Transformation 246: Face Your Demons.

27/1/2017

This week Ratchet and Megatron bond over shoving a corpse into a shell.

Plus, Xaaron continues to show his love and support for Micromasters.

And Combat Colin starts to hit the anvil with the hammer of Prisoner references.

All this plus Bob Budiansky comes to the UK in my look at ISSUE 246!

18 Comments

Dave

27/1/2017 07:26:21 pm

I'm confused by your comments about the cover not having a transformer in evidence....isn't the whole cover Seawatch's face?

Stuart

27/1/2017 07:28:59 pm

Ohhhh...Holy crap. I've never seen it before! I really thought it was a monster in a red suit. Oh dear...

Dave

27/1/2017 10:33:50 pm

Haha, happy to help. Let's try and make this go viral, like the blue and black dress ;)

Nathan Webb

27/1/2017 09:29:33 pm

Hahahahahahahah

Chris Chapman

27/1/2017 11:41:06 pm

I... can't stop looking at that cover now. It's like a magic eye. How are you seeing a monster in a space suit? I just can't see it... WHY CAN'T I SEE IT??

Stuart

28/1/2017 01:43:58 am

I've managed to create the one surprise thing we'll be talking about this week... :O

Tom

28/1/2017 10:34:37 am

What on Earth! I can't for the life of me see a red suit! That's so funny! I actually really enjoy this story. Set nicely before Yesterday's Heroes it's a great precursor to Still Life that almost gives the illusion that it was all planned.
Only 3 more issues directly tied to the ongoing continuity before it hits the fan........

Simon Hall

28/1/2017 10:50:53 am

I'd never known how out of synch the continuity between the US/ UK material really was as this time. I'd definitely have been a bit 'WTF?' reading this first time around seeing Grimmers and that all in bits in the first half and then just fine and dandy in the second.
Jeff Anderson's art is really great on this story, isn't it? Love it!

And yes, let me be the 94th person to point out that that is one of the titular demons reflected in Seawatch's eye, thus reflecting (pun intended) the contents of the issue.

...its not a very good cover though, all the same.

In fact, looking in the back of the Hachette Partwork volume 18, a lot of the UK covers from this point on vary from great to odd (resized panels of the US comic art painted up) to awful (resized panels of the US comic art painted up).

FIENDISH FEET! om nom nom nom nom

Ralph Burns

28/1/2017 10:58:31 am

I can't see the monster in the space suit ei -

-AAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Richard

28/1/2017 01:59:34 pm

Speaking of the Hachette Partwork, I just picked up the third volume - which is very nice with all the coloured UK art - but I thought I read somewhere that they were trying to collect all the stories in chronological order, in which case shouldn't Underworld be included between All the Familiar Faces and Yesterday' Heroes? (along with Two Megatrons, although dropping that from continuity at least makes a certain amount of sense...)

Stuart

28/1/2017 07:01:56 pm

A nice post! The ordering in the partwork does seem a tad random (Cold Comfort and Joy in the wrong place), but for the black and white stories in the third issue I think Furman intentionally wriggled the ones drawn for colour into one of the books that would be in the test so that even if it went no further at least those would get the treatment they'd been intended for.

Tigerbread

28/1/2017 09:56:06 pm

Now that the partworks have been brought up, I thought I would mention that the colouring for issues 215 - 218 is..
adequate. The intention is to alternate between US and UK style colouring, depending on the continuity it ties into.

bouncelot

29/1/2017 06:56:08 pm

Like a lot of other people, I can't see how you'd see a spacesuit. I can get that you must have thought Seawatch's eye was the helmet, but I can't see which other features you thought were part of a spacesuit. Can you at least explain that so the rest of us can get what was going through your head?

Tigerbread

29/1/2017 09:13:41 pm

I suppose Seawatch's nose could've been mistaken for a spacesuit arm.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

3/2/2017 02:46:58 pm

The switch to "G.I. Joe the Action Force" seems to have caught Marvel UK on the hop - The Incredible Hulk Presents also ran the mini comic in issue #8 (same week as TF #245) but didn't change the name of the strip until issue #10, coinciding with the start of a new story. Perhaps the new logos weren't yet available for pasting up?

And this saga would be almost be perfectly aligned if the US strips were running about a month earlier so it would have run alongside Yesterday's Heroes - you can almost hear Furman's frustration at how once again his plans get messed up by the reprints.

Stuart

3/2/2017 07:09:32 pm

I can see the logic in not bothering to change the logo on an old story, but not having them ready for the covers of either TF of Hulk is a bit sloppy and as you say suggests it wasn't that well planned.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

10/2/2017 02:31:29 pm

In the case of Hulk the logos didn't actually appear on the cover so it would have been just a case of what appeared at the top of the first page of the strip.

There's also the problem that this change was made at an awkward time of year as the annual and Christmas presents would still have the old name. It wasn't the best timed rebranding going. Marathon becoming Snickers some seven months later was a better example, doing so after Easter but well before Christmas so getting the name bedded in and the old stock out of the way before the peak periods.

Felicity link

27/11/2019 07:36:38 pm

I couldn’t see the spacesuit either, but then I found that if you hold your hand over Seawatch’s mouth so you can only see his eye and nose, then it does look like the demon is wearing a deep-sea-diving robot suit.

So are these the same demons that attack Action Master Grimlock and Hi-Q towards the end of the series? For us North American readers they really came out of nowhere.

I, too, love how Ratchet gets enthusiastic about his work before remembering its evil purpose. I like Starscream’s Pretender armour, too.

The lettering of Blackjack’s “Though I enjoy spinning subtle webs of deceit…” has an anomaly. The word “I” is written extra bold and large, as though Jim Massara forgot to put it in originally and it had to be shimmied in at the last minute. The effect is to make it sound as if Blackjack is about to draw a comparison between himself and another person, something like “Though *I* enjoy spinning subtle webs of deceit, *someone else* doesn’t.”

As a fan of the cartoon first and foremost, I wouldn’t have minded if José Delbo (or any artist) didn’t put so much human-like expression into the Transformers’ faces, at least back when I first read this. However, it’s grown on me, and I agree with you; it works here and I’ve grown to love it.

Transformation 246: Face Your Demons.

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