Chris McFeely has reported that the IDW trade paper back version of the Beast Wars Sourcebook is going to feature updated artwork, colouring and corrected spelling.

You can see the original report on TFormers

Simon Furman has updated his blog both with a Christmas message for his readers as well as a present in the form of a downloadable script of Transformers Beast Wars Shell Game, issue 1. The story was to tie into the Summer Special Beast Wars story, published by Dreamwave, but never came to be. Eventually the story was reformatted (pardon the pun) into Beast Wars The Gathering.

You can find the article and script here.

Simon Furman has updated his blog with the following information concerning the IDW Publications Beast Wars The Ascending issue 2 comic.

Hot on the heels (paws?) of issue #1 of Beast Wars The Ascending comes issue #2. This week, October 17th in the US, 18th in the UK, sees the release of issue #2 of The Ascending, the continuation of IDW’s series set in and around the Beast Wars world created by Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio in the TV series of the same name.

Things are looking bad for the Maximals and Predacons, as an ancient evil once more threatens the very future of Cybertron itself. Their only hope? One Predacon general, Magmatron, currently in temporal limbo and unable to affect very much at all. One Maximal deep cover agent, Razorbeast, currently stranded on prehistoric Earth and embroiled in his own ‘Beast Wars’.

This issue, things go from bad… to worse. Even the arrival of The Pack (the Maximals’ crack special forces team) seems destined to be too little, too late. As for Razorbeast, he’s about to undergo something of a transformation, and things will never be the same again! Beast Wars The Ascending #2 is by myself and Don Figueroa.

For more details of all IDW’s Transformers titles visit their website here.

Thanks to Talk Transformers for posting a few images from the Transformers Beast Wars Source comic from IDW Publications. You can see the images here.

I'm not sure why BB is coloured in Orange, but puhaps if someone owns the comic they could shed some light on this?

Simon has type up another long article on his blog, which you can see here. We've reproduced the text below, in case you find the formatting on his blog a little hard to read.

Beast Wars United

Not, as you might think, a football (soccer) team in a league composed of Transformers generations (Cyberteron City, RiD Rovers et al), but a unified Beast Wars universe, one that amalgamates the US Beast Wars TV series/toy line with its Japanese counterparts (BW II and BW Neo) and, for good measure, the convention/store exclusive toy characters.

That was what we (myself and bwtf.com’s Ben Yee) set out to do when (over a year ago now) we began to craft a four-issue sourcebook/profile series for Transformers Beast Wars, the first issue of which is available next week. No easy task, as there are elements of the Japanese shows that just aren’t easily compatible with the US series.

What we did first was compose a timeline, a fairly loose ‘what came when’ that included the likes of BWII, Neo, the Pax Cybertronia, the ‘Great Upgrade’ and so forth. Some slight revisionary tinkering here and there was necessary, of course, but we finally had the framework into which everything (and everybody) could be slotted. Next, we set about detailing the planetary hierarchy, the ‘who does what’ on Cybertron in the BW era.

Some of the characters like Lio Convoy, Big Convoy and Magmatron had already been assigned roles/positions in the first IDW Beast Wars series, The Gathering, but we needed to flesh those entities and bodies out. Who, for example, sat on the (Bi-partate) Committee for State Affairs (mentioned in The Gathering)? What was the full roll call for The Pack (of which Razorbeast was a member)? Where did the TriPredacus Council and the Magnaboss trio fit into all this? And so on. Should alliances or roles already established in BWII and Neo be honored or scrapped? Lots of problem solving needed to be done before we so much as started on the character profiles themselves.

Then, it was down mostly to Ben to come up a definitive list of BW characters, taking in everything from Botcon exclusives to McDonalds Happy Meal exclusives. Where characters hadn’t reached their Fox Kids Transmetal form (in the TV show) he extrapolated. We then carved up the character list and set to work. Ben probably wrote 75 per cent of the entries (compared to my somewhat cherry-picked 25 per cent), with me acting as overall editor/guardian of the ‘house style.’ It was exhaustive work, and (when it came to the repaints, effectively two identical characters issued with a different colour scheme and name in Japan) demanding, making the pairs as different as possible in terms of their profiles and powers. Where one existed, we used extant tech specs as a guideline, in other cases we started from scratch. Some characters we retooled almost entirely to fit the new, unified TV show/IDW universe.

Over the course of the four issues, no less than 162 characters are profiled, and (in issue #4) there’s an extensive glossary. Entries vary from one to two to three pages, depending on number of alt. forms or variations. Main characters, such as Optimus Primal and Megatron get the full three-page treatment, even including early (unused in the TV show) forms such as bat Primal and croc Megatron. It took a good chunk of time to write all four issues, and longer still for IDW editorial to commission the illustrations and compile the books. But here we are at last.

Beast Wars Sourcebook #1 hits the stores on Oct 3rd (US) and Oct 4th (UK).

For more information on this and all IDW’s Transformers titles, check out their website here.

IDW Publishing has published the following preview in it's Art Du Jour section of their website, previewing the Transformers Profile book.

Simon Furman (Transformers: Beast Wars: The Gathering) and Ben Yee (consultant on the Beast Wars TV series) team up to present an all-encompassing, unifying resource book highlighting the characters, worlds and technology from all generations and incarnations of BEAST WARS. From AIR HAMMER to WOLFANG and beyond, and featuring all-new art from a host of the greatest TRANSFORMERS artists like Don Figueroa, Nick Roche, Rob Ruffolo, and many more, this is the series everyone's been clamoring for! This special series will be comprised of three 48-page, ad-free editions.

Click on the image to preview: