s hit song from The Jetsons.
Curse you. That tune is now stuck in my head including the new chorus.
Blame Judy Jetson.
Blimey! That came rocketing back up from my brain’s data banks, covered in dust but relatively intact. ‘Come fly with me! Up high with me!’
I have to agree with Billie. Animal matter tends to have really good weight/strength relations and that looks like a rather flimsy hold unsuitable for a human weight/strength ratio. You’d need an ape to do better and/or something quite smaller than a human. A transformer is entirely implausible.
Ok, it was implausible to start with. Sue me.
As there’s probably no chance that Daniel Warren Johnson will have the Transformers meet Desmond Fishman, it’s pretty obvious who’s version will turn out better.
Just saw the casting call for the new Transformers movie, and they have a character named “Delmont Piscinefella.” Coincidence, I’m sure.
Obviously, you’ll do it better.
To me, CHET, CHUT, CHOT, and CHU CHU sound just like the names of the tracks on an extremely obscure experimental electronica E.P. that five people think is amazingly groundbreaking but the rest of the world has never heard of. (But maybe that’s just me.)
More like characters from a typical British children’s TV programme, I think. Also, as one of those five people, I’d have expected the tracks to be named CEHT, CHUC, TCOHT, and CHCHC.
Yes! and the creator will have some terribly clever and convoluted technology-related reason why the tracks have those specific names with those spellings, but, alas, they’ve never had an opportunity to tell anyone because nobody has ever asked.
This sounds like my life
Ah, I guess I am too old to have my life sound CHET, CHUT, CHOT, and CHU CHU.
Somehow, I feel as if the Secret Sentai guy should get involved with this.
How do you know he isn’t?
Given where the head emerges from, was that Werthers already in its mouth?
It likes a good butterscotch
Why is this robotic figure not wearing the string backed driving gloves? Very disappointing.
Seems like its grip is fine without gloves, though.
The gloves would only be just big enough to cover one fingertip each. I cannot help but notice there are exactly two of the robot’s fingers hidden from view in today’s comic. (pinky and ring finger on the left hand) Coincidence?
For such a giant, the gloves act as a charm which grants +2 grip. They should remain in the glove compartment or risk cancelling the effect.
Oh, this is fantastic. First Kit and the X-Men, and now Transformers are confirmed in the Steeple universe.
Plus a certain chiropteran-inspired crime fighter.
You mean Ooh-me-back-man?
If I missed The Blue Morpho in here somewhere, I’m going to be really disappointed.
That would be a lepidopteran-inspired crime fighter.
I don’t think the Kit and the Wolf story took place in the Bobbinsverse.
At least there is no hard evidence as such. However as with the Man-Like-Bat incident, it’s possible there might have been some brief temporal meshing between the Bobbinsverse and Marvel Earth-616 continuums.
“Unbranded cyber changers” please
Cyber Changers it is!
John A – Any chance you would consider crossovers with other webcomic creators? Tying all this stuff together would be a “fan”tastic MetaVerse service.
I remember the wonderful Charles Schultz tribute when scores of cartoonists paid tribute https://schulzmuseum.org/tribute/ and how fun that was. Crossovers could be an excellent way to expand audiences for different comics. For example, I am thinking of such webcomics as https://exiern.thecomicseries.com/, which occasionallys step back, winks at, and occasionally leaps over the 4th wall. Especially today’s (13 July 2023) page.
If you are not familiar with it, Exiern has traded hands a couple of times. Different writers and artists kept the name and characters and did their own very different things simultaneously with occasional winks and nudges referencing the other storylines.
So last night I actually looked up the canonical onomatopoeia for The Noise in anticipation that it might be useful today. However, I think you nailed it better than the canonical one. (TSCHE-CHU-CHU-CHU-TSCHE, according to tfwiki.)
O-oh! OHHHHHH! Yeah, YEAH! I’m down! Secret Sentai was already fun as hell, but bringing transformers into the fold is gonna be just as cool!
You meant bringing Unbranded Cyber Changers into the fold, right??
I KNEW it!
So did I.
This eventuality still does not explain how the Rev avoided being sliced and diced between two vehicles on a narrow road (he proved that definitively through the power of Dinky). Unless he blacked out of course…
Transformers are surrounded by a reality-defying field where conversation of mass and energy is not a thing. OK, it’s not a thing but an abstraction anyway but you get my point.
Frankly I meant conservation of mass and energy, but on second thought, I like conversation of mass and energy better in the context of this story.
Conservation of mass and energy might make sense if this was an actual transformer, but since we’re dealing with an “unbranded cyber changing” entity, conversation of mass and energy goes!
It bounced up? dunno
Score one for Billie for being right. (Bonus point for not getting them both killed.)
Yes! A true bargain. Good thing that creature was able to transform by pushing them out instead of letting them inside and squashing them. Wonderful robot!
Basic hygiene. Squished organic matter is unhealthy for machines. Planes have ejection seats in order to avoid getting grounded with squished organic matter inside.
NNnnnngngghghhgghnngng YES! ROBOTS. IN. DISGUISE
Just wait until we get into the complex lore of this generic race of cyber changers. It never ends!!!!
Cannot. Wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The more complex and convoluted the better! Finger’s crossed for a guest star by a certain freelance peace keeping agent, yessss?
It looks like a Hyundai…
Drives like a Hyundai…
Flies like a Hyundai…
But we got wise
It’s the ROBOT IN DISGUISE
Thank ya. Thank ya very much.
Dare we hope for a cameo from Deaths’s Head (1 or 2, I’m not fussy)
These are unbranded cyber changers, alas there is no appearance for their DH equivalent “Super Derek”:
https://www.gocomics.com/bad-machinery/2017/04/16
Never mind fairly sure the GoBots license can be had cheap
I can honestly say I had absolutely no idea this would be the twist
I did not see this coming.
I was expecting one of: sink, float, or fly.
Well, it’s clearly an auto-unbranded-cyber-changer and not a decepti-unbranded-cyber-changer.
I think it’s a bot-like auto.
(awestruck silence)
you beat me to it!
Just to put some perspective on it: “autotransformer” should not be trademarkable since it just is a transformer partially sharing primary and secondary coils and has been this way since the times of Tesla. The inventor, not the car.
That would make it uncopyrightable, but not untrademarkable.
Trademarks that cause more confusion than they clear up (and particularly in the age of electric vehicles, autotransformer certainly counts) can be challenged and/or not granted in the first place. And this one clearly is an optimus prime contender.
Looks like Absolutely Not Tap-Out.
Pardon my french but, FUCKING HELL THIS IS SO COOL!
So we have it on good authority that the proper automatic transmission setting for steep downhill is “S1”.
Yes, finally the reveal that it was a Shapeshifting Mechanism Going Incognito all along!
More than meets the eye!
So when can we expect the generic cyber charger Steeple action figure?
I need to talk to artisans and craftsfolk
The Spinerette webcomic has some fairly nice looking figurines as merch, so this is not a completely unreachable goal
https://www.spinnystore.com/collections/not-books
Given that this is a Hyundai (not a knock, I drove one for 14 yrs), this is obviously not one of those Japanese Transforming-brand vehicle/creatures, but a more economical Korean Mechanamorfer.
So, whenever someone recites the Satanist Creed, do you have to repress the urge to say, “What!? What must I do!?”
One would think a giant robot head under the bonnet would have been a clue! Love Billie’s expression in the third panel!
The placement of the door handle!!! Easy access, indeed!
ALSO: Am I really the first to say it?? Billie was RIGHT!!!
ALSO: (I keep rereading it and having more thoughts) is this the first time she’s ever called him David? I don’t recall her calling him David. I guess, this would be the moment that warrants it.
She called him David at jason’s vigil, in Clotted Crime part 4. https://steeple.church/comic/a-good-step-for-you/
Billie’s been right before.
Great reveal. Shocker. Why this generic cyber changer allowed Billie to drive him off a cliff, rather than just applying the brake and maintaining most of his mystery, is, well, a mystery. But seeing them all hang from a cliff is worth any quibbles I might have with the sequence of events. Well played Mr. Allison.
GCC was playing a game of chicken that he lost. Just cause he’s a mechanized cyber brain doesn’t mean he’s perfect.
Playing chicken with devil worshippers is prone to make you lose your head.
I suspect the GCC was thinking to it/him/her/their self, “Surely this human will not be foolish enough to drive me off a cliff!”
The generic cyber changer didn’t get enough sleep last night, so it was only the sensation of free-fall that woke it up. Being driven in car form is just as autonomous for the GCC as breathing is for us.
I have to say that the generic cyber changing noises are absolute en pointe
Really enjoying the “flat-out daring major entertainment corporations to pursue legal action against me” phase of your artistic career!
In my defence: on this story, you, and lawyers for Hasbro, will find that the parameters of this arc are very delicately balanced to skirt any recognisable likenesses. In fact, you may find that the avoidance of copyright infringement opened up some interesting narrative asides.
Your work is an excellent example of exactly why there is such a thing as “fair use”.
(IANA legal scholar or in any other way qualified to make this assertion, but _I_ believe it.)
IANAL, but I don’t think fair use matters here, because I’m pretty sure “robot that changes into a car” is not copyrightable in the first place. There were, at one point, at least two competing companies making toys based on this idea.
There is also at least one series of low-budget movies that pretty blatantly rips off that big-budget franchise.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0960835/
And there were plenty of Japanese toy robots that could turn into planes and things before either Transformers or GoBots existed.
Some of them even became Transformers. Jetfire/Skyfire, for example, was originally the Veritech Valkyrie from Superdimensional Fortress Macross. Which is why the cartoon version doesn’t look anything like the toy.
That’s some Hyundai, all right.
Hyundai – qualities you cannot readily perceive!
(Still working on that.)
Now that’s a cliffhanger!
The Perils of Billine?
Ah! I get it now. That’s where the odd silhouette and big fist which smashed up the campervan came from on an earlier page. So what was the campervan? Or was it just retribution for it driving recklessly. I feel like that sometimes while driving. Who doesn’t? So many questions.
I KNEW IT AS SOON AS I SAW THE NAME “SI FURMAN”