Transformation 201: Civil War!

18/3/2016

It's Autobot Vs. Autobot, but are you team Fort Max or Team Rodmius? The alcoholic football thug headmasters are definitely the former.

Plus, the début of what is going to be the very short lived Mayhem Attack Squad!

And Scorponok gets ahead. It's all in my look at:

Time Wars: Part 3!

17 Comments

Alex Smith link

18/3/2016 04:12:00 pm

Fort Max's characterisation here is especially odd considering Furman does a decent job with him in 'The Last Autobot'.

The present-day Autobots not recognising the future Autobots is still baffling. I'd love to get an idea of what was going on behind-the-scenes at this time.

Stuart

19/3/2016 09:08:13 pm

He had help with Last Autobot though by just nicking Spike's story from Man in the Machine (which he did again for G2. Spike was always deciding his true fate was to be Fortress Maximus before sort of just forgetting and having to learn the lesson again. Till he died).

Tim Roll-Pickering link

21/3/2016 01:08:40 am

There's a line in there about imposters, which although focused on Rodimus Prime it could suggest the others are treated as such.

As for the time jump effect, how much did the contemporary Autobots ever actually learn about how it works? (Maybe Bumblebee's past knowledge is instead the error.) Though I wonder if some of the problem is down to Furman not specifying the full cast and Smith creating continuity errors by using Ironhide and the like - other than Goldbug do any of them actually speak?

Stuart

21/3/2016 06:15:10 am

The likes of Ironhide may be the result of that, but Wheeljack is specifically mentioned in dialogue (and we know Furman wrote "Full" scripts for the UK stuff) so presumably he was intentional.

It does feel like he didn't have time to go back and reread the earlier stuff and was working from two plus year old memories.

Alex Smith link

22/3/2016 11:33:24 pm

<<There's a line in there about imposters, which although focused on Rodimus Prime it could suggest the others are treated as such.>>

Actually that works - Fort Max, as a commander, presumably knows exactly where 'his' Hot Rod, Kup, Blurr etc. are currently based, especially with both the Time Wars and Underbase situations brewing onEarth. Seeing other versions of them pop up out of nowhere when he knows they ought to be on the Ark or something, it makes sense he'd think they were frauds!

Chris Chapman

18/3/2016 09:06:22 pm

Yeah, it's shit, ain't it?

It feels like the worst single issue Furman's written since Second Generation - certainly the worst he ever wrote for a big epic. I know you hate Space Pirates 2, but it's much better than this for me.

But as you say - next week is in a different league, and Time Wars really delivers from this point on. 202 was my introduction to Transformer comics and it's terrific fun/extremely violent/both.

Alex Smith link

19/3/2016 09:00:38 pm

Oh I still love Time Wars - it's the first epic I actually read in real time, and for fuck's sake, look at Galvatron's spiky soles. It's insane, and the best is yet to come; Galvatron being sucked up into the time vortex deserves to be up there with "...Are All Dead" as an iconic Transformers moment.

But, like many things in the harsh daylight of cruel adulthood, the cracks soon begin to show. The most frustrating thing is it had the potential to be so much bigger and better!

Ralph Burns

18/3/2016 09:09:06 pm

I will not hear a bad word about Time Wars!
*travels back from the future to defeat Mr Webb*

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Stuart

19/3/2016 09:06:53 pm

But killing me will destroy you for I AM YOUR FATHER.

John D. link

21/3/2016 07:40:36 am

I don't think I ever believed it was "megatron" in these stories, I treated the guy as some powerful random that galvatron had recruited. It's surprising in retrospect that Furman was allowed to write Megatron in Marvel UK as it was an obvious recipe for the big mess that followed. Was he perhaps assured the character was finished in Marvel US? It also seems odd there was no Powermaster Megatron. Anybody know why that was?

Charles RB

22/3/2016 03:48:08 pm

He must have just made an educated guess - Hasbro hadn;t started up new toys for the same guys at the time. Furman himself was the one who cocked it up by bringing Megatron back after all, with no toy to pimp (and why he didn't have a page done that the Uk could edit, I dunno)

Alex Smith link

22/3/2016 11:28:55 pm

Yeah, the real baffling decision here is the whole 'Two Megatrons' business - there must have been a more elegant solution and indeed, as we see later on with Deathbringer and Dreadwind and Darkwing's retrieval of Starscream, Furman had no problem putting in little references to UK stuff that would leave US readers nonplussed.

Christ, he could have had the Time Wars timestorm take Megatron as well, and deposit him back on Cybertron with yet another convenient case of amnesia - explained away by both the time storm and also Shockwave's reprogramming of his brain after he dragged him out of the Thames. Contrived as it is, compared to Two Megatrons, I think another bout of amnesia is a mild penance to pay.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

23/3/2016 10:56:01 am

However those are relatively small moments, mostly featuring bit part characters doing what sound like mundane tasks but actually weren't, although I wonder how many US readers were left wondering when the Deathbringer story happened. By contrast Megatron had been running around quite a bit and that would have been hard to handwave in such a way that he had been doing things on Earth but not seemingly spending years on Cybertron advancing a single plan using a form of technology not yet created to attack someone not yet in a significant post.

It's possible the problem was Don Daley insisting on a "Megatron miscalculated and took years to self-repair" story and Furman, on only his second US issue, didn't yet have the clout to make it flexible enough.

LiamKav

6/10/2020 07:17:13 pm

My main problem with the whole "Two Megatrons" fiasco is characters like Ratchet being under the impression that Megatron had been dead for several years. I know he wasn't present for these issues, but when shown all the Autobots he had to repair did no-one say "yeah, Galvatron and Megatron teamed up and went on a killing spree"? Did Blades never talk to him about meeting Megs in the sewers?

Nathan Webb

22/3/2016 03:35:04 pm

The whole autobot vs autobot is just a clique that all comics use every time heroes meet for the first time for example Batman vs Superman, daredevil vs punisher, ironman vs deaths head etc. It's dumb but it's just a formula of the comic format.

Felicity link

15/11/2019 11:28:58 pm

I’m surprised to see Rodimus Prime and Fortress Maximus drawn as being the same size. I know that it was only in the cartoon that Fortress Maximus was a city Transformer, but didn’t he rebuild himself twice as big in “Trial by Fire”? That’s why he’s now a double Headmaster with Spike becoming the head of Cerebros and Cerebros becoming the head of Maximus. Rodimus Prime should be the size of Cerebros, unless the Matrix did a lot more than just turn Hot Rod into a truck.

For that matter, why doesn’t every Transformer make themselves bigger, if this is a thing that can be done? At least until the Micromaster era where apparently, because of a fuel shortage, small is the new big.

Snowkatt

12/9/2020 10:03:33 pm

Yes, but all the major toys shrink when their toy isn't on the shelves anymore.

Omega Supreme is the biggest and most infamous example of that.
In his first appearance he takes out nearly all the remaining 1984 Decepticons on his own.

In totaled he gets taken out by Buzzsaw on his own.

Fort Max's upgrade gets mentioned three times and is then forgotten.

Transformation 201: Civil War!

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