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Blast Cannon wrote:As somebody who hasn't got a clue about what half of you are moaning about, I found the Convenant of Primus to be an interesting history of the civilization of the Transformers. I was fascinated by the concept of the 'Thirteen' and how Cybertron's history has been divided into ages with their own unique features because of what happened during that time.

Those things all existed before this book.

Blast Cannon wrote:For someone who, like me, hasn't really bothered with Transformer literature before, it was a really enjoyable read. It felt and read like the Transformer equivalent to Tolkien's the Silmarillion in terms of scope, grandeur and sheer drama of the storytelling.

Please read the Silmarillion again, and then tell me that Tolkien's high fantasy account of creation and the epic struggles that followed have any resemblance to the poorly written narrative that comprises the Covenant.

It sounds to me, Blast Cannon, like you focus more on the concepts featured in the book rather than the execution of them.

megatronus wrote:]Those things all existed before this book.

Really? I wouldn't know, as I've already said that I haven't got a clue about what half of you are moaning about.

megatronus wrote:Please read the Silmarillion again, and then tell me that Tolkien's high fantasy account of creation and the epic struggles that followed have any resemblance to the poorly written narrative that comprises the Covenant.

Okay. There are resemblances in the concepts and scale of story between the Silmarillion and the Covenant of Primus.

Sabreblade wrote:It sounds to me, Blast Cannon, like you focus more on the concepts featured in the book rather than the execution of them.

That would be a fair comment. I'll happily admit that I'm ignorant of everything that has been released before, so I'm not affected by any issues of what you might consider to be going against pre-established ideas and stories. I'm just reading it for what it is, an interesting history of the Transformers from Creation up to 'the end'. A lot of it is mumbo jumbo yet I did thoroughly enjoy being given a detailed account of the adventures of the Transformers before the Civil War.

I thought it was an interesting take on things. Certainly didn't fit with a lot of previously established canon which would have been fine, had it only been contradicting G1 or Unicron Trilogy or whatever continuities, as those are already established as alternate universes to the Prime one. That it has so many inconsistencies with the rest of the Aligned continuity grated on me quite a lot once we got to those sections, but it's just another example of how presumably no-one at Hasbro knows what the word "aligned" means. Seriously, you know you're in trouble when there's stories from the G1 comics, cartoon and toy bios that mesh together better than the Cybertron games, Prime show and this book.

That it is vaguely based on the Prime show is a bit of a disappointment in the first place. I hadn't really picked up from solicitations that this would be the case. I'd been under the impression it was all going to be along the lines of the first few chapters and not tied to one specific incarnation of the franchise. But hey, I just suppose this is a reason for them to be able to do another one later on for any new continuity they come up with.

The product itself is pretty cool as a physical object. The case is really silly, but a big selling point for me, and the book inside is nicely put together. The artwork inside is mostly great.

Its not the best written book I've ever read and a lot of the decisions made in the story itself are not ones I'd have either chosen or agreed with were I either writing it for fun or Hasbro okaying it as the supposed true history of this current continuity that they're supposedly promoting, but the prose is never so bad that I was turned off. I usually only put it down at the end of a chapter to take a break (mainly from holding it, it's pretty heavy) but despite the page-count there's not a huge amount of content in it.

Huge timejumps relegate thousands of years to throwaway comments as we get big epic pictures painted in our minds of the grand things happening, then we'll spend half a chapter following some uninspiring characters around as they stumble through potentially exciting events. I definitely wasn't a fan of how it was paced, and it felt like a lot was missing. I certainly never cared for any of the characters like I have sometimes after only a few pages of some of the recent comics.

The Earth 2 retelling of the Prime series put me off as well. I ended up mostly skimming through that thinking "but he wasn't there when that happened!" or "they must have run the episodes out of order in whatever universe this was made", but I suppose at least it tried to tie things together with the story of the 13 at the start of the book.

All in all, I'm not sad I got it, but when it was announced I expected much, much more.

The impressive Aligned continuity wrapping book Transformers: The Covenant of Primus may have come out a while back, but Ken Christiansen, one of the artists in it, has seized the opportunity to share some of the unused sketches in preparation for the publication. Check out the first one, and Ken's explanation, below: it's a pre-Takara Micronus!

Now I'll start posting the pencil art for the Primes, but I'm going to start with something a little unexpected. I've mentioned before that I was originally slated to do all 13, but Takara stepped in and claimed Micronus and Alpha Trion. When I found out the Primes were finally being published, I went back and dug up the rough thumbnail sketches I had going before the characters got canceled, and decided to finish the design drawings. Which, honestly was just a human-esque figure in a circle. The Alpha Trion doodle was pretty much a rough sketch of the G1 animation model, to get the shapes right before drawing the new details.

Here is a close-up of MY UNOFFICIAL version of Micronus, about 2x the size of the actual drawing. I imagined he would have the ability to scale the way the first movie's All Spark was able to fold in on itself.

Tomorrow I'll post the complete drawing of Micronus and Alpha Trion.

When I recoup some money from my recent house purchase, one of the things I want to do is to commission someone to make me a poster of all 13 Primes.

It would be awesome.

I would love to be considered for that commissio, sounds like a good challenge! I'm in the process of updating my deviantart. http://gantzrunner.deviantart.com/ , should be some newer stuff on there soon

A while back, we posted some unofficial personal sketches by Ken Christiansen, one of the artists on the Covenant of Primus. With a couple of days between then and now, see below for some more work by Ken, this time with his own personal notes on Nexus Prime and final pencilwork for both Micronus Prime and Alpha Trion. Check out his Facebook page for your chance to own one of the original pieces, too!

It may look ridiculous, but this is how I keep notes on art. But, it's pretty effective for me. I must have sketched out the Alpha Trion and Micronus in early 2010 - on my own, after I learned Takara was going to do them - but the idea stuck with me for almost four years, before I got around to it.

And I forgot that I promised to post the 'notes' for Nexus Prime. Well, there it is...wanting to showcase the alt forms, though they would be alien versions.

Incredibly sloppy and simple, but it works for me.

Alpha Trion and Micronus Pencils - NOT actually in the Covenant of Primus

Again, this is just my personal interpretation of the characters I did NOT get to do - I did nearly all, and it's bugged me that I didn't get to complete the set. I'm sure some completionist collectors can relate.

And this isn't a dig at the Takara designs, they did a wonderful job, and their work is the official versions of these characters.

It took me nearly 4 years to get around to drawing them, let's see how long it takes for me to render them out like the rest...

Seems the TCC version of Nexus Prime was originally going to have a bigger influence in design of the Aligned version of Nexus Prime than the final design ended up having.

So I've all but given up on this book. I just can't be bothered to continue reading it, so far the onyl thing it managed to do was ruin Aligned for me.
Until this book came out it seemed like Aligned had this amazing mythos full of mystery and secrets with a good combination of sci-fi and fantasy.

Now it's just full of ****.

Everyone we know from Prime has been around since pretty much day one, which renders the whole research Shockwave did on the Predacons utterly pointless.
Everything significant and insignificant about Cybertron and the Transformers was done by someone we all know. Seriously, we needed an explanation for the stupid "markings" on Cybertron, and it's Perceptor who's responsible?
What's the point behind calling Ratchet an old bot when he came to Iacon when Orion Pax is much older than him? On top of that Orion Pax has constantly been referred to as "a young" bot/ archivist in all the Aligned media before he became Prime, but now he's suddenly the oldest living thing on Cybertron?

What's the point behind constantly talking about how live on Cybertron evolved and stuff died out? I mean the book makes it very clear how Evolution did not happen on Cybertron. Everything came out of Cybertron's vagina I mean well of allsparks, and when something died it was immediately replaced by another one, as evidenced by Predaking's first arrival and killing something. That's not how evolution works.
And if that's how life on Cybertron works, why did the Predacons ever go extinct? Shouldn't the well have just replaced them with copies the moment they snuffed it?

So what happened to the "Ancients" that are brought up in Prime and FOC? They're referred to as a mysterious ancient forgotten civilization who went exploring and conquering, an entire level of FOC is set in one of their ruins, in fact the whole plot of FOC couldn't have worked without them. But here they never existed since the current civilization is still the first civilization full of the same people as ever.

And what's that with Liege Maximo? In the episode the Prime's grave is well-known and Megatron rips his arm off, in the book AT states they hid the corpse and kept it a secret so nobody would worship him or something, and Megatron found it by accident. And somehow knew it was a Prime although the grave was unmarked?

And this is what I got myself for Christmas?

Concept designer and artist Emiliano Santalucia has updated his blog with his character model for Megatron for the Transformers brand bible. The design was referenced for both the The Ultimate Pop-Up Universe and The Covenant of Primus. Check out his design below, you can read a few of his words on the concept by visiting his blog.

Straight from the Binder of Revelation, it's Aligned continuity Megatron in his earliest official design!

Nice. I'd still like the barrel to have a bit more girth to it, but overall, I like it.

Wow. I really love this design. It's intimidating and very evil looking. (The monster-in-your-closet evil.)

Must kitbash ....

why the hell wasnt that used it looks awesome, i dont understand how that gets scrapped but TFP & bayformer megs get the go ahead

Megatron Wolf wrote:why the hell wasnt that used it looks awesome, i dont understand how that gets scrapped but TFP & bayformer megs get the go ahead

It wasn't scrapped. It got published in the pop up book and in the Covenant book.

As for why it wasn't used, the people behind the shows and games simply had their own designs that they wanted to use instead. This design was just made for a production bible.

yeah they had their ideas...but man, this one is better. Kinda mixes every megatron into the pot. I like that.

That face is among the most deplorable things in creation.

I'm not a fan of the face. Too Bay-ish.

But apart from that, this is really cool.

Well, we do have to consider that this design was made back in 2009, back when the movies were still new and the biggest thing in the brand. So it looks like a lot of inspiration came from mostly the G1 and ROTF designs above all.

Can anyone see any other influences in this design that could have come from other Megatron designs of the time (G2, RiD, Unicron Trilogy, Animated, etc.)?

You can see that it influenced the TFPrime version, look at the shoulders, the head, arms, and the feet.
I like this design, if it where updated to be more in the TF Prime style it would be amazing.