Transformation 164: Well Chuffed.

3/7/2015

Get out the brown trousers as the scariest Transformers story of all time starts: zombies, Duocons, J'Muk's. Oh my.

Prepare for the chill feel of fear down your spine as I look at City of Fear! Part 1.

What's not included, thankfully, are bloody Pretenders.

11 Comments

Ryan F

3/7/2015 10:30:11 am

RE: the Seacons - when TFUK introduced them it was pretty early... IIRC they hadn't even been released yet in the shops, and their U.S. debut in Club Con was still a ways off.

Given the Jawbreaker/Overbite thing, plus the rather ropey colour schemes in their first UK appearance, I reckon that the writing and art teams were basing their Seacon knowledge on early info that was revised just prior to the toys' physical releases. "Sparkler Mini-bots" is likely another example of the same phenomenon...?

Stuart

4/7/2015 06:34:06 am

IIRC the Seacons were out in early '88, or around their comic début (obviously they'd been released by now for this letter to be sent in). Working from early information is a pretty likely explanation though.

Nathan webb

5/7/2015 11:15:33 am

I missed this entire story the first time around but bought the summer special it was in which was cut short and ended on a cliff hanger that wasn't concluded until the Titan reprints

Stuart

5/7/2015 01:19:03 pm

The second half of that story did actually did get collected in the specials: http://tfarchive.com/comics/marvel/?s=collected#93es

Of course, we're talking (roughly) five months later and without a regular comic to promote it, so it's little wonder you missed it. That second special was actually the last Marvel UK Transformers title I ever bought (though in the reverse of you, I missed the first half).

Dave

6/7/2015 11:24:12 am

I'm surprised the specials carried on for so long! There must have still been a big market for Transformers to justify these... I don't think many cancelled comics carry on with specials, do they?

Tim Roll-Pickering link

6/7/2015 04:48:09 pm

Actually quite a number do or rather did when the market was broader - a special is often a cheap way to use up material or meet the licence requirements or test to see if there's still a market and so forth. A recent example is the Dandy which has had some holiday specials post cancellation. I'd have to check cancellation dates but I think there's been a few such specials already shown in the adverts here.

I'm another who found this storyline via the specials and as someone who did actually find both of them (the second was found randomly in a newsagent in Shrewsbury I happened to pop into one Easter Saturday) it was a delight to get a complete epic rather than the endless started-but-not-finished ones. This storyline lends itself to the specials quite well as you don't really need to know anything about the wider plotlines in order to follow it and indeed entering the narrative midway through the events helps to make the introductions work.

And this is my favourite of all the Marvel UK stories for reasons we'll get to in weeks to come.

Mark Stevenson

6/7/2015 05:02:49 pm

Ahhh, the Flame saga. A definite favourite of mine.
I've got a very distinct memory of reading this when it was published - Dan Reed's Zombots certainly made a very strong impression. The scene with the decapitated head certainly provided a chilly thrill that, in terms of visual horror, was never matched in the original run (although Sullivan's rather gleeful sequence of Galvatron's skin being pulled off at the end of Time Wars comes close).
I look forward to the next few issues!
Mx

Ralph Burns

7/7/2015 04:19:02 am

10-year old Ralph: AAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!
37-year old Ralph: AAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Stuart

7/7/2015 01:47:03 pm

That's the interesting thing about this storyline, everyone loves it pretty much unambiguously, but it never gets that much attention. Let the six week reappraisal begin!

Simon Hall

7/7/2015 02:01:56 pm

I like this too...but not as much as you guys. Probably because I didn't read this until the Titan collections, by which time I'd read lots of other grisly stuff in the meantime :)

Dan Reed is great though. Always liked his stuff, and this and Time Wars are my favourite things of his.

Auntie Slag

9/7/2015 11:57:49 am

Loved reading this saga round my mates house. Although I wasn’t a fan of the artists squidgy depiction of Transformers, I felt it worked best here. Interesting story, great use of colour. Colour played a big part in the impact of a good Transformers issue for me. To have great art is one thing, but great colour too? Its probably why I enjoyed the whole era from Prey to issue 104 (where I could even forgive Jeff Anderson). It was home run after home run at that time.

This saga is slightly less successful, but it delivered the goods by feeling like a properly good Transformers story, as opposed to some of the Budiansky stuff that had been doing the rounds (Club Con and BW & the Carwash of Doom).

Transformation 164: Well Chuffed.

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