Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

As I mentioned in the last post, Powermaster Optimus Prime was the body that Optimus was resurrected into in the US/UK comics, but in Japan it was an entirely new character. Star Convoy here is how Optimus was eventually resurrected in the Japanese continuity. At this point that Japanese cartoon line had ended entirely, and interest in the toyline was fading, both in Japan and in western countries. One of the last gimmick lines they created was the Micromaster line. It seems like it was pretty obviously inspired by the success of Galoob's Micro Machines toys. Micromasters were a little bigger than Micro Machines in vehicle mode, and they transformed into robots of a pretty uniform size. They were released with a number of larger transforming vehicles and bases.  In Japan they had an additional type of figure, which was a large transformer, which in addition to having vehicle and robot modes, also had a micromaster base mode. It would be similar to Trypticon and Metroplex, wh

Powermaster Optimus Prime was the first major revision to the Optimus Prime character, he came out long after the 1986 animated movie, and thus after his death in the cartoon. The powermaster line never appeared in any American animation, but it was featured in the US/UK Marvel comics. In the Marvel books, Optimus Prime died under much different circumstances (something about dueling to the death with Megatron in a primitive computer game, it was really very silly). His consciousness was saved, but they didn't have the technology to put him back into a body on their own, so they journeyed to the planet Nebulon. Nebulon is a planet where a human like race is the dominant species, and the Transformers had been there before, resulting in two types of Nebulon/Transformer bonds: Headmasters, where a Nebulon would form the head of a Transformer, and Targetmasters, where a Nebulon would form a gun for a Transformer.  After the resulting wars had devastated Nebulon, a scientist