Transformation 273: Wolf in the Combat Shed.

3/8/2017

A double bill this week to help us get over the slough of despair this Bloody Crossover has gotten us into.

First up, Serpentor meets Shockwave and Carnivac meets a Great Big Fiery Death (or DOES HE?) in my look at Transformers ISSUE 273!

Then, a special Addendum looking at the recently published collection of Action Force Combat Colin stories. Read that HERE.

And hopefully I'll be seeing many of you at TFNation next weekend!

15 Comments

John D. link

6/8/2017 01:33:50 pm

I can't ever recall reading the "action force" back up story. Which is really weird as I would read anything. I used to read my mind this copy of "Mean Machines" several times over. I read all the Enid blyton books. I read the back of cereal boxes. I must have tried it occasionally but decided action force was just too boring. I remember one issue involved snake eyes being attacked by a tiger? The art seemed quite vibrant so I must at least have turned the pages. There was the guy with the snakes in his helmet, and a guy with a gold helmet? And another bad guy with a monocle and moustache? And a girlfriend with glasses? This feels like Malcolm Tucker trying to describe Star Wars..

Was it just me or did it feel like the issues were all printed out of order?

Simon Hall

6/8/2017 03:52:24 pm

You've just described the level of interest in G.I. Joe there was in the UK, both in terms of the intended market and within the offices of Marvel UK at the time...

There's just something very silly about G.I.Joe being the more 'serious' toy/comics mash up when you've got a guy wearing snakes as the current antagonist. Military realism my arse.

The Carnivac story is proper ace though. And deservedly got the full colour treatment for the last UK annual. And I've just ordered all 3 of the comics off of Lew Stringer :)

Anonymous X

6/8/2017 07:20:07 pm

Wasn't the Action Force/GI Joe story crossover and later comic merger mandated by Hasbro as a requirement for keeping the Transformers licence, or something like that? You're right about AF/GI Joe not really being a big deal over here. (Personally I resented the comic merger, as I was stopped by my parents from buying the TF comic for about a year due to them disliking me reading or viewing anything too 'military'. Objections to the content of the Meltdown storyline sealed the deal though.)

John D. link

6/8/2017 11:26:04 pm

Amusing that you mention parent censorship! I lived in terror of the front cover including a naughty word in a speech bubble and my mum noticing and refusing to buy it. The word I seemed to fear was "darn" which was definitely used in dialogue. Looking back I don't know why I ever thought it was a "bad" word. The cover with shockwave pointing at an oil tanker and saying "FETCH" (I think such a cover exists?) seemed to trigger this anxiety. I imagined him pointing at something whilst saying "DARN".
To be fair there was some content that probably wasn't entirely appropriate for a 7 or 8 year old. And "spider man and zoids" (surely the most ridiculous merger of them all?) recycled stuff straight out of The Terminator and Aliens (18 certificate films) and was sometimes genuinely terrifying.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

7/8/2017 04:16:59 pm

Serpentor is one of the ultimate examples of how G.I. Joe got in a creative mess because of the different visions all pulling in their own direction. He was a Hasbro creation pretty much forced onto Larry Hama, with the origin in turn forced by the animated advert following the cartoon version. Hama always disliked the more fantastic elements that got added to the line but found it difficult to veto them, especially given the advertising forcing his hand. Serpentor was killed almost as soon as the toy dropped out of the line.

Burstingfoam

7/8/2017 12:06:49 pm

Poor old GI Joe/Action Force, never catching a break. Gonna have to say a few words in its defence, or at least in its understanding.

So, deep breath…

I was one of those benighted, apparently cursed, young folk who was a fan of both Transformers and Action Force (as it will always be to me). Perhaps most notably, my fandom can be seen in two ways. When it came to the comics, I was more of a fan of Transformers. When it came to the toys, I was more of a fan of Action Force. This is a twofold thing; firstly, the toys were, on the whole, cheaper. Secondly, and here we veer into ‘burn the heretic’ territory, the Action Force toys were frequently more fun to play with. So many Transformers, whilst beautiful pieces of Japanese engineering, weren’t that much fun to play with; Megatron in particular, top three character, terrible toy. And whenever I tried to engineer a battle between my Galvatron and my cousin’s Ultra Magnus, the latter would just fall to bits due to its weird design.

So I was a fan of both; it was just that the comic version of Transformers was actually more fun than playing with the toys themselves. I’d been a reader of Action Force since the days of the old Battle Action Force and the Red Shadows, and I’d been collecting them since the days when they didn’t even have codenames (I’m very old). That long-lying latent affection was very hard to kill off, even if the Joe comic was probably past its best by now (I never forgave them for the deeply arbitrary killing of Ripcord’s girlfriend)

Long and short of it, I loved having both of my favourites combined into the one comic; the nature of this blog seems to tend itself towards readers who were fans of the one and not the other (perhaps inevitably), but I’m surely not alone in enjoying both. And yes, the baddy has a snake on his head. This bothers me not in the slightest. When I first started reading Action Force, the baddy wore a bucket on his head (and was, I think, even referenced as such in the dialogue). If you can get past that, Serpentor’s not even a challenge.

Now, having said all of that, by this point in the comic’s run I’d checked out (no particular problem with the comics themselves, I ducked out around the time of the Underbase Saga as all of my efforts and pennies were henceforth being channelled into the more mature and sane world of Doctor Who), and coming back to them, the crossover is agonisingly poor. In the same way that the Big Broadcast put the unfairly abused Uncle Bob into a more positive context, so this must surely do the same for Larry Hama.

John D. link

7/8/2017 03:31:49 pm

I had precisely zero Action Force toys! Quite unusual as I had at least a few things from each major toy line (e.g. the Gobot leaders; Lion-O; a jeep from MASK; He-Man; etc). Who was the guy with the gold helmet? Was he assistant to Snake-Head?

I had Ultra Magnus but not Galvatron. I agree UM wasn't very good. Optimus Prime plus a fairly unposeable piece of plastic. At least Galvatron looked unusual. Anyone know the thinking? Was it just to use up Primes?

Tim Roll-Pickering link

7/8/2017 04:04:38 pm

I'm guessing the gold helmet is a reference to Destro's new look which ISTR was released around this time and should be showing up in the comics soon. Here's the YoJoe page on the toy: http://www.yojoe.com/action/88/destro2.shtml

Ultra Magnus's toy was about the last of the Diaclone toys to be released. It's actually a modified version of the Prime/Convoy cab with a new trailer, originally using the name "Powered Convoy". I don't know if there was ever any intention of making the Hasbro/Takara version an enhanced Optimus Prime (the idea of routinely rereleasing the leaders as new toys was already established with the likes of Masters of the Universe and Mask) or if it was just grabbed to cut down on the workload.

LiamKav

14/10/2020 02:27:42 pm

Transformers seemed to be relatively unusual in that rather than releasing new versions of old leaders, it would just replace them with new characters. Powermaster Prime was very much the exception (and it should be noted that the toy didn't represent Optimus Prime in Japan.) Beast Wars started the idea of "give the leader a new body every year" and we've kind of been stuck on that ever since.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

14/10/2020 05:25:50 pm

I think this is another legacy of Generation 2. That had four Optimus Prime toys and three Megatrons (although not all were released as those characters over here) plus two more of each in the pipeline when the toyline went down

LiamKav

14/10/2020 05:41:38 pm

That's true, but I was more thinking of toys with accompanying fiction. If we include the Japanese G1 line it.was basically brand new leaders every year (Galvatron being a bit of an odd case.) Granted, we did have a G2 comic that did do "Optimus and Megatron have new bodies" but Beast Wars was the first where a new routines and fiction launched together and gave the leaders new bodies/toys every year.

I do get slightly worried that Hasbro's current approach seems a bit more G2 and not enough Beast Wars/Unicron trilogy.

Tigerbread

8/8/2017 04:20:50 pm

The story that had Snake Eyes fighting a tiger was an original story from the UK Action Force comic (around issue #40,) which would explain the vibrant art. It was quite brutal as Snake Eyes got torn up pretty bad.
As for parent censorship of comics I never experienced it. Besides, most bad habits I picked up came from school, where ironically most kids didn't read corrupting literature like Optimus Prime charging in heroically to save Bumblebees life.

Ralph Burns

11/8/2017 10:38:24 pm

My interest in Action Force waxed and waned though I must preferred the UK stories from the Weekly and Monthly incarnations. They were ace. Flint is The Man. The American stories then and now just never grabbed me as much.

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Felicity link

15/12/2019 10:28:26 pm

Although I can’t entirely defend “GI Joe and the Transformers” I too was a fan of both properties, in animated, comic, and toy form (though I only ever bought the one GI Joe toy, the aforementioned Tiger Rat). I liked “Transformers” more but they were both worthwhile.

Larry Hama was able to give the comic a realistic feel even when the characters or events of the story were unrealistic. He was too modest about it, actively denying it when fans would write in to praise the realism. Maybe “realistic flavour” would be a better description.

Who’s that in the photo montage at the top right?

Felicity

15/12/2019 10:52:15 pm

That “Combat Colin” collection cover shows the trouble with using digital lettering and colouring on traditional flat art. It never looks quite right. Even though it would be anachronistic for a modern book cover I would have recommended that collection cover be lettered and coloured the old way, in keeping with the material inside.

Transformation 273: Wolf in the Combat Shed.

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