The Energon Pub

I saw a thick book at my chapters which contained Beast wars: The Gathering, The Asending, and a beast wars character handbook for about $40, are the two comics any good, and do you think the price is worth it?

I got it for $27 at a local comic store. It's pretty interesting if you're a Beast Wars fan. It follows a completely different story line than the Beast Wars 'toon. The Beast Wars Character Handbook is f-ing awesome though.

The Sourcebook is OK. The actual stories, not so much.

Razorbeast and Magmatron are the only good things about those books.

The rest of the characters are hard to tell apart and overall forgettable. The sourcebook is good but almost necessary because of that reason.

ponycorn wrote:The rest of the characters are hard to tell apart and overall forgettable. The sourcebook is good but almost necessary because of that reason.

Not to mention that the vast majority of them end up meeting typical Furman ends.

Not really, honestly. I like Furman, but the Beast Wars stories weren't his best--he tried to fit EVERY Beast Wars character into the tale, and the result was that you didn't know who was who, or anything. To make matters worse, there were Japanese characters included who looked JUST LIKE the US versions of the characters, thus confusing the heck out of everyone.

I thought it was pretty fun. I got the individual TPBs for about $5 each from Amazon Marketplace.

Personally, I loved them. That said, the art was not as good in the Ascending. Some nice characters in there. Magmatron and Razorbeast obviously but I like Snarl, Optimus Minor, Ravage, Iguanus, Grimlock and Prowl. Lio Convoy has the best line in the whole series.

The profiles are great fun. People complained about the sourcebook when it first came out but to be honest, I loved it.

I like how they suggest that Terrorsaur and Scorponok survived their lava swim and became Transmetals.

Also liked that Waspinator became a Transmetal in an alternate universe and got possessed by Starscream who influenced his jet mode.

The only thing that gets me is how they can be tied in with various G1 series like Marvel, Dreamwave and the toon but oddly, not the IDW G1. Though personally, I prefer Marvel and Dreamwave.

I have the book and often find myself re-reading it, especially the profiles. Of course, I often refer back to Dreamwave's G1 and Armada MTMTE books too. All 3 have great characterisations.

Would love to see more sourcebooks -

A G1 expansion book with characters such as Acid Storm, Roulette, Clampdown and Wrecker Hook.

An Energon/Cybertron MTMTE series.

A Movie/Real Gear line sourcebook. There are plenty toy characters on top of the Movie ones. Slag, Prowl is a comic only movie character who I'd like to read about.

But I digress. You should definitely pick this book up.