Transformers Legacy: Jetfire

Jetfire is a longtime member of the Autobot Secret Police, a clandestine paramilitary force established after the close of the Great War. Each agent acts alone, and is tasked with locating and apprehending (or exterminating, if the case necessitates) Decepticon fugitives throughout the galaxy. These officers answer directly to the Autobot High Council, and are are granted immunity from moral or legal recourse in pursuit of their goals. Predictably, the Secret Police is an organization rife with corruption, so to say that Jetfire is perhaps the most unscrupulous of his peers is quite the accomplishment.

Jetfire is not driven by a sense of honor or justice, but rather vengeance. He has long been in pursuit of the prolific but elusive bounty hunter Lockdown, who murdered his friend and fellow agent Devcon nearly a decacycle ago. After finally tracking Lockdown’s signature to Earth, he finds himself embroiled in a new war that forces him to honor duty over his personal vendetta, much to his chagrin. Though Jetfire wants to see the Decepticons eradicated as much as the other Autobots do, he resents working with them and prefers to work alone unless the situation absolutely necessitates it. Jetfire is cold, distant, uncaring and self-centered, and is nearly as much an adversary to the Autobots as any given Decepticon. It is Optimus’ hope, however, that compassion and solidarity will win over his hardened heart in the end.

Like all Secret Police agents, Jetfire is a veritable one-man army; he is by far the most heavily-armed (as well as the largest) Earthbound Autobot. His most prominent piece equipment is his back-mounted pair of Turbo Thrusters, which each contain an extremely powerful, long-range rail cannon, as well a booster rocket allowing him to attain flight in both modes. Each forearm conceals a pair of flechette launchers for close-to-mid-range combat, and he can swap out his hands for flamethrowers formed from the vehicle mode's OMS thrusters. His arsenal is rounded out by a double-barreled Valkyrie Rifle. Jetfire does not actually possess much combat finesse, but that matter little when he’s littering the battlefield with as much ammunition as he is capable of dishing out. Truly, his biggest weakness is his stubborn insistence on working alone against an entire enemy army.

-------------------------------------------------
<sub>Jetfire has been a very long time coming. He and Inferno were in early consideration for Series 1’s Autobot “pyro”, but Grimlock eventually won out by a nose. Nevertheless, I’ve always considered him a priority character in Legacy, and if you’ve been paying attention to some of my comments over the years you’ll have known that he was coming. To further reinforce how long this dude’s been around, the sketch for this illustration was done on June 21, 2011. His design was only slightly tweaked for this final version. By the way, he’s huge. Like, almost Blackout size.

I don’t feel like there’s too much to say about Jetfire’s appearance. He’s based heavily on his G1 incarnation (specifically the cartoon model), although the Space Shuttle altmode was inspired by his Armada/Energon incarnation. For a long time I was considering a Cybertron-style cargo plane (specifically a modified C-130 with turbofan engines and a US Coast Guard deco), but I feel like the shuttle is a much more iconic image. And yes, it’s been retired. But so were the F-117 and MH-53 when I did Skywarp and Blackout, not to mention all the surely-obsolete-by-now car models. I just don’t care! Note that the name of the shuttle is Constitution, which was the original name for the testbed model that wound up being named Enterprise  (coincidentally, the NCC-1701 Enterprise from Star Trek, which it was named for, belonged to the Constitution-class). There’s also a little bit of red on the wings because I felt it was necessary for the robot mode. Otherwise, he’s very white. Normally I choose a “secondary color” for the robot mode bits that don’t show in vehicle mode, but nope, Jetfire’s just straight-up white across the board. G1 accuracy, man.

Jetfire’s personality is based very heavily on BW Depth Charge, with the asshole level cranked up to 11. And of course the Lockdown rivalry is a swipe of his and Rampage’s backstory. The Autobot Secret Police was an idea I developed on my own, although it turns out FunPub came up with a similar idea of the same name for their Shattered Glass fiction, so I swiped their logo for my own purposes. In much the same way I like the idea of not all Decepticons being inherently “evil”, I really like the idea of this shadowy organization of “good guys” doing really sketchy and immoral shit without many people knowing. While my version of the Wreckers (see Jazz’s entry) has a similar mission, the Wreckers are a civilian vigilante force with truly good intentions, the Secret Police are government-officiated and almost wholly corrupt. I think it’s kind of a nice nod to Jetfire being a former Decepticon in certain continuities, too.

I should mention that the mention Devcon is an in-joke referring to the Transformers Mosaic story “Hunter or Hunted” (www.deviantart.com/art/Hunter-…. Back in late 2009(!), I was asked to do the art for that story, but I ended up being unable to commit to it, and it passed to trabloSK (who did a much better job than I would have, BTW). I actually drew up a (bad) G1 Lockdown design for it, which I totally forgot to mention in his entry. Whoops. I have made many mistakes in my life.

The transformation is just… ugh. See, my problem is that I usually sketch a robot mode with vehicle mode kibble drawn in places I think look best, then work backwards from there to figure out the transformation. In this case it required a ton of attempts to work out properly, and even then it’s perhaps my most iffy yet. I basically had to work out a way for the very front and very back of the vehicle to come together to form the torso, then forms the legs from the midsection, and somehow get all the wings into place. An absolute nightmare, and perhaps the first I needed to draw several sets of technical drawings to work out correctly. I can’t even explain it, really. So yeah, I’ll probably change my approach from now on.</sub>