Transformation 163: Player One Wins.

26/6/2015

The scary soulless face of Optimus Prime hides the best thing in the issue that answers the question "What are Pretenders good for?" with "Not a lot".

All in my look at Pretender to the Throne! Part 2.

8 Comments

Lee Gannon

26/6/2015 04:42:38 pm

According to Comicvine Alf lasted 1 issue. http://www.comicvine.com/alf/4050-52563/

Tim Roll-Pickering link

27/6/2015 06:05:02 am

However according to eBay it got up to at least issue #14. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Alf-Issue-Issues-11-13-14-1989-Marvel-UK-Comic-Bundle-/111687198162?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item1a011365d2

A lot of online comic databases are not very good when it comes to UK titles, especially licenced books that never built up a fan following in their own right. The database contributors just don't have all the issues in their collection.

John D. link

27/6/2015 01:28:01 am

As I said last week, I liked the computer game bits, the Pretender stuff continues to be dull. If my robot mode and alt mode were both as rubbish as all Pretender transformers were, I would volunteer pretty quickly for the process too...

The scariest thing about next week's issue will be Dan Reed's art! Just kidding I think it will be one of those issues that suit his rubbery transformers. Are you going to assess how Ultra Magnus has own from wanting to stop Megatron wing reactivated to now just wanting to go back to Cybertron? Going through these issues as a 35 year old man is making me pay a bit more attention to the narrative...

Stuart

27/6/2015 11:02:34 am

@Lee and Tim: Your Google Fu beats mine gentlemen, even if information on this comic is still scarce. 14 issues (at least!) is considerably more than I would have guessed. Maybe it was more popular at the time than it's remembered now (in the UK at least, ALF seems to be more fondly recalled by Americans in my experience). Or it was a cheap licence.

@John: Yeah, it's a good couple of weeks for Dan Reed coming up.

Old man Benway from the 80s

29/6/2015 04:39:48 am

Going on memories, I thought ALF was pretty popular. (A hell of a lot more popular than Action Force anyway!) It seemed to be on TV for a few years and it had been around for what seemed like ages before the comic even launched. I'm pretty sure a friend of mine collected it and that it did run for a while. In any case, cancelling a new comic (and a TV tie-in, at that) after even a poor launch issue without plugging it some more seems unlikely to me. At the very least wouldn't they have already finished, or nearly finished putting together issue 2 by the time the sales figures where assessed?

Stuart

29/6/2015 01:59:10 pm

Interesting, I wonder if we were the victims of the regionalised nature of ITV at the time and ALF didn't get treated so well by Central? Or if the memory of it has simply faded.

Or my friends who don't recall it aren't a very good sample.

I don't recall ever seeing a whole episode, just clips on retrospectives.

Ralph Burns

3/7/2015 05:57:57 am

I'm just impressed by the big flat screen TV on the cover 20-odd years ahead of its time. Maybe that is why Prime looks so angry on it.

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Felicity link

8/11/2019 04:53:58 pm

The Pretender toys may have not have been so great but as comics characters they were enjoyable. Since the artists were free to draw them less stiffly than the plastic shells of the toys, they could look very cool at times. The Cloudburst/Landmine missions, Skullgrin’s movie career, the Classic Pretenders, and the Strangehold/Octopunch group, are all happy memories.

Remember that for part of the battle, the Autobot Pretenders are only pretending to lose and fall back so that they can catch the Decepticon Pretenders off-guard when they divide and double their numbers.

Good explanation for why the Decepticons are momentarily fooled by the size of the human-looking Autobot Pretenders. IIRC the Decepticons notice that these humans are larger than they expected (larger than their Nebulan colleagues, come to think of it) but figure it doesn’t matter, they’ll attack them anyway.

The killer app that got me to try reading “ALF” comics was that there was an issue that parodied “Doctor Who,” with a Melmacian Tom Baker called Doctor Whosonfirst.

Patrick Macnee was great. I loved his guest appearances in “Murder, She Wrote” and so many other things.

Transformation 163: Player One Wins.

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