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Beast Wars Reviews Archive

Comics Bon-Bon Manga Summaries

Last Updated 9/19/00
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    One of the reasons I kept getting Comics BonBon was for the Beast Wars II, Beast Wars Neo and Beast Wars Metals manga installments. While I don't read or speak any Japanese worth mentioning, the manga were aimed at kids and the storytelling was generally good enough that I could figure out what was going on without being able to read the words. However, I did get help from various sources to clarify points.



Beast Wars II

    Prefaced by a brief (2 page) piece in June 1998, the Beast Wars II manga ran for eight installments. Like all the manga series, it has its own storyline related to the anime, but not exactly following the anime. This is largely due to the fact that the manga has something like 200-300 pages to tell a story that covers around forty anime episodes, so some compression is inevitable. Oh, the episode titles are my own for the most part. I generally didn't bother getting the official titles translated.

  1. "Getting A Head": The two sides land on Gaea and Megastorm comes up with a scheme for using his leader to power a super-weapon.
  2. "Angolmois Hoard Part 1": Galvatron has found a city of the original inhabitants of Gaea and hopes to tap it for power. Lioconvoy wants to stop him...but can he?
  3. "Angolmois Hoard Part 2": The giant Galvatron has Lioconvoy on the ropes until Lioconvoy absorbs the Angolmois energy himself...which makes him powerful and insane. Will Convoy be able to save him from himself?
  4. "Cybertron de Bergerac": A light-hearted episode. Bighorn has fallen in love with the Seacon pirate Scylla, but he's too shy to woo her in person. So he sends Scuba as his intermediary...and Scylla falls in love with the handsome squid Cybertron. Wackiness ensues.
  5. "Enter the Kangaroo": A former prize-fighter named Star Upper (the winner of a fan character-creation contest, and secret character in the BWII Gameboy game) comes to Gaea, trying to regain the courage he'd lost in the ring.
  6. "The Cyborg Kid": Immersion in angolmois energy has turned the Destrons into cyborb beasts, and now they plan to bring the Tasmanian Kid into their group....
  7. "The Coming of Nemesis": The endgame begins as Galvatron summons his starship Nemesis to Gaea to harvest the planet's angolmois energy. That the planet will die in the process doesn't bother him at all.
  8. "Beast Wars Second - THE END!": It's a big knock-down drag-out as the Cybertrons and Destrons battle on the surface of Nemesis for all the marbles. Megastorm gets a great death scene.


Beast Wars Neo

    Another 8-episode manga. While I haven't seen much of the anime, it appears that this manga diverges quite radically from it, linking more closely to the end of the BWII manga and taking a spiritual bent.

  1. "Beast Wars Neo: Prologue": On a primitive planet with fauna similar to Terran dinosaurs and Ice Age critters, one of the angolmois energy capsules spread by the explosion of the Nemesis has affected the locals. A gang of evil dinosaurs have been transformed into Destrons, and a battered Lioconvoy is too injured to stop them. So he transfers his energy into a mammoth named Big, charging him with continuing the good fight.
  2. "The Rookies": Set some years after the previous story, Big Convoy is given command of a rookie task force and sent out to seek the angolmois capsules and stop Magmatron, Big Convoy's nemesis created out of the dinosaurs. But Magmatron has allies of his own....
  3. "The World Is Hollow...": Inside a hollow asteroid is a worldship containing an angolmois capsule and a strange menace of sand.
  4. "Crisis of Infinite Clones": In a continuation of the previous episode, the sand turns out to be infested with microbots which quickly learn to mimic the Cybertrons...
  5. "The World Ash": The Cybertrons come to a forest world known as Greengard, only to find it a frozen wasteland due to the presence of the evil angolmois energy. Stampy must overcome his fears or the mission is doomed.
  6. "The Great Old One": Inside a colony worldship of Corahda's people, the young Cybertron must relive his greatest shame and overcome it, as their mission starts to look more and more important.
  7. "The Chaos-Master": After a montage of collecting the remaining angolmois capsules, the Cybertrons are lured into a trap by the being whose energy the angolmois truly is...UNICRON!
  8. "Our Darkest Hour": It's everyone versus Unicron and his Blentrons for all the marbles, and Big Convoy is finally free of his obligation to Lioconvoy.


Beast Wars Metals

    The last manga series in BonBon (to my knowledge, anyway...I haven't heard of any Car Robots manga) was a six-parter covering Beast Wars Metals, which itself was a translation/rearrangement of the second and third seasons of ther U.S. Beast Wars series. The manga is VERY brutal....

  1. "Aftermath": A terrible space battle between Cybertrons and Destrons over a primitive planet has left scattered handsful of both sides stranded, and Metal Convoy's body has been shattered almost beyond repair...and captured! Can a desperate journey by Rhinox into the Matrix bring Convoy back?
  2. "Protoform X": On a crashed Cybertron ship, a hidden danger lurks...Protoform X! It costs Metal Convoy an arm and a leg (and some other body parts), but he manages to exile the monstrous Transformer to orbit.
  3. "Code of Assassin": Jaguar, a psychopathic Destron locked up by his own people, decides to finish off the Beast Wars by killing everyone who survived the initial battle!
  4. "Web of Deceit": Tarantulas has taken over the mind of Tigatron, and is forcing him to kill his beloved Airazor. But she's able to fight back....
  5. "The Future Ends Now!": Megatron has discovered the Ark, and the fact that this planet is primitive Earth. He wants to destroy the original Convoy's sleeping form, but is betrayed by Blackarachnia. Bad move...he merges with the original Megatron, and then funky stuff happens, with Protoform X exploding and releasing all the sparks he'd consumed. The dead walk....
  6. "Unity": With the birth of New Convoy (Optimal Optimus) and Tigerhawk from the ashes of dying Cybertrons, the tide shifts and the day is saved!