Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Ark Addendum - Minerva's Transform


Hello hello! Another edition of The Ark Addendum. Today I thought I'd bring you the extended transformation sequence for Minerva. Minerva is one of my favorite characters from Masterforce. I like her plucky attitude and her ability to see the good in people that others can't.

This image is nicely dynamic, lots of jumping and skidding. It's a pretty cool sequence.

Plus, some AllSpark Almanac help would once again be useful. The Titan magazine #17 featured a back-up story by Simon Furman called Dino-MIGHT!, set in the Animated universe. Can any of my UK (or very well connected US) readers tell me if that story has a title block?

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome. Thanks Jim! -tt24@seibertron.com

Phil said...

Nice challenge there...hmmm...

Anonymous said...

the kind of pages I love. And from Masterforce. And from Minerva! Jim, you're the man ;)

Anonymous said...

Question for you Jim:

Will these stray entries be in the Omnibus- for that matter, what extra material can we expect & how much more will their be?

Jimtron said...

Fair question, Caleb Barber. Nothing posted on this site will be showing up in the Omnibus. The Omnibus is only 416 pages, which is exactly the number of pages of Ark 1 and Ark 2 put together. Now, there ARE a few duplicative pages I can pull out, so I will be including a few pages of extras most likely. (It's not up to me, it's up to IDW, but I think they like the idea) I've been saving a few pages that I think are particularly nice for the Omnibus version. Things like transforms I want to stay away from, because really I'd want to do all of them or none of them - just five or six random transforms wouldn't work for me.

Anonymous said...

It sure would've been fantastic for you to, oh I don't know, put this content IN YOUR BOOK to start with.

Anonymous said...

Damn, Jim, this is a ice piece of material/ it's a shame you can't put out a book just with Transformations and backgrounds. I know I'D buy it, lol. But, at this point I'm becoming a bit of an artbook junkie (I curse Generations Deluxe for coming out before I had the ability to get it, damn beautiful concept art in there).

Oh, on a side note, am I the only one who thinks a book of packaging art through the years would be really cool?

Anonymous said...

i must admit I was confused then. I thought all this extra pages were the main reason to get the omnibus when you already have the original Ark I and II volumes :(

besides, I love the transformation sequence models and would love them to be featured in the Ark books. You don't need to have them all btw, as you didn't have exactly the same amount of material for every character.

As a side note, I second NuclearConvoy request of a packaging art book :)

Jimtron said...

OK, a few points.

Anonymous, I'd have loved to include this in my original books, but I only had a finite number of pages. If I'd included this I'd have had to cut something - maybe everything after Victory, for example. Or, I could have shrunk everything down and given it to you at half the size. Ultimately, I think I made the right choice with the scope and size I went with.

NuclearConvoy, while I think a book of backgrounds and transforms would be neat, I don't know how many people would actually buy such a thing.

Carlos, the point of the omnibus is to make The Ark 1 available to people without forcing them to spend $100+ on it. Ultimately, though, it's more analogous to a trade paperback version of comics. It's basically collecting what's already there, fixing a few mistakes and inserting a bit of bonus material.

As for a book of packaging art, I'd love to do it, IDW would love to do it and Hasbro would love to do it. The only issue is, I don't have high-quality versions of the images, and neither does Hasbro in most cases. That is a pretty huge limiting factor.

Hans said...

Botch has quite the collection of box art on his site, I'm, not sure the size and quality is good enough for printing quality, but perhaps he has larger files on his computer?

This is his site:
http://www.botchthecrab.com/archive/


I would love a coffetable book with at least all Generation 1 artwork (Japanese stuff too). Especially guys like Jeff Mangiat did an amazing job. The back-of-the-box posters are all amazing, too.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for answering my question Jimtron!

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't want all of it one book, but even I can appreciate that most people don't care that much. I know when you were looking at your bottom line you simply had to be practical without bumping up the price.

Still- if a book is ever made that has that stuff in it I would be the first in line. Of course I'm a bit fanatical about Transformers art.

Anonymous said...

oh well, it's not like I'm not buying the book anyway ;)

however, now I'll have to search your blog for all those pages I didn't save to my hard drive as I thought they'd be featured in the omnibus :P

And Botchthecrab is an awesome source for packaging art!!