Simon Furman has provided some more information on the recently announced "Transformers Spotlight: Arcee" from IDW Publishing. Mr. Furman first addressed the concerns by fans over Arcee's personification being different from the Generation 1 cartoon. He points out that "it always seemed strange to have any kind of gender demarcation in a machine-based species that didn’t reproduce."

To deal with his oddness, he references back to a satirical piece he wrote in his Marvel UK days. "I did a 5-page story back in the Marvel UK days called "'Prime’s Rib,'" writes Mr. Furman, "which explained away Arcee as an attempt by the quote-unquote ‘male’ robots to be politically correct."

The following are the details that Mr. Furman originally provided on his official blog (line breaks are by the news poster for easier reading):

This time around, within the context of the new IDW/TF-verse, Arcee is a much more troubled and tormented character. When we first meet Arcee, ’she’ is on a personal crusade, a vengeful rage and adrenaline-fuelled tilt that brings ‘her’ into inevitable conflict with law-enforcement officer Ultra Magnus. It’s not pretty.

This in turn leads us to Garrus-9, an Autobot detention facility (something readers have speculated about since we showcased a Decepticon penal colony in Spotlight Hot Rod). Garrus-9 brings the authoritarian Fortress Maximus into the mix, and a story thread running on from the end of Spotlight Optimus Prime (concerning a certain sextet of captive combiners!).

Add into the mix Banzaitron, some Combaticons (minus Swindle) and Jetfire and the Technobots (oh, and Arcee of course!) and you can start to see there’s one heck of a showdown/melee in the offing. Oh, and Arcee’s ’state of mind’ ties into the Dead Universe storyline (which all starts to kick off in the last couple of issues of Devastation).

And yes, why ‘he’ and ’she’ are or aren’t used is most definitely addressed.

The book is set for a February 08 launch, following the January issue of Blaster, and is written by Simon Furman with pencils by Alex Milne.

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