Transformation 125: Full Force Firefox.

3/10/2014

"And using two different browsers!"

Dear reader, you'll have no idea what a struggle it was to bring you today's entry (well, unless you follow me on Twitter), for some reason the latest version of Weebly doesn't work with Firefox (though hopefully they'll sort that out) resulting in the text disaparing from the box everytime I tried to add an image. It was two solid days of fighting this before simply using another browser occured to me and Google Chrome made this update possible.

[I am not sponsored by Google Chrome, but if they want to throw money my way. I still had to use Firefox for the links though as they turned red every time in Google rather than keeping their nice bold black colour).

Still, Action Force Month kicks off, at last, with my look at:

Ancient Relics!

3 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

5/10/2014 01:33:52 pm

Quite a bold step forward for Furman. I wonder if he was perhaps thinking the UK book could simply ignore a return of Megatron storyline or perhaps just rush Megatron to either Cybertron or whatever wrong destination the US book might pick Megs up from. (Which makes the mess even more inexplicable since that's largely what he did. Perhaps Don Daley insisted on a survival story that also explained his US absence rather than a "I am very hard to kill" Master-style handwave, and Furman as a new US writer on his second issue didn't have the clout to override him.)

I wonder just how the Marvel UK office made its assumptions about the crossover audience between the two titles. Maybe the mailbags contained a lot of the same names (which might not be reflected in what actually saw print - on a lot of comics the letterspage could be the work of an assistant editor taking scrawled letters as early drafts and making up others completely) or maybe there was some mechanism by which newsagents reported back combinations of periodicals ordered by the same person/household. I always thought the reason for tying in with three different ongoing plotlines was to really up the essentialness of this story for Transformers readers whereas often crossovers wander into a title for an issue or two and then depart with no long term impact at all - e.g. I don't think this tale is ever mentioned again by Action Force.

And we get actual human deaths again, something that the UK comic seems less restrained about. Perhaps the US book was restrained by the implications of being a toy title even though it escaped the Star Comics imprint, whereas here in the UK the anthology and war comic genre made it more normal to have dark material alongside toy promotional material.

Iron Man 20-whatever is one of the best of all the back-up strips IMHO. The character's hubris as he discovers his inventions are all flawed in their own way, making his mission invariably doomed, builds up his arrogance and then the inevitable downfall. I wonder if this story was in part an inspiration for the present day Iron Man going down some similar paths in the late 80s and early 90s. And I don't know what you could and couldn't do from a New York payphone in the mid 80s but Spidey has a long history of making personal phonecalls from payphones whilst in costume. I guess it's just one of the superhero conventions and your point about the risk would have to be saved for the "more realistic" approach of the New Universe.

Stuart

6/10/2014 02:06:09 pm

There's long been some speculation that Furman's first American arc was based on a storyline Bob had already pitched to his bosses, and there's some circumstantial evidence to support that (He'd done an outline for the introduction of Action Masters-reprinted in one of the Titan trades- that has Megatron alive and well from the start implying he was intended to come back before they got hold of Nucleon).

Mind, I think it's just as likely a case of Furman approaching his new job carefully and wanting to feel his way in rather than rock the boat. The fact US editorial let the Deathbringer cameo slip in shortly afterwards suggests they wouldn't have been completely averse to a Megatron return that didn't contradict the British material as long as the linkage wasn't overt.

Equally though, Furman might have been expecting the British comic to edit the dialogue in a Gone But Not Forgotten Way (it's easy to see it being reworked so that Megatron's "Death" that everyone talks about is the death of the clone from Two Megatrons. "Last I heard you shot yourself in the head" "Ha, that was merely a double who replaced me after what happened on the space bridge...").

I love the idea of Spider-Man being a frequent pay phone user.

Felicity link

2/11/2019 01:42:22 am

Once again I’m pleasantly surprised by the Geoff Senior humans! And as always his Transformers and his architecture are fantastic.

In terms of “Doctor Who” episodes that had giant sewer rats, Furman might also have been thinking of “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.”

Rachel Becker only appeared in the one issue but she was a female character that was neither a helpless damsel nor a love interest.

Flint does look sort of British doesn’t he?

Spider-Man’s often the sad-sack superhero who has to deal with things like change for the pay phone, and doing his laundry, and bills, whereas other heroes don’t have to worry about it.

I’m a little disappointed that a hypothetical reader of this issue would then have to go buy an issue of “Action Force” to find out how the story ends, as that means having to buy two titles instead of one. That’s the kind of thing that Marvel would do on a much larger scale with their epic multi-title crossovers starting in the 1990s, and it made me stop reading many of their comics because I couldn’t follow the story in just one title and I wasn’t about to start buying ten extra titles. However, since the idea was to get sales numbers up for “Action Force” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they would pull something like this.

Transformation 125: Full Force Firefox.

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