Patrick says...

Look! It's some action! I finally got around to drawing a battle. Unfortunately, I had no idea what was going to come next after I drew this. In the second frame, the recharging chamber is used for the first time. I realized that it wasn't possible for Trashformers to lay flat and had to modify the design a bit to fit Scrapper's backside. Even with this modification, I don't think Garbitron, Toil, or A.T.C.er would fit. ...and Starspeed would be out of the question. "Close the gates!" "Gates closing!" "Good." HA HA HA! Note that Garbitron is in the computer screen in the third panel. In the fourth panel, you can see that he's upstairs and Toil is downstairs near the "mystery vehicle". Presumably, Scrapper is still in the recharging chamber and A.T.C.er is still out exploring. I have no idea where Twistor and Starspeed are. They're supposed to be in the base. The fifth panel is essentially when I decided it was time to make sure all the Write-Bots had been properly introduced. Chameleon is a colored pencil, Penpot is round, cup-type a pencil holder, Pen-kil is your standard #2 pencil, Penscribe is a ball-point pen, and Inky is an ink bottle. I added the "Ink tank go!" line later to make sure people didn't think Inky was the tank. As for Penophone, he's a bit more difficult to explain... As a kid, I had a collection of unusual pens. One of these was a pen where a sturdy metal wire held a piece of plastic in front of the tip of the pen. To use the pen, I'd snap that back and into place 180° behind the pen. When I started thinking up the Write-Bots, I decided to design one after this pen. Not only would he be a pen and a robot, but depending on where the plastic piece was positioned, he could be a hovercraft (as seen on this page)...or a gun. Even though this pen only had one point of articulation, I made Penophone an octouple changer. Yeah. It makes no sense. I drew all eight of Penophone's forms on the inside of the back cover of the Trashformers notebook. At some point, I'll post a scan of that in the Gallery. In the last two frames, you can see that it's sundown and the Trashformers are launching a rocket for some reason. Again, when I drew this, I had no idea why. However, I had fun drawing the laser beams. At the bottom is another mistake covered up by a comet. If I remember correctly, I wrote the teaser for next week's comic after I realized that A.T.C.er never returned home.