Decepticon Prime.

22/8/2014

It's the issue that very nearly didn't happen... but would we have missed it?

It's Galvatron Vs. Magnus, Cindy Vs. Reader Apathy and Rodimus's Autobot logo Vs. an artistic mistake, all in my look at:

Fire on High! Part 1.

8 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

22/8/2014 11:52:06 am

Maybe because I first saw this out of sequence and so didn't spot how reptitive it is but I enjoyed this issue a lot. It's got Galvatron losing to Goldbug! Maybe if the other Autobots had just stayed back and not provided a distraction then the newest toy could have pressed home victory in all his glory.

(Of course this totally mucks up the impact of next week's clifhanger.)

And that exchange between Wreck-Garr and Ultra Magnus is priceless.

Changing the billing on the back-up strip is natural given that some of the 1980s Spider-Man annuals had a tendency to forget who is actually the star of the book - #16 is even worse being the debut & origin of new Avenger & trademark protector Captain Marvel with such a lengthy flashback the character named in the title is absent for nearly half the issue - and Spidey won't appear for a few weeks. However it means that in just a few months Marvel's biggest hero has gone from headlining his own UK title to being the guest star in a back-up strip. Watch out for the various changes made for its printing here. The story was originally set in 2015 despite the original cover and later tradepaperbacks billing the character as the Iron Man of 2020. (In the Iron Man 2020 trade it's placed prior to the previous published Machine Man limited series.) It was originally published in 1986 and but stated "the present day" was 35 years earlier - I suspect the original plan was to run this in 1985, maybe as a Marvel Team-Up annual before that series was replaced, and have the Iron Man of 2020 actually come from, erm, 2020. The Spider-Man editorial politics of this era were chaotic to say the least and this may well have been a fill-in lifted from file.

And they were only expecting a further single issue to wrap up Inhumanoids - an emergency cutdown of the six parter or would there have been another gap until after Headmasters? We may never know.

Ryan f

22/8/2014 02:27:35 pm

Great Spidey info there, Tim, cheers for sharing!

I remember reading these issues as a kid and thinking it was a really good overall story... in those days for me it was all about the cool characters, rather than the plots.

I had no idea about the Throttlebots at the time (maybe they weren't released yet?), so this new version of Bumblebee came straight out of left field, and was just about the coolest thing ever. Shame the Goldbug toy was actually rubbish!

Stuart

23/8/2014 07:43:22 am

I can certainly see this issue working better as a standalone (and as rushed as the art is elsewhere, the actual fight between Magnus and Galvatron is nice and brutal. I suspect those are original rather than redrawn pages).

That Spider-Man/Iron Man 2020 stuff is interesting (including the bit about there being a trade, I might well invest in that), and suggests a real tangled web (ha!) going on behind the scenes.

The dating tickles me as well, a problem with putting the year in the title is sooner or later time is going to move on in fiction (I don't know how the various 2099 titles handled that), but actually deliberately setting the story five years before the year that's in the character's name is just deliciously bonkers.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

23/8/2014 10:10:53 am

If you can get the trade then do - it's also got the Machine Man limited series in one place, an encounter with a certain freelance peacekeeping agent, a later oneshot and limited series and a short What If? based on this story that was written by Furman between generations.

The Spidey office politics of the mid 1980s were certainly a mess and it threw up a lot of problems in the books themselves - the thing articles and interviews now mainly focus on is the revelation of the original Hobgoblin's identity but there were some other disasters with the third book, Web of Spider-Man, never managing to get a creative team to last more than five issues for the first forty or so. Then there was Spider-Man marrying a woman who he hadn't been in a relationship with for nine years. Or there was a storyline involving Northern Ireland that resulted in the Marvel US office getting bomb threats. (And 25 years later Marvel blundered again, albeit with fewer noticing, by releasing a collection that reprinted that story in the week of July 12th!)

Arno's year of origin is small change in this but also I think he's never actually called "Iron Man of 2020" in the story, just on the cover. But just what else could you call him?

Harry

23/8/2014 10:03:28 am

I always remember being so disappointed with this back-up strip due to me missing the final week's instalment when I was on holiday in England. Ironically, I couldn't find the comic there, despite having been able to get it every week here in Ireland. Must just have sold out or something.

Stuart

24/8/2014 12:41:06 pm

The trade was, with postage, less than a tenner on Marketplace and that's good value for the Machine Man series alone (I do like how about half the book is co-opted stories from other character's titles rather than Iron Man 2020 proper).

Tim Roll-Pickering link

26/9/2018 02:00:15 pm

A few further comments on Iron Man 2020 some years later, having recently reread the story in another collection.

"Ken McDonald" is a writing credit that's only otherwise appeared on an issue of Dazzler (the one where the Assistant Editor lets power go to his head and become the dictator of the office, until the Editor phones in from ComicCon). "Ken" was Jim Shooter's father's name and "McDonald" the surname of one of his grandmothers, suggesting the Editor-in-Chief might have written this under a pseudonym http://jimshooter.com/2011/07/its-so-hard-to-get-good-help-these-days.html/ However more recently editor Christopher Priest (then known as Jim Owsley) has said he wrote this annual under a pseudonym but Shooter got the money as part of a scheme to reimburse him for personally buying a computer for the office. https://www.bleedingcool.com/2016/08/19/no-more-black-panther-comics-but-maybe-a-novel-christopher-priests-bleeding-cool-interview/

(The interview has quite a bit about the editing of the Spider-Man books in the period.)

Jumping ahead a little, the references to Aunt May's birthday reinforce the idea that this was originally meant to have come out in 1985. Spidey's purchase of a hat as a gift and then having to get it home past the Vulturions (don't ask!) were a key part of one of the first Web of Spider-Man issues at the start of the year and then Amazing Spider-Man annual #19 features the birthday itself. Louise Simonson was the initial writer on Web but got dropped after just three issues, then wrote the Amazing annual, an early example of the chaos on the books as the new editor immediately started shaking things up a little too bluntly.

(I row back on the possibility of it having been planned as a Marvel Team-Up annual as Simonson was the last writer on that book before it was replaced by Web of Spider-Man and Priest only arrived as editor after all the changes had been implemented.)

And to be blunt, the editor has a very poor grip on Spider-Man as we'll see.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

24/10/2019 04:21:21 pm

Simon Furman has found his Get Fresh appearance on an old VHS tape and uploaded it to YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPkGN5OaGAc

Decepticon Prime.

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