Transformation 124: Blaster Blues.

26/9/2014

It's a tense time for our two Autobot rebels as they have a massive falling out due to Goldbug being a coward and Blaster being a tosser.

Also this week, Don Perlin find that Goldbug character model on his desk and we finally get an answer to the question: "What does the Marvel UK editorial team like best: Action Force or Ricicles breakfast cereal?"

All in my look at Crater Critters Part 2!

4 Comments

Simon Hall

28/9/2014 10:38:11 am

Although this story is an odd one - shifting from macabre body horror to light comedy - the image of the robot pilot's head falling off as he's slowly eaten alive is one of the images from Transformers that's always stayed with me. Because its horrible! I just like the sad "--Ohh--" as his head drops off.

Blaster is a total knob during this story, and its hard to understand what Budiansky was aiming at by making this rebellious Autobot the lead. Still, makes for a refreshing change, the good guy not being a super likeable fellow.

Stuart

28/9/2014 01:12:52 pm

Yeah, I think Bob deserves credit for wanting to make the leads more interesting than just "Normal" good guys, it's just Blaster is so completely at odds with the style of the issue around him it doesn't work.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

13/10/2017 08:34:09 pm

Just rereading these posts after reading the Iron Man 2020 story again...

"Iron Man... doesn't seem to know who the web crawler is, thinking he must be some sort of law enforcement agent..."

This looks like one of the later examples of an old Marvel tradition with titles set in what was then a few decades into the future. In general the superheroes were treated as mostly forgotten history, often overswept by the events that created the dystopia backdrop to the stories. As a result the present day superhero are often unknown quantities in time travel tales - Spider-Man himself visited the eras of Killraven and Deathlok in one of the most memorable epics in Marvel Team-Up and neither had knowledge of him.

Felicity link

2/11/2019 12:57:41 am

What was the joke in “Life, the Universe, and Everything” that was similar to the Scraplets evolving from a cloud floating through space? It’s been a long time since I read it.

I must agree once again about Blaster being a terrible person in this story, and yes, why doesn’t Goldbug just explain? Presumably because then Budiansky couldn’t do a character arc where it starts out with Blaster hating Goldbug and ends with them on good terms again.

This brings up a thing that I’ve been thinking about, though mostly in relation to comedy as opposed to SF. I think there are two kinds of people and when one kind is writing the fiction and the other kind is the audience, it can be disastrous. And the two kinds are the people who suspend disbelief and get into the story, and the people who look at it as an abstract exercise in writing. This is where you get sketch comedy or situation comedy that seems completely evil and depressing when taken as if it were really happening in its fictional universe. The writers must think that we see it the way they do, as a display of technique within the artificial structure of the narrative, rather than as a story that makes you feel something. The problem is that this is punishing the audience for caring about the story.

I don’t know if that’s what was wrong with this particular comic book issue or if Bob just got careless.

Transformation 124: Blaster Blues.

Leave a Reply.

Author

Archives

Categories