Transformation 281: Blood on the Tracks.

29/9/2017

Well thank fuck that's over with.

yes, the endless crossover has ended!

Plus, Tracks is drop dead gorgeous as far as Grimlock is concerned.

All in my look at ISSUE 281!

6 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

29/9/2017 11:16:19 pm

From what I can recall my attitude was probably more "meh" than hatred of the crossover at the time but I guess I was conditioned to accept that the alternative was more unpopular reprints (how little we knew at the time). Or perhaps I was more tolerant of a double B feature era on the book because I was also now reading the LEM Batman (probably now only remembered for an appearance in Mr Bean) which had just replaced the early 1980s stories with post Crisis stuff like Blind Justice and that may have given the necessary excitement fix. As I've said before, I think a key problem is the combination of the crossover and an excessively jokey period on the UK strip which feels like it was meant to be the antidote to the intensity of Matrix Quest. Had the black & white stories been doing something more serious and intense in this period then the crossover might have been accepted as a necessary interlude sideshow to something great.

Grimlock hates Tracks because he's vain? So how does he put up with having Sunstreaker on his crew? Tracks is basically the same personality type (which *may* explain why up to now the comic has generally avoided having the two active simultaneously).

John D. link

29/9/2017 11:25:03 pm

Yes Tim, it struck me this week that there has been a torrent of daft jokey Earthforce stories. 1 or 2 might have been ok but there must have been about ten in a row. All dross, which doesn't even add depth to characters or the "lore". When you think of the criticism James Roberts gets when he writes one issue of vaguely filler!

With hindsight, publishing the cross over was contempt for the readership. I think the cost of commissioning new art work was debated on here a few months ago, but I simply don't understand how running the reprint was sufficiently cheaper than 5 or 6 more pages of black and white art. The reprint must have cost the comic thousands of readers per week.
Lastly, who is responsible for the character model/previous art tracing extravaganza that was the front cover? Presumably the comic was still spending money on getting a decent cover, so how was this lazy nonsense allowed? More contempt!
"As a kid"...

JD

Snowkatt link

10/12/2017 08:02:23 am

The problem I had with MTME , ( I have since stopped reading in 2015) was the tone.
Especially the time travel story.
It's supposed to be this huge impactfull story, but the characters dont even take it seriously.
If they cant be bothered to take it serious, how can we the
readers ?

Throw in the fact that now all of a sudden the mary sue squad, err the DJD have softer sides with an oh so "funny" cantankarous but lovable medic, and I pretty much lost all interest.
Doesn thelp that I loath the DJD from day one.

These are supposed to be monsters, but now they are not really ?
MTME was tonally all over the place, it wanted to be seriously grim dark. But couldnt help cracking jokes at every inoppertune moment.
And often the joke didnt really gel with the more serious nature of the story or just smothered it.

And the light hearted fluff, quickly overtook the more serious elements.

MTME had a lot of great character moments, but by the point i dropped the series ( 44) it was mostly just fluff.

Ralph Burns

9/10/2017 12:10:25 pm

Back in the day this was my last issue of Transformers having been a regular reader since #42. By this point only myself and one other person I knew were still buying this comic locally (that I knew of at the time) and 17 weeks of that awful crossover and crap Earthforce comedies had killed my interest. My loyalty to the title remained strong but it had increasingly felt like it was being made for little kids and not for my age group anymore. Kids son't like to feel they are being talked down to. I hung on for a while but this was the week I started Secondary School so dropped it. My friend still got the comic (he had to order it from his newsagent) and I still snuck a look at some copies until #319 when his newsagent couldn't get it anymore. I got the feeling I used to get some Transformers from 2000AD.

Ironically, what I did not know at the time was that the comic was only a few weeks away from returning to its former glory.

Sigh.

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Uraael

28/1/2018 12:52:37 pm

"How many of the people with no interest in reprints were still reading the lead strip by week 17? I must admit to have been at best skimming it at the time. Certainly the book has lost enough readers that the UK stories themselves are on their last legs."

While it's bad, very very bad, truly horribly eye-gougingly bad....the Crossover didn't feel to me, from what I can remember, as being much worse than the normal Budiansky strips. Remembering that by this point we'd had the Car Wash o Doom, the Micromaster Wrestling, Roadhandler's Masterclasses On How To Be A Jerk, Skullgrin leaving the Transformer war to make low budget films....and more of the Delbo/Yomtov combo's "art" than we ever wanted to see in our lives ever again. Belatedly seeing the TFs and GI. Joe team up for their DOA crossover just felt like more of the same substandard US drek. You could say we had grown tolerances to it, like how skin hardens if you suffer a mild burn, because we knew the real meat of the comic - UK originated material - was still present. We'd grown accustomed to the pattern: you suffered the US stuff until more UK stuff appears. This didn't feel that different, even at 17 issues long.

Speaking of which, this is why they would put the better story later on in the comic. It's the same psychology they use in supermarkets, putting your essentials - milk, bread etc - at the back of the stores so you have to walk past the other stuff they're trying to sell. To get past the US strip you had to flick through it which might pull some into actually reading it. Maybe not first, you might decide to come back to it once you'd feasted on the UK strip's tender flesh, but even catching sight of a panel could spark curiosity about the contents enough to decide to plough through it.

Just a thought.

Felicity

17/12/2019 04:29:07 am

God, Grimlock was just awful. Especially as written by Furman. At least under Budiansky, when Grimlock was wearing his crown and being a terrible leader, it was clear that we weren’t supposed to like him. And more of this garbage is still to come with the Nucleon saga and Grimlock as leader after the battle with Unicron…

Oh well. At least we have some more Matrix Quest to do. That’s the good Furman era, despite featuring Grimlock in parts of it.

Transformation 281: Blood on the Tracks.

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