[Character Profiles] Nightbeat

Nightbeat is a legend among old school Transformers fans, though he never appeared in the 1980s cartoon, and his appearance on toy shelves was rather late, in fact it came after the end of the American animated series. Nightbeat (the G1 toy) was a unique repaint of Japanese Masterforce Minerva. I grew up watching the cartoon and was late in coming to the Marvel comics.





In fact Marvel's Transformers issue #62, starring detective Nightbeat, was my very first issue and what a powerful experience it was! As a young boy, I didn't know that issue 62, the first part of a 5 issue mini-series called Matrix Quest, was based on the classic Noir film The Maltese Falcon.

I remember wondering about the Peter Lorre reference for years (ah, the days before wikipedia and immediate answers to obscure questions!). But the impression that Nightbeat made on my mind would turn out to be as lasting to the mind of a young boy as Boggie's performance would become to the mind of a young man. Simon Furman, the stupendous Marvel UK writer responsible for Matrix Quest managed to craft a character whose impact would be lasting.

So lasting that for decades many of us Transformers fans dreamed of an updated posseable Nightbeat toy. Although Transformers was revived in many forms in the years since, Nightbeat (never prominent to begin with) was never restored from Beast Wars up through the live action movies. Well, not quite.

There was a Minicon motorcycle named Nightbeat in Armada who was packaged with possibly the worst Transformer toy in history and a movie-verse Nightbeat toy which didn't exactly look anything like the original. Then, finally, almost in passing, someone in Hasbro decided to repaint a generations deluxe Bumblebee mould as Nightbeat with a head that actually looked like Nightbeat. I won't go so far as to say that was the best day of my life, but it was certainly great!

Initially, I had thought of putting my Nightbeat toy into an individual ongoing photo comic called Who Done It? That didn't really work out for lack of ideas good enough to sustain a series like that. I had to settle for weaving Nightbeat's capers into the overall story arcs of my plotlines (if you can call them that).

So Nightbeat, at least in Pete's Super Robots, shows up in the Multiverse as one of the many crew members who Skids revives from statis aboard the Lost Light (shamelessly borrowed over from the IDW universe of course. Fresh out of stasis lock and in the pages of my fanfiction,

Nightbeat immediately sets about solving the greatest mystery of them all: how did the various universes all become jumbled up into one grand multiverse? Who started this time-space mess? This problem would prove to be the the overall plot arc universal to all of Nightbeat's appearances in my comics. The mystery isn't actually that hard to solve - anyone who has read Pete's Super Robots from the opening "The Untimely Death of the Universe" probably knows the answer which Nightbeat doesn't. And if you don't know - then go watch the magnificent anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya!

Anywa Nightbeat eventually ends up on Earth where he becomes part of the Earthforce team and...doesn't really do much there. But at least he is intergrated into the overall plot. Well, he does do something, namely - he has an adventure with cows trying to solve (what else?) the mystery of the multiverse. You can see I'm a terrible robot-detective writer. The fact is that while I don't have many problems thinking up Transformers story lines, it is rather difficult to sustain a detective story in the Transformers universe.One-off minor mysteries are fine, but an all out Noir-style detective story with multiple episodes? Perhaps the Nightbeat toy Hasbro gave us just isn't inspiring enough?

Well, in any event, as my fanfiction progressed it seemed to me that a natural friend to Nightbeat would be Skids (and Jazz). Skids is an anthropologist, which fits right in with a criminal detective (especially when your alternatives are weapons specialists, engineers, and intergalactic space soldiers in general).

Jazz, given his love of Earth and espionoge talents also seemed somewhat of a natural fit, though less than Skids. Skids and Nightbeat were two Autobots who would not be out of character in rather niche situations. Through them, one could stand abreast the epic scope of the Transformers universe and do something different - pity I wasn't quite able to pull it off. Every time I made an attempt to go down the road of the "Mystery of the Multiverse", I feel like all I did was create more disjointed plot threads which, to this day, are just hanging loose (and abandoned).

Was it worth it? Of course! I guess it's just that the Nightbeat adventures I ended up creating were nothing like what I imagined them to be. I see the same thing happening with Pounce and Wingspan, who have finally been produced in the Generations line and who I adore, but who I can't seem to fit into anything remotely interesting as a plot - or, to put it differently - the manner in which I fit them into my plot doesn't seem distinctive enough.

And I made the horrible mistake of calling it Transformers: Noir! Yes, I really am this self-critical about my super robot fanfiction. Oh - the ambitions I had for this...just didn't pan out. It's hard to make a Noir fanfiction with neon colored Terrorcons running around...

Nightbeat also got to investigate other arcane things, like missing Autobots on Cybertron (kidnapped by a vengeful Dai Ouiga!) and the causes of combiner Optimus Maximus's refusal to de-combine - I suppose there was some merit in these stories, though they didn't really go anywhere.

The whole detective motif was best sustained with the latter tale, where Nightbeat worked together with Rattrap and Streetwise to solve the mystery of the kidnapped Transformers, but of course the mystery was rather simple and in the end, I couldn't escape the fact that the detective element was eclipsed by the giant robots slugging it out element. One day I might come up with a format that works! 'Till then, I ams still happy to have Nightbeat in my collection providing a unique element to my fanfiction.