Transformation 241: Christmas on the Beach.

25/12/2016

Merry Christmas everyone!

Aplogies for the delay on this one, but hopefully this will make a nice read over the post turkey slouch.

Prime gets distracted, and Thunderwing goes to a party, all in my look at ISSUE 241!

Have a good one folks.

5 Comments

Ralph Burns

25/12/2016 01:48:37 pm

I care about Jaws 2. It's no 'Jaws: The Revenge' (the novel, which is worse than the film).

Young Ralph was once a Wise Man during a Nativity Play at Christmas. Much of the green room chat was about how we were all missing Jaws on the telly because of it. Bitter times.

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Tim Roll-Pickering link

25/12/2016 07:36:18 pm

I'd not realised it before, but the shortening of the US TF strips may explain why early in 1990 the G.I. Joe the Action Force reprints switched to four parts instead of five. It would also have the minor benefit of getting an extra US issue in each year, slowly making up for additional Special Missions issues that were pushing things behind the toyline even further. Thanks to this storyline being told in both US titles and a couple of other tricks in the weeks ahead, some of the threads with Billy and Fred are now going to dangle for a bit longer than in the original printing. (Characters changing clothes across titles is annoyingly common with crossovers, but this one may have been strained further by the last minute replacement of the McFarlane art. Looking at the scans on http://www.cbr.com/comic-book-legends-revealed-182/ it's clear that Quick Kick and Snow Job did actually take their regular outfits behind the Iron Curtain even if they didn't wear them in the raid.)

If the comic did have a Hasbro UK mandate to help clear out the previous year's toys then this would explain not only the choice of Enemy Action so early in the Collected Comics run but also the emphasis of the publicity on the Seacons and Firecons. But the Ark Duty mess is an early sign of the debacle that the Collected Comics got into in the next couple of years.

Was Thunderwing meant to be an early version of the character model Jhiaxus eventually took? He also started off calm but descended into madness - and we learned along the way that he had been a mad tyrant before but believed he'd purged that madness only to learn he'd actually just suppressed it. If so then I can see an attempt to expand the character arc for Thunderwing by showing what was beneath the surface, although it would have been very quick given that Furman probably wrote this expecting Thunderwing to show up in the US reprints within weeks (or even in the same issue as next week's story).

And yes, the US strip is the cliche of everyone else rushing off to deal with the smallest of threats but then the new toy rule means the Micromasters win just about every other confrontation until their last appearance in the regular title.

Simon Hall

26/12/2016 11:37:43 am

Always think its a shame Collected Comics ended up such as mess. I got thoroughly fed up of seeing that butchered version of 'Victory' reprinted to the point of farce, becoming the comics version of 'The Girl Who Loved Powerglide'.

As for this issue, yeah, this Thunderwing arc is drab. Never much of a fan of showing us how unhinged a character is by having him beat up his own troops. In some ways, its a shame that we don't ever get to know much about Thunderwing. By the time he appears in the US strip, he's just obsessed and then possessed and then dead, so its hard to care about him. Boo.

(Still like this lead strip - even though it is very silly that Prime takes EVERYONE to deal with four Micromasters. Sigh.)

Mark Stevenson

28/12/2016 10:57:12 pm

Well, it's finally here...
This is a special issue for me, because this was the last TFUK I got upon publication. At the start of November 1989 my family upped sticks and moved to New Zealand. At the time this meant being cut off from everything we knew culturally, leaving everything and everyone we knew behind; this was long before the internet shrank the world and it was (needless to say) all very strange...
So issue 241 was the end of a road for me; with the exception of the odd Earthforce-era issue that my Nan would send over (and bless her - god only knows how much posting a comic to the other side of the world would have cost in 1990), and the even more occasional imported US comic that I found in NZ shops, this was where my first journey with the Transformers ended. It wasn't until a decade later that I'd find out how the story continued, firstly by slowly downloading low-res scans at University and then by spending a fortune to complete the rest of my collection at a few of the Transforce shows.
So for that reason, this otherwise fairly unremarkable comic is very, very important to me.
(Side note: before we moved, I still had all the original packaging for my TF toys. My Mum told me to throw it all away as we couldn't take it with us and "it's not really worth anything, is it?". DOZENS of pristine boxes. If I ever need to emotionally blackmail her today I remind her of that collection and it's probable value...)

Felicity link

26/11/2019 06:33:22 pm

It was wise of Simon Furman to establish that the Autobots are short on soldiers so that it doesn’t seem like Optimus Prime takes a hundred Autobots to handle four Decepticon Micromasters. Not to mention that when Scorponok shows up with more Decepticons, Optimus will be glad that he brought more than four Autobots.

This is a long shot, but given Furman’s penchant for Bond references, could Thunderwing walking out of the water and onto the beach be a Bond reference? For 1989 it would have be the Ursula Andress version and not Halle Berry or Daniel Craig.

I have no respect for villains who aren’t loyal to their own followers. Cartoon Galvatron was bad for this. Coincidentally at the same time over in “GI Joe” we had the same sort of behaviour from Serpentor.

Transformation 241: Christmas on the Beach.

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