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Polyhex
Polyhex is the Decepticon-held province of Cybertron ruled from the fortress Darkmount, home to the smelting pool, the Dead End slums and the space bridge that first brought the war back to Earth.
The record
What it is
Polyhex is Marvel's great contribution to the geography of Cybertron, and it is grimmer than anything the cartoon put on screen. It is a province rather than a single city, lying in Cybertron's northern half between the Rust Sea, the Tagan Heights and Iacon, and it is where the Decepticons run their occupation from. Its capital is the fortress Darkmount, and its governor for the comic's most memorable Cybertron stories is Straxus, a butcher who solves administrative problems by dropping Transformers into molten metal.
Two Marvel issues define it. In The Smelting Pool! (The Transformers #17) Straxus disposes of prisoners and dissidents in a lake of molten alloy outside Darkmount, a horror scene that gave the American Transformers comic its reputation for being considerably nastier than the cartoon. In The Bridge to Nowhere! (#18) Straxus forces the engineer Spanner to build a space bridge to Earth, uses Spanner's severed head as the bridge's control unit, and is apparently destroyed by Blaster when the bridge goes wrong. That bridge is how Marvel gets its Cybertron cast to Earth.
Polyhex also contains the Dead End, the slum district where the Empties live: Transformers too broken, too poor or too fuel-starved to function, scavenging in the shadow of Ratbat's corporate offices. It is the closest G1 ever comes to social realism, and it exists nowhere in the cartoon. The province is Decepticon-controlled throughout the Marvel run, with Perceptor's Autobot cell operating from an Autobase somewhere close by.
History
What happened here
| Event | Episode |
|---|---|
| Straxus executes prisoners in the molten smelting pool outside Darkmount | The Smelting Pool! (The Transformers #17) |
| Spanner is forced to build a space bridge to Earth and is rebuilt as its control head | The Bridge to Nowhere! (The Transformers #18) |
| Blaster apparently destroys Straxus in the space bridge accident | The Bridge to Nowhere! (The Transformers #18) |
| Ratbat runs Decepticon operations as a corporate fuel auditor from offices in the province | The Transformers #41, Totalled! |
Continuity
Comics versus cartoon
Polyhex is a comics-only region. The cartoon's Decepticon Cybertron is Shockwave's command centre and nothing more, with no provincial government, no smelting pool and no slums.
Detail
Trivia
- Polyhex is stated to be a province rather than a city in the Marvel UK letters page of issue 210, which is the only source that pins down its administrative status.
- The smelting pool sequence in issue 17 is routinely cited as the moment the Marvel comic proved it was not going to be a toy advertisement.
- Darkmount's name was later recycled for the Decepticon fortress in Transformers: Prime, which is why searching for it returns mostly Prime results.
- None of Polyhex, Darkmount, Straxus or the Dead End ever appear in the G1 cartoon.
Handle with care
Contested
Where the sources disagree, or where a name that everyone treats as original G1 actually arrived much later. We record it rather than smoothing it over.
- Straxus's death in issue 18 was later walked back; he returns as Megatron's mind in a new body in the Marvel UK stories.
- Polyhex's relationship to Kaon is unresolved: Marvel treats them as separate polities, later fiction often merges Darkmount into Kaon.
Keep reading
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