Transformation 221: Remember Me?

5/8/2016

Death's Head is back!

But not in an original adventure. He's having enough trouble keeping those going over on his own book. Instead it's reprint time!

Meanwhile, Skids turns out to be the manager from hell and Broadside is a bit paranoid. Though everyone is out to get him.

It's all in my look at issue 221!

9 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

5/8/2016 03:55:57 pm

There's something about Stokes's depiction of Skids that doesn't feel quite right. Is he still drawing the characters as the toys when he can get his hands on them? (And how is a good question - IIEC Skids is the only 1985 car absent from both the 1986 UK poster catalogue and the list of toys available way back during Target 2006.)

At the time the Action Force part was an interesting introduction to computerised payroll before I ever had a card of any kind, though looking back it feels surprisingly antiquated. Was the US really such a slow adopter of such basic payroll methods?

And the reprint. Now I'm another for whom these stories were new and so didn't personally feel the anger. Looking back it seems the comic was becoming a victim of its own success. A lot of successful British comics are either long running properties (usually continuous, sometimes relaunching after a gap) or brief titles tying in with a fad. The latter is only expected to last a few years and so not get into problems. The former expects the readership to completely turn over every few years and so it's possible to do the same sort of stories and even reprint old stories that the current readership are estimated to have not seen before.

At this stage the comic and property are almost five years old and entering the long running phase. Unfortunately the cult readership it's built up means that there are going to be a lot more people who have seen this stuff before. Worse still the Collected Comics have exhausted a lot of the material from the first couple of years (and possibly used up a "one reprint max without further negotiation" clause) and what's left is either probably too long to run or intermediate parts of arcs or partially black & white. So the available material becomes even more recent, compounding the problem.

I wonder just how much of an understanding of the readership Marvel UK had at this time? (And I stress Marvel UK because a lot of the decisions, especially financial, would have been taken above the editor's head.) But from comments it seems they were expecting a new generation of Transformers fans to have arisen and those who had lapped up the earlier years to have moved on.

How old were each group supposed to be? And exactly what were we supposed to have moved onto? Death's Head and Action Force Monthly? (The latter would also have been nearing its final issue around now.) There's a bit of an overlap between both titles and this cover.

Stuart

5/8/2016 04:10:36 pm

Yeah, there's clearly a desire to keep the book going past the point it probably would have been cancelled otherwise (whether because of some residual fondness for a once very successful book, it doing better than their original titles still or Hasbro being keen or a combination of all of them) but they really don't have an idea how to do it.

Another problem with trying to get new kids hooked with reprints as well is they'd probably rather being seeing adventures of the new toys they own rather than Rodimus, or even Skids I suppose...

Dave

5/8/2016 10:02:31 pm

I do wonder how much of an issue the reprints were for the majority of readers. For me, as someone who began with Space Pirates, it felt exciting to be getting to see these old adventures, and the talking up of them in the mag as "reprinted due to popular demand" made them sound even better.

What I wonder is how many kids who were long-time readers really kept archives of past issues? I'm sure there were many who did, I kept all of mine for years, but a significant portion probably had their comics thrown out fairly immediately so the repetition might have felt like a welcome repeat of things they'd read a couple of years earlier (which to a kid can feel a lifetime ago)

John D. link

6/8/2016 01:58:26 am

Always a pleasure to read Tim's comments. Are/were you in the publishing trade Tim? You seem very aware of likely contractual arrangements. I found the reprints pretty disappointing. For context, my mum must have started getting me the comic around issue I can recall the cover of issue 50 (Dinobot Hunt; Grimlock fighting Snarl) which the TF Wiki shows me was published in March 1986, when I had just turned 6. I can remember issue 70ish (Omega Supreme's debut; July or August 1986) and everything from then on pretty clearly. Something must have switched on in my brain when I was about 6 and a half! So by the time things like "in the national interest" got reprinted I was not impressed at all. I would have been impressed if they had gone back to the really early issues - so I can see why kids who hadn't seen the post-Target 2006 stuff would be pretty excited. I had the collected comics issues 3 and 4 but otherwise I longed to find issues 1 - 20 (Transformers Marvel UK) and for years would search comic shops (pre internet) with noluck. It would have been a dream come true. Sad I know. I must have had to wait until maybe the Dreamwave days in the noughties to see issues 1 - 20ish - were they collected in a trade book around that time? Have all the early UK stories been re-published?

Stuart

6/8/2016 02:08:24 am

Apart from a couple of later Annual stories, everything has now been reprinted in some form, though across two companies and various formats. When the IDW Classics UK books finish (book 6 out in January!) that'll be the first time who whole lot of UK stories has been out in a uniform series.

Simon Hall

7/8/2016 12:53:51 pm

I have these issues! A massive Death's Head fan, I was keen to own his Transformers issues (I was reading DH's solo book, but never found anything beyond #7, I did see an #10 on sale, but my internal pedantry wouldn't let me buy it until I'd picked up 8 and 9), and I knew my friend Stuart had them, but wouldn't sell them. He was more than happy to sell me these issues though, which reprinted those stories. So they made me happy too. But for different reasons than anyone reading Transformers.

I love John Stokes work. Always one of my favourites on Transformers. His work is quite traditional and unflashy, but its solid and nicely detailed. I love his work Special Teams with Buster's nightmare a particular highlight. His work here is nice too. I love how rich it looks in b&w.

I wonder if the problems with the book were precisely because people were sticking with it. Whilst that's a plus for Hasbro - they can continue to enjoy the cross-promotion of toys, it'll cause headaches for the folk running the book. Despite the original material, its first and foremost a reprint book ... and if there's no US reprints to go for, what do you do? Putting Death's Head in was probably an obvious go-to given how popular he was and the impression he originally made. I suspect that's where the 'mountain of mail' was - in a heap from a year or so ago. It may have helped with a bit of promotion for his own book (if you could bloody find it anywhere). That said, any new readers were likely to be non-plussed. What is impressive even at this stage, is that its still popular enough to run as a weekly title. Normally, these sorts of things get merged into another book (the oft seen 'Great News Chums!' on many a british comic heralding a merger - I never knew that Whizzer And Chips were actually separate comics at one time in some years after the fact) or turned into a monthly (as happened with Overkill sometime later).

LiamKav

8/10/2020 01:44:05 am

I'm pretty sure Wizzer and Chips were never separate comics. The whole concept of the comic was "two comics in one" but it was that way from the get go, to try and create feelings of being a fan by making you pick a team (Wizz-kids for life!)

Tim Roll-Pickering link

8/10/2020 02:22:48 pm

Here's a look at the first issue and there's nothing indicating a merger: http://www.greatnewsforallreaders.com/blog/2016/11/13/ten-things-i-discovered-in-the-first-issue-of-whizzer-and-chips

Regarding a possible Transformers merger I suspect it would have to have been with another title based on a Hasbro property and it had outlived all the others. Certainly it's notable that the Hasbro properties were absent from the Marvel Bumper Comic whereas other licenced material appeared there; whilst the absorption of Action Force and Visionaries suggests there wasn't anywhere else for those licences to go.

(One problem with this theory is Action Force/G.I. Joe appearing in the anthology the Incredible Hulk Presents alongside Doctor Who and Indiana Jones. Perhaps the anthology nature of the series or the banner [ha] headline being one of Marvel's own properties meant things were different there.)

Ralph Burns

11/8/2016 07:08:37 pm

Young Ralph was tremendously excited to see Death's Head on the cover. He was back! Hooray!
Young Ralph looked inside and saw a %^&% reprint, which confused him utterly as he had been trained to know that reprints went into the Collected Comics Specials.
Young Ralph went to a deep dark corner and cried. The tears never stopped. Ever.
Ever.

Ever.

Ever.

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Transformation 221: Remember Me?

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