Transformation 198: Goodwill to all Men.

26/2/2016

We've made it to the end of another year! As 1988 closes a storm is gathering and the Powemasters might help to stop it if not for a combination of being obsessed with Miami Vice and Optimus thinking they're all twats.

But that's not all! We also have Transformers Universe, the 1988 Annual and the Collected Comics to deal with!

Writing four pieces (three of them lengthy) in a week has sent me a bit mad, so thank you all for reading for the last 12 months. 1989 has lots of interesting turns in store for us.

Here be the links:

Cold Comfort and Joy!

Transformers Universe

1988 Annual

Collected Comics.

13 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

27/2/2016 12:28:15 am

I first read Cold Comfort & Joy in the Collected Comics reprint when it doubled up as the 1991 Christmas story by default. It's an okay bit of fluff for what it is, but coming after the middle of Time Wars, including Sandstorm's death, it did feel rather out of place.

Transformers Universe has one other difference from the Marvel Handbooks - it doesn't fill out entries with synopses of the characters' histories that rapidly date (anyone who read my reviews of all the Essential collected editions of the Handbooks will have noted my frustration with their timelocked nature) which may reflect the source material but has the side advantage of being reasonably cartoon friendly (at least until one reachs Shockwave). As a kid I found this a couple of years later on a trip to Guildford and it was the nearest to a substitute for all the AtoZs I'd missed. It did surprise me at the time that the book was using the US numbering, not realising Marvel US was behind it.

This annual was also an after the event find, albeit in my local John Menzies's when they did a stockroom clear out and I picked up both this and the next year's at the same time. It's probably the second best of the seven IMHO, getting the right balance between stand alone fun and important serious stuff without causing too many problems for readers of the book or the comic (at least at the time) but not both. But it does also have the howler of Optimus Prime abandoning his trailer only to subsequently combined with it.

I disagree about the paper now used by the Collected Comics (it will change back and forth a bit) - as I've said before I think it does a good job absorbing the inks and colours, particularly with the painted colouring.

bouncelot

27/2/2016 11:25:49 am

The more obvious clue that there wasn't any preparation time for the switch in format for the weekly is that the first six issues clearly featured UK stories that were written as 11 pagers.

Charles RB

27/2/2016 11:46:34 am

Peace is astonishingly bleak and that's why I considerate it THE ending for Transformers (and put that one Rodimus panel riiiiight at the bottom of TF Wiki's Marvel timeline so it's the last thing seen). Other Transformers fictions would give you the future where everything's turned out quite nice, maybe bitter-sweet, but the goodies won and the baddies didn't.

Not Marvel UK. Here, the ultimate end is the Autobots turning on each other because of deep-seated wartime tensions and because it's just too easy for them to pull that trigger. How else is the 4-million-years-o-war story going to end? They probably didn't even need Triton to spark it off.

And of the other two UK endings, the last original strip has the Decepticons winning and the war carrying on. (Unless you count The Magnificent Six as the last Earthforce, and then that whole storyline ends with depressed, traumatised guys stomping around looking for a magic bullet that might not exist.)

These all feel like they left a big impression on James Roberts - particularly in how the big post-war threats in MTMTE are almost _always_ Autobots who got messed up in the head - and led to someone at TMUK saying "what if the post-war Cybertronian is a grey, depressing cyberpunk dictatorship?".

Alex Smith link

27/2/2016 03:39:01 pm

This was my first annual and, along with the Flames of Boltax, are some of the earliest memories I have of the comic. I did get the preceding annuals pretty soon after, as I imagine many of them are still clogging up second-hand bookshops.

All in the Minds I recall freaking me out a bit, and Scorponok is terrifying in it. Am I mis-remembering, or does the bit where Highbrow overloads the gun have that great sound-effect "CHAKKA-DAMM"? That's a fave.

Between Peace and Time Wars I was also left with the impression that Scattorshot was a bit of a prick, and that Roadbuster was basically there to get blown up. Whirl also confused and frightened me - I had no idea if he had a toy or not back then. He also has hands in this story!

Ralph Burns

27/2/2016 09:33:05 pm

I must fill in the coupon and send it off now! Before it's too late!

SPECIAL TEAMS!

bouncelot

28/2/2016 12:08:02 am

The coupon expires on the 31st December (year not specified). The date on the cover is 31st December 1988. Does that mean that readers were expected to send them in immediately, or that they had an entire year to do so?

Stuart

28/2/2016 03:14:33 am

The cover is dated a week in advance. Not a huge amount of time though.

Cradok

29/2/2016 03:11:12 pm

11 was my first CC, meaning I got a quadruple dose of 'new' Christmas stories. I liked Cold Comfort - I've always been iffy on placing it before Prime linked up with the Ark on the Moon, I think it fits better after that, and right before Time Wars - partly because I *think* I'd ended up with my cousin's Sandstorm at that point. I also really liked The Gift, even though I didn't have any of the toys that show up in that. It does tie in nicely with my Jetfire obsession, though, so maybe it was the proto version of that.

I have pretty strong connections to all four of the annuals I owned as a kid, but I'd agree that this is probably the better of the four. It was the first time an annual I had continued from a story I actually had the comic for, rather than something I had to imagine, and all three strip stories were *good*. The text stories, I have less memory of. I've definitely read them all at some point, but didn't really do so when I was young. I've always found Transformers don't work terribly well for me in text form. I even declined buying Eugenesis when it was released because of this. Still haven't read it, actually...

Stuart

1/3/2016 05:54:43 pm

It's interesting how many of you started reading around this time, obviously this project is mainly of interest to people like me!

The best kind of people.

Simon Hall

1/3/2016 07:58:25 pm

Whoop! Such a lot to comment on! Firstly, Cold Comfort And Joy. I like this. Its fun and done in one. 'The Gift' is probably the best of the Xmas stories though. I like Wildman's art here. The lack of backgrounds here isn't as obvious, because it is mostly snowing. I do really like how he makes the bulky Autobot Powermasters look good. And isn't it grand that we eventually got a Transformer toy that turns into a Toaster (no).

Transformers Universe is a joy to read. I love it. One of my favourite bits of TF media ever. I kind of like that its incomplete, although it did bother me when I was younger that there were robots featured on the cover that weren't inside. Including my beloved Pipes.A few years ago, I was so excited when Dreamwave covered the entire G1 line in a 'Universe' format, but disappointed with how that turned out. The reheats of Bob's work and the varying art styles didn't work for me. IDW bringing all the old Marvel stuff together I thought would be great, but then they've tinkered with the colouring and made some editorial choices I don't care for, so I'll be sticking with my battered old TFU thank you very much. I remember being finding this in a bookshop somewhere when I was on my way to my cousins house.They lived in Blackburn you know.

The 1988 Annual is the best of the UK Annuals. Prime Bomb is probably the weakest element of the Annual, but its by no means terrible. Good strips, loved the Seacons profiles (and that the sexy box art got used for these - shame Piranacon wasn't featured though, but continued the grand Marvel tradition of making the team members more important than the gestalt). Altered Image and All In The Minds are both great. Peace I always found blackly comical, and enjoyed it for that.Its a really great book! Love it.

The Collected Comics were all generally great (I missed the Crisis Of Command one) and I have a real soft spot for Robot Buster and Second Generation.

All in all, 1988 was definitely the peak of Transformers fiction in the UK. A year of really great stories and a huge growth of the comic. Its quite alarming how quickly 1989 will see the title change as sales start to drop off. Maybe its because a good portion of the target audience would have been hitting puberty and moving onto secondary school...and having to put childish things to one side whilst pretending to be a grown up :P

Alex Smith link

4/3/2016 02:09:39 pm

I'd always thought Time Wars pt 1 was Wildman's first interior work. Simon's right in that he makes the Powermasters look great here (but I do have a fondness for the blocky, Sunbow-esque aesthetic of the 'Master' tots.

Felicity link

15/11/2019 12:32:32 am

I definitely didn’t like Andrew Wildman’s “curves and teeth and saliva” art. Strangely enough I enjoyed his art on “GI Joe”; I guess it was just Transformers that I thought shouldn’t look like that. Nobody’s perfect. I love José Delbo’s art but not when he started giving the robots human eyeballs.

Cartoon Destro definitely didn’t seem Scottish to me either, even though IIRC there were at least two episodes where he went back to his ancestral castle in Scotland to do stuff. Informed attribute.

Felicity link

15/11/2019 06:54:24 am

(Comments on “Transformers Universe”)

It’s weird seeing all the Transformers the same size on that cover, combiners standing shoulder-to-shoulder with mini-spies! But I like it. :-)

I’m glad they revised Arcee’s model. As I might have mentioned before, IMHO the problem with the movie-originating characters is that they were designed completely by Floro Dery without the influence of a toy designer, allowing him to indulge in too many curves and low centres of gravity. The best-looking models are the original batch that were anthropomorphised heavily, adding stomachs, pelvises, and bits of arms where needed, and keeping the head small, the chest high, and the legs long. This was a style the artists got away from until, surprisingly enough, they brought it back in the later designs, from the Headmasters onward.

If it’s any consolation, when I got on the Internet in the mid-1990s and discovered that the cartoon wasn’t the “default” version of “Transformers” for everybody in the world, that was a shock to me too. As you saw from some of my earlier comments, I’m still not quite over it! :-)

Although Akin & Garvey were talented at conveying the texture of metal, funnily enough I find myself preferring the less-inked models like Shockwave, Skywarp, and later on the ones that appeared as back-up material in the regular comic, like Strafe. It’s all good, though. I love the whole series.

It might be fun to re-draw a character like Cosmos, not in his original chubby design, and not in some far-out anime-style 2000s design, but just massaged into more 1984 proportions.

Transformation 198: Goodwill to all Men.

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