10 Mora Bascht comes to us from Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. I always had a fondness for the character, and with her build, height, and skin color, it pretty much makes it a given that she'd be a Hoffmanite. PJM

217 Skullomania is named after the skeleton-costumed superhero character from the Street Fighter EX video game series.

248 Warthogs are from the Halo series; Meerkats are original to the UF universe, and are basically high-tech, lightly armored heavy pickups - sort of the Army deuce-and-a-half of the 25th century.

254 Pelicans are also from Halo.

262 Original to UF in this implementation, the Napoleon-class light urban tank is a mass-production version of Leona Ozaki's custom minitank, Bonaparte, from Dominion Tank Police.

290 Sgt. Spruance is named for Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (1886-1969), one of the great U.S. naval officers of World War II.

305 UF's ACROSS Getter Team uses the "Mark III" Getter Machines from Shin Getter Robo. In this universe, the Mark I was never built, only designed on paper, and the Mark II (aka Getter Robo G), seen in Symphony No. 4, was the prototype series that led to the advanced models ACROSS uses.

325 "Coincidentally", the three sub-ships that make up Armada Tidal Wave's combined starship form.

347 "The Rebels have been routed, they're fleeing into the woods." PJM

396 The ACROSS arrow is a reoriented version of the In-n-Out Burger logo.

424 You can usually spot a Transformers comic written by Simon Furman, because his Transformers are always saying things like, "Hnn." This is our tribute.

525 Outrun is an original character. He's named after an arcade game and his vehicle mode is based on a car from another one (specifically the Rocket ZX from San Francisco Rush 2049).

553 The front and back "covers" for issue 2 were based on this scene, though of course Flanker wasn't accompanied by the rest of his squadron in his sniper nest. However, it did give me a chance to draw a close grouping of Transformers, as well as a convoy in the distance. I probably messed up the perspective somewhat for a distance shot, but still it gave me some experience in drawing city backgrounds.

561 The Vozdushnikons allowed us to be gratuitously Soviet with abandon during the rest of the issue, and it shows. It should also be noted that they still maintained their Soviet-era rank structure, even after being reabsorbed into the Decepticon military. Blackjack's a colonel, and the rest hold various lesser ranks in the Soviet Air Force, even though the Soviet Air Force no longer exists. PJM

608 The Vozdushnikons (from the Russian vozdushnik, roughly "flier" or "aviator", after vozdushnyy, roughly "aerial") are original characters who were conceived as the Soviet answer to the Aerialbots. Their backstory is that they were survivors of the Nemesis crew whose escape pod landed in the USSR. The Soviets discovered them in the early '80s, reverse-engineered them, and rebuilt them as Russian aircraft. Even when reabsorbed by the Decepticon forces after the Mt. St. Hilary eruption of 1984, they always retained their Soviet-flavored personalities. Their names derive from the NATO code names for the kinds of airplanes they turn into. The concept and their bios were created by me for a BPGD entry, and Phil designed their robot modes for this issue's cover art. And although I do say it myself, I love the Vozdushnikons.

The Vozdushnikons gave me a chance to visually design a combiner team from the ground up, and I did my best to add little Soviet design touches across the board, including uniform rank and affiliation badges appropriate for the era, and Soviet firearms for their weapons. As for transformation schemes, Flanker and Fulcrum have the classic G1 "Seeker/Sky Soldier" transformation, Forger has the same transformation as G2 Afterburner, Foxhound takes a lot from G2 Eagle-Eye, and Blackjack has one I pretty much made up, since I didn't want to copy Aerialbot Silverbolt's transformation.

612 Darth Vader, Star Wars, 1977. PJM

681 Well, technically, only three of the Aerialbots turn into American jets; Silverbolt's altmode is an Anglo-French Concorde and Slingshot is an AV-8B Harrier II, technically US-built but designed and first built in the UK. But Priss isn't an aviation historian.

768 A similar move is performed by his namesake in Street Fighter EX.

827 I had a TREMENDOUS amount of fun writing this extended combat sequence, starting off with the Vozdushnikons' merger and formation of Soyuz, and going all the way to the end where he gets one-two shotted by Getter Robo and Skullomania. I wanted to give a serious impact to the threat a full-powered combiner could present, and Soyuz delivered. As for his physical design, I wanted to give him some serious "weight", so I based his profile illustration pose on the original Street Fighting Husky Russian, Zangief.

872 Being a pilot, Chuck Keith of course has read Wedge Antilles' autobiography.

1092 One of Zangief's signature moves.

1195 Soyuz's shield is the same shape as the KGB emblem, FYI. PJM

1211 Except in that one issue of War Within. Wha - ?

1215 The WHM-3R Warhammer was my favorite 'Mech in the original Battletech, but it did have a heat management problem. (But not as much of one as the Marauder!) The two PPCs alone could kick out 20 points of heat in a round, before movement or any other weapons were taken into account, and the 'Mech had only 18 heat sinks.

1251 No, he really doesn't. Soyuz isn't terribly bright even by combiner standards. But he is determined!

1288 And now we get to give Chuck Keith a chance to show just why he was considered appropriate for the Getter Team.

1363 Ok, so the quote should have been "I must break you", if it was to be truly a reference to Ivan Drago in Rocky 4, but hey. Given that Soyuz is more of a wrestler than a boxer, I might also have had Bane in mind.

1444 Soyuz's chest emblem takes cues from the designs of various Soviet-era military medals and badges, including the wings-and-crossed-daggers from the Red Air Force's piloting excellence badges and the red star from the Order of the Red Star. PJM

1457 N.S. Khrushchev, 1956.

1467 Actual Soviet missiles of roughly the same period as the Vozdushnikons' aircraft modes. The Kh-55 (NATO: AS-15 Kent) is a cruise missile with a maximum range of around 1600 miles; the Kh-15 (NATO: AS-16 Kickback) is a short-range air-to-surface missile, though the Kh-15P isn't the nuclear-armed variant.

1597 The separate internal status computer that monitors conditions the Transformer himself is not consciously aware of is a feature that, IIRC, originally appeared in Beast Wars. It doesn't seem to have been carried over into newer Transformers properties, but I like it, so I've kept it across the board for UF's Transformers.

1664 As good New Soviet Robots, the Vozdushnikons are students of Marxist-Leninist dialectic materialism, which predicts (to oversimplify the matter somewhat) the inevitable triumph of communism. Although, to be fair, only Blackjack and Foxhound can really be said to understand it. Flanker thinks he does, Fulcrum isn't bothered, and Forger totally doesn't care.

1698 This is Energon Landmine, whose "Brute Mode" takes the rear half of his vehicle mode and turns the tracks and grader into massive power fists, perfect for performing battlefield recovery by breaking things up. PJM

1715 And, as we'll see in Intrusion Countermeasures, 'Bee's been reformatted into a full-size Autobot shell lately, so he's sort of a Minicon in name only these days.

1741 Normal production Atlases can't do this.

1747 I never owned the Micromaster Overload toy, but the concept of his trailer turning into a jet was pretty neat, and I liked how the Dreamwave More Than Meets The Eye series elaborated on his bio -- therefore, he got to show up here.

1805 Admittedly, in those bios, Overload's fascination with the Decepticons was becoming a security risk for him and his associates, but we decided to tone it down for UF purposes. Unlike the usual TF continuities, UF-Cybertron has plenty of therapists to help with the shellshocked and obsessive Cybertronians in the greater population. PJM

1823 The Infamous Incident at Baku was intended to be one of those throwaway historical references that was never developed further (like the Clone Wars). Whether it stays that way or, like the Clone Wars, suddenly evolves into five seasons' worth of television and a theatrical motion picture is anyone's guess.

1843 Buzzsaw! As the pack-in minicassette that came with Soundwave, Buzzsaw got very little screen time on the original TV show, because they wanted people to buy Laserbeak. I never thought that was fair, so my bias is always to give him the screen time in UF.