Titan - Age of Extinction #3

Title: Accept No Substitutes!

Writer: Martin Fisher

Pencils, Inks and Colour: Andres Ponce

Lettering: Comicraft

Cover Date: Sept/Oct 2014

Cover Price: £3.99

Poster: Optimus runs from a Chopper!

Plot

Bumblebee attacks and leaves a KSI factory, and introduces himself an threatens a bunch of humans. Very soon, elsewhere, Bumblebee hears about this on the news, and is rightfully confused as to how he could have possibly done that!

Bumblebee goes for a drive to investigate what happened, when he comes across a house on fire, with a woman trapped inside. Bumblebee goes to save her, but she's afraid of him. Before anything can happen though, another Bumblebee appears and attacks the real one.

The fake Bumblebee introduces himself to Bumblebee as Stinger, and welds Bee's battle mask shut, so no-one can tell them apart. The two fight briefly, until Optimus appears,a nd he cannot tell who is who, until Bumblebee jumps to action to save the woman, who has just fallen from her window.

Stinger goes to attack Optimus with a gun, but Optimus just smacks it away, allowing Stinger to run away.

Afterwards, the woman has changed her mind about Bumblebee and trusts him. Optimus apologizes to Bumblebee for not recognizing him sooner, but wonders what Stinger wanted with all of this....

Characters

Autobot

Optimus Prime - Truck Cab

Bumblebee - Camaro

"Decepticon"

Stinger - Sports Car

Human

Burning House Lady

Bob the Anchor

Jean the Anchor

KSI Staff

Other

Primus (Mentioned)

Notes

• This issue comes with either Vehicon or Megatron as the main free gift
• Strafe finally gets named properly in the features in this issue (instead of calling him Swoop)!
• As usual, Bumblebee and Optimus are shown in their mid-AOE bodies, despite this appearing to be set before the movie.
• Stinger really shouldn't be active at this point in time, as he should be a mindless machine still (unless he was being controlled by some KSI guys for some reason here
• The comment by Jean, the News Anchor, about modern toys being too complicated for kids to play with is a double jab at the Transformers toy line. The releases for collectors (such as Generations, Masterpiece etc) are designed to be somewhat complicated to make them look better. The second jab is that the main AOE toyline releases are actually now the very basic One Step series of toys.
• The plot in this issue is very similar to the main plot of the Transformers Animated episode "Where Is Thy Sting?" where Bumblebee is replaced with Wasp, who even uses an electronic paint job like Stinger does here. Stinger comitting offences as Bumblebee is also somewhat similar to the Decepticon's actions during "Megatron's Master Plan" from the G1 cartoon.
• It's unclear what Stinger's ultimate goal was though, did he intend to kill and replace Bumblebee to act as a spy maybe?

Other Features

Adverts

A couple of Competitions

The Ultimate Smack Down! - Galvatron vs Optimus profiles

The Lowdown on.... - Drift profile

Trouble and Strafe! Maze puzzle with Bumblebee and Strafe

Meet the Real Dinos! - Article on real dinosaurs

Crosshairs' Conundrums - Puzzles!

Lockdown's Letterbox - Lockdown and Crosshairs read the fan art and mail

Dinobot Wordsearch! - Find the Dinobot names in a wordsearch!