Transformation 271: Blackrock and G.I. Joe.

20/7/2017

It's a first for the comic this week...

But not one to be proud of.

plus, Mindwipe strieks and Combat Colin meets his doom!

All in my look at ISSUE 271!

11 Comments

Ryan F

21/7/2017 04:37:13 pm

I feel your pain - this issue was pretty terrible. By this point I was getting the comic out of habit, rather than because it was actually any good. Thank goodness for Combat Colin!

(I actually use the word 'Yampy' in real life, and have done since I was a kid, just because of Combat Colin.)

Tim Roll-Pickering link

21/7/2017 05:31:53 pm

Dr Doom
vs
Thomas the Tank Engine

If only...

(And a joke a few months late as otherwise this is presumably intended to be Combat Colin's contribution to the Acts of Vengeance crossover that ran around the start of Matrix Quest.)

I wonder if earlier editors like Rimmer and Furman (or indeed a later one) would have tried to reorder the crossover scenes in order to get some Transformers into this issue? It's tricky given the flow of the story but they were never above tampering with the US material when it would produce better cliffhangers.

Ralph Burns

21/7/2017 09:45:33 pm

At the comic's lowest point, Combat Colin has now become the main selling point!

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Tigerbread

21/7/2017 09:51:28 pm

I was also getting tired of the book around this time, thanks in no small part to the thrilling Joe crossover. As a diehard fan I was compelled to keep going, at least until things improved, they must have lost a LOT of readers during it's run

Dave

22/7/2017 09:59:48 am

I've been surprised by some of the comments over the last few weeks. Not because I disagree with them. But as a kid I'd assumed I was alone in disliking GI Joe and Action Force because they were such a mainstay of the comic. So while I found this period a struggle, I'd assumed all other readers were okay with it. Was GI Joe ever actually popular in the UK or was it purely Hasbro's desperation to keep the brand alive that kept it tied to the Transformers comic?

For me I seen to remember the comic reaching a golden age after this; I was unaware of the difference between British and American strips (The switching speech bubble designs was confusing though!), and not knowing it had been seen before I really like Machine Man as it was a breath of fresh air after years of GI Joe. So it will be interesting to see what everyone thinks at that point

Tim Roll-Pickering link

22/7/2017 02:59:18 pm

The G.I. Joe/Action Force toyline was a solid seller that lasted many years here but I don't recall it ever being that big a thing. It *may* have been different earlier in 1980s when Palitoy and IPC were handling things.

I suspect that Marvel UK had signed up to the rights with a contract that committed them to rather more appearances than the market could really sustain - they ran the weekly strip across first Action Force weekly and then Transformers for almost exactly four years before stopping with just a few specials for another couple of years and that has a whiff of contractual obligations carrying on despite the standalone weekly no longer being viable. The Monthly was probably an attempt to crack the US market in order to recoup some of the money spent.

The whole thing feels like the problem of a toyline that's not popular enough to sustain its own title but not *un*popular enough for the toy company to let licensees give up early on so it wound up in the only other Hasbro licensed title.

Ralph Burns

22/7/2017 10:11:00 pm

Action Force US strips also ran in the short-lived THE INCREDIBLE HULK PRESENTS. It was the series that Marvel UK would not let die.

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Simon Hall

22/7/2017 03:40:19 pm

To this day, even having owned various runs of Transformers, I never the G.I. Joe back up strip. It just never interested me. I had a couple of the toys, which I liked putting together, but that was about it.

I've a got a few issues of the US Joe book used to launch TF:G2, and they're awful - the title is trading solely on Snake Eyes being the most popular (to the extent its his name on the cover, with G.I. Joe in tiny writing above) - a weird mix of ninja bullshit mixed with some attempt at a serious military story (always something I found risable about G.I. Joe when you've got the likes of Dr Mindbender wandering about).

i do like the first live action Joe film, though...

Harry

22/7/2017 04:57:57 pm

I suspect that one great advantage that Transformers, as a toyline, comic or cartoon enjoyed which G.I. Joe didn't was that, while the Earth-based stories in the comic and cartoon largely took place in the USA, the main characters themselves were aliens, making their battle of good versus evil more universally palatable than the Amerocentric bias of the Joes? Not that I'm indulging in knee-jerk liberal bashing of the US, lest anyone think so, but the property did lend itself to 'Murica F**k Yeah!' jingoism even if the likes of Larry Hama didn't intend this (though I read online that there were some barbed comments in the comics about people who bought non-US made cars?). And the solution adopted by Marvel U.K. and Hasbro, rebranding the Joes as Action Force and changing the nationalities of characters to make it an international anti-terrorist organisation, was a brave attempt but it never truly worked (as a kid, I knew about G.I. Joe as an entity and that Action Force was somehow our edited version, but, then, I also sussed the difference between the US reprints and original UK material in the main Transformers strip quite early on as well!). My brother and I did own some of the toys, I admit, but it never really hit as big here as Transformers did.

Richard link

25/7/2017 04:27:42 pm

I wonder if the popularity of the Commando comic in the UK was in any way part of the GI Joe's trouble in getting traction over here? "Why have sci fi / pseudo military when you can have the real thing?"

Felicity link

15/12/2019 05:31:35 am

Weirdly enough, I had the theme from “The Living Daylights” playing in my head before I encountered this entry!

It’s been too long since I read the comic so I don’t know for sure, but doesn’t the mini-series at least establish that Anthony is OK at the end? There’s some pathos with wondering whether being a discarded victim of Bombshell means he’ll be catatonic for the rest of his life.

Good for GB Blackrock, pitching in. (IIRC his crew captures the parachuting Cobras.)

In the cartoon, Mindwipe was scarily powerful, based on what little we saw. He could mind-control anybody once he’d gotten close enough to talk to them. Even his Nebulan partner, the brainy Vorath, was immediately subdued. Sadly, we never got a full fourth season to find out more about the implications of this.

Transformation 271: Blackrock and G.I. Joe.

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