BIONICLE got its start in 1999-2000, when an international team of people employed by the LEGO Company were tasked with coming up with a storyline-based LEGO line. The early working title was, believe it or not, “Bone-Heads of Voodoo Island.” The first story bible (a summary of the year’s story) for 2001 actually ended with Mata Nui awakening! No one could be sure if BIONICLE would be a big enough hit to last for more than one year …

The BIONICLE line was introduced with a comic book, truck tours, a “build your own website” contest, and, of course, the first six Toa canister sets. The six villager sets (who would later come to be called “Matoran”) were available only through a McDonald’s promotion.

As the Toa were originally planned, they were all different ages and they would all sound sort of “godlike” when they spoke. I had a long conversation with story team head Bob Thompson as I worked on the first comic, and suggested that the characters might be easier to relate to if they had different personalities, and spoke differently from each other, rather than all sounding like Thor or Superman. He agreed, and that was how the initial characters were born in print.

We did three issues of the comic in 2001 in the US and Canada (only one in Europe, I believe). The original plan was to have issue #3 lead into a BIONICLE PC game, which would deal with the fight between the Toa and Makuta. But when the game was cancelled (when it was decided it did not measure up to LEGO standards), the battle ended up being reflected only on BIONICLE.com, and the first issue of the next year started the Bohrok storyline.

More to come!