Transformation 242: Doing the Delbo.

29/12/2016

A long dead villain makes a surprise return!

Unless you're a British reader in which case everyone pretends a very much alive villain has been dead so he can make a surprise return.

Also, Thunderwing shows what a good potential leader he might make and how well his tenure will end.

All in my look at ISSUE 242!

And a very happy New Year to you all!

10 Comments

Ralph Burns

30/12/2016 11:48:25 pm

Words cannot convey how exciting Fiendish Feet were back in the day. I collected them all. I am sure they featured on a future cover too! I entered this competition. Did I win? No!!!

My memory may be off, but I am sure regular correspondent Mark Stevenson has the original art for this cover. It was for sale at a con and looked gorgeous and I am sure he grabbed it!

Speaking of the cover, mention must be made of a change from this issue as this was the first to feature a bar code on the cover. I remember being really angry about it at the time as it covered up part of the image and to my mind ruined the cover design. It did not help that bar codes were ugly things. We hadn't needed them before! We're at that forgotten era when folk in shops entered prices manually on their tills rather than scanned them. Jings, I feel old!

SPECIAL TEAMS! FIENDISH FEET!

Mark Stevenson

5/1/2017 10:16:59 am

Hi Ralph - sorry bud, but it's not me! It's a nice cover too. Perhaps it was one of my many clones that had it?

Tim Roll-Pickering link

30/12/2016 11:50:46 pm

At the time I was sufficiently new to the series to not realise just how much Megatron had been around over the last few years and thus I was one of the few British readers for whom this revelation was a shock rather than a "hang on, you're still alive". But that just added to confusion as and when I saw other stories that showed how messed up this was.

Fiendish Feet - oh how these ads take me back, though I can't remember if we ever had any ourselves. Are we due a nostalgia revival?

At the risk of a comment of outrage, is Keith Barron an actual person who's been writing for many years or a longstanding pseudonym for made-up letters designed to help support the editorial line? Critical letters that allow a reply to either explain an editorial policy or announce things are changing for the better aren't unusual.

Stuart

31/12/2016 12:34:18 am

Not sure how his current letters come across, but a "The comic hasn't been good for two years!" one would be a bit much to use in those circumstances. Especially as Dreadwind doesn't really argue against most of his complaints, just that one of them will be addressed in the New Year.

I still do think that "I notice there are films, have you ever thought of doing a Transformers film?" letter in mid-86 might have been a plant though.

Ralph: Hadn't noticed the bar code. Alas the innocent days.

Wait, Monster Munch is crisps isn't it? What am I thinking of?

Lee

31/12/2016 10:40:28 am

Munch Bunch?

Simon Hall

31/12/2016 11:34:00 am

I liked Fiendish Feet! The yoghurts were quite luminous IIRC and the flavours were pretty good, if a bit sharp. And yes, I kept the pots afterwards. For a bit. Until I looked at them and went 'what am I doing with these?'. As with old breakfast cereal packaging, I bet these are fairly valuable now.

That splash of Megatron is awesome and definitely one of Delbo's highlights on the book (still like this story).

The Thunderwing stuff on the B&W end of things is definitely one of the weaker Transformers stories. Its just not very good and does nothing to sell Thunderwing as a credible threat. Its boggling he's made leader after this fiasco. This is the best the Decepticons could do? Mind you, I suppose its like any large organisation where egotistical yes men are more likely to get ahead than those that think about what they're doing. Bludgeon's rein can't come soon enough...

Ryan F

2/1/2017 11:27:41 am

I also collected Fiendish Feet yoghurt pots, and trust me, they weren't a poor man's anything. As well as the yoghurts they later branched out into other potted desserts like mousses and fromage frais and jelly-type things, thereby forcing my mum to keep a sharp eye on the dairy aisle for any new characters that came along!

I would suppose that there's a causal link between the Fiendish Feet competition and the lack of a calendar this month. Given the choice between wasting two pages on a calendar or getting paid by St Ivel to run a competition, there was only really one choice for the flagging title.

Did anyone actually remove the calendars, or use them? Even as a kid I thought they were a bit rubbish, and just skipped past them. The choice of art was always a bit baffling, I thought. No way 'Ladies Night' was one of the top 12 British covers up to that point. Maybe (as with some of the older strips), all the good early ones were lost?

Alex Smith link

6/1/2017 12:22:48 pm

They later became Fiendish Faces, I believe.

Felicity link

26/11/2019 09:58:01 pm

There was indeed some confusion about who stayed on the Ark and who teleported to Cybertron. It sure seemed to me—and to at least one other person who wrote in to the letter column about this—that Ratchet was asking why Jazz, Bumblebee, and Grimlock weren’t coming. Of course, that wouldn’t work with Ratchet turning them into the other Classic Pretenders. The letter column tried to claim that Ratchet was asking why Blackjack wasn’t coming, but that still doesn’t add up…if so, then why would Ratchet ask why “they” aren’t coming? It’s one of those errors that stresses me out until I’m forced to just not think about it.

Nevertheless, a good issue of the comic and one that I enjoyed seeing reviewed here!

LiamKav

10/10/2020 09:17:22 pm

I've never been able to figure out exactly how Delbo thinks that Prime's shoulder cannons attach to his arms. They always look like they're just floating next to it.

(Also, really sloppy colouring on that final panel where Yomtov apparently thinks that Ratchet's right hand is actually Megatron's?)

Transformation 242: Doing the Delbo.

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