Spotlight: Mirage

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To be, or not to be... a Decepticon.

"The Transformers Spotlight: Mirage"

Publisher

IDW Publishing

First published

March 5, 2008

Cover date

March 2008

Written by

Art by

Colors by

Letters by

Edits by

Continuity

Somewhere in the multiverse, Mirage helps win the war for his allies... the Decepticons!

Synopsis

Mirage dreams of an explosion, Hound asking if he is all right, Starscream spearing Optimus Prime, himself injured, and himself in a mirror, and is disturbed that in the dream, he is an Autobot.

Decepticon Mirage awakens and speaks via a comm channel to Megatron, who is waiting for Mirage to deliver his promise of Optimus Prime and the Autobots. Mirage bargains for a share in Megatron's energon mining operations to ensure the end of the war.

In the Pegasus Star Cluster, the battered Autobots are out of energon, but Hound is working with Zodiac energy, a source with cross-dimensional properties. Ratchet tends to an injured Jetfire. Bumblebee bypasses the security perimeter, and they open the blast door to let him in. Once in, he blasts the security system, revealing he is actually Mirage in disguise. With security down, the other Decepticons rush in, and the two sides do battle. Soundwave is beheaded by Hound, but Mirage takes Jetfire hostage, saying that he will spare his life if the Autobots surrender. Under initial protest by Hound, Optimus Prime surrenders after Mirage guarantees the safety of the others.

Mirage contacts Megatron and informs him of the news. Though Mirage states the Autobots should be treated as prisoners of war, Megatron insists that Mirage kill them or he won't get his payment. As Mirage prepares to spear Hound, Optimus Prime reminds Mirage of his conflict when he joined the Decepticons and how the two of them were friends before the war. Mirage grows angry and kills Hound, enraging Prime, who runs into Mirage and sends him crashing into the Zodiac energy chamber.

Mirage once again has a dream, similar to the one just before, but is disturbed that in the dream, he is a Decepticon. But of course, it is just a dream...

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots	Decepticons
Hound (2) Optimus Prime (4) Mirage (5) Bumblebee (6) Ratchet (7) Jetfire (12)	Mirage (1) Starscream (3) Astrotrain (8) Megatron (9) Soundwave (10) Blitzwing (11)

Notes

Continuity notes

The main story of Spotlight: Mirage is, of course, intended to be ambiguous in nature: is it truly only a dream our Mirage is having of how his life might have gone had his uncertain loyalties led him to side with the Decepticons instead of the Autobots, or has the unknowable power of the Zodiac afforded the Mirages of two different universes a brief glimpse into each other's lives? At the time of this issue's publication, the IDW universe was an especially tight-knit construct telling an overarching story that every issue published up to that point had tied into in some capacity, so for this issue to be a standalone story unconnected to (and uninterested in connecting itself to) anything else going on in the universe at the time was surprising and confusing for many fans.
- The framing sequence of the issue is legitimately a little confusing, though. It shows the Autobots being badly injured in a Decepticon attack, with Optimus Prime, in particular, getting brutally speared by Starscream. This is part of "our" Mirage's reality, and the cause of the injuries that place him in the recuperative state in which he has his dream, but no chronological placement is offered for it—again, a move that distinguished it from the rest of IDW's tightly-constructed Transformers line. The final two pages of the issue show Mirage awakening on Earth, suggesting the battle must have taken place there; that would mean the only logical time we could assume it occurred was in the period between Maximum Dinobots and All Hail Megatron, after Optimus Prime's forces had returned there to root out the Decepticons.
- Furthering the ambiguous, "outside" nature of the comic, it was not referred to again for many years, despite Mirage playing an important role in All Hail Megatron. It seemed destined to be forgotten until, in 2015, writer John Barber referred back to it in The Transformers #40, in which Mirage's dream was mentioned to be one of a series of hallucinations he has had over the years caused by a buildup of neurotransmitters in his brain. Of note, a vision he experiences in the same issue is treated as a potential prophecy, so the ambiguity of the original issue remains.

Errors

It had been previously established that both the Autobots and the Decepticons had subsisted on an inferior artificial energon substitute ever since the exhaustion of the natural energon supply on Cybertron and the abandonment of their home planet. In this issue, Mirage demanded from Megatron a majority share in energon mining operations after the war ended to help track the Autobots down. However, as that conversation was set in an alternate reality, it's possible that the Decepticons found other sources of natural energon to mine.
In the trade paperback, Autobot Optimus Prime delivers a somewhat illogical line while knocking Astrotrain to the ground. Decepticon Mirage then delivers exactly the same line as a logical retort to what his Autobot opponent Ratchet has just said. Optimus was probably given Mirage's speech balloon by mistake, so that it seems that Mirage is repeating Optimus when Optimus was never supposed to have spoken there at all.
- RATCHET: "Back off, Mirage! He's already dying. He's not in this fight."
- OPTIMUS: "Maybe not. But then, neither are you." [kicks Astrotrain's feet out from under him]
- MIRAGE: "Maybe not. But then, neither are you." [throwing Ratchet out of the way]

Other trivia

After the story is an IDWords section about The Reign of Starscream.
Advertisements originally stated that Grimlock and Mirage's Spotlights were "1 of 2" and "2 of 2", respectively, due in March 2008. Due to a delay in Grimlock's, Mirage's was released first (March 5) and Grimlock's was pushed back to 7 weeks later.^[1] As the rest of the Spotlight series until this point has stories in a vague chronological order, and Grimlock's issue is set before Maximum Dinobots, the original ordering would've been correct.

Covers (2)

Cover A: 3 images of Mirage by Guido Guidi
Cover RI: B&W sketch of cover A

Cover A
RI cover

Spotlight: Grimlock
Focus on: Decepticons!
All Hail Megatron series
Classic Transformers Volume 1 TPB
The Ascending TPB
_target 2006 TPB
Transformers Animated books
Journey, Crossfire and Licensable Bear^TM comics
Obscure: The Aftermath game
The Reign of Starscream (back cover)

Reprints

The Transformers: Spotlight Volume 3 (September 17, 2008) ISBN 160010245X / ISBN 978-1600102455
The Transformers: The Premiere Collection Volume 2 (June 17, 2009) ISBN 1600104371 / ISBN 978-1600104374
The Transformers: The IDW Collection Volume Two (October 6, 2010) ISBN 1600107516 / ISBN 978-1600107511
The Transformers: Spotlight Omnibus Volume 2 (September 9, 2015) ISBN 1613779429 / ISBN 978-1613779422
The Transformers: The IDW Collection Compendium, Vol. 1 (July 6, 2016) ISBN 163140637X / ISBN 978-1631406379
Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 39: Hearts of Steel (April 5, 2017)

Spotlight Volume 3 – cover art by Marcelo Matere
The Premiere Collection Volume 2 – cover art by Nick Roche and Josh Burcham
The IDW Collection Volume Two – cover art by E. J. Su
Spotlight Omnibus Volume 2 – cover art by Jeffrey Veregge
The IDW Collection Compendium, Vol. 1 – cover art by Jeffrey Veregge
The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 39: Hearts of Steel – cover art by Don Figueroa, Guido Guidi and Aaron Leach