Transformation 313: Drum and Base.

10/5/2018

This week, another Decepticon base bites the dust. Did they learn nothing from the loss of the SPACE island?

Plus, discover how brave Triggerhappy and Mindwipe really are and Shockwave's one true weakness.

It's all in my look at ...All This and Civil War Part 1!

8 Comments

Alexander Smith link

11/5/2018 02:59:57 pm

In other pop music refs, the Next Week box references Leonard Cohen.

Stuart

11/5/2018 03:53:30 pm

It also (And I hadn't noticed this till just now) drops a big spoiler by calling Xaaron a medium to Primus...

Ryan F

11/5/2018 07:34:01 pm

Regarding All This and World War II, whilst the film was a notorious flop, the soundtrack album (orchestral Beatles covers with vocals by famous names) is exquisite. Strawberry Fields by Peter Gabriel, Come Together by Tina Turner, I Am The Walrus by Leo Sayer. Can’t reccommend it highly enough!

Charles RB

15/5/2018 09:41:22 am

"Back To The Future.... fun for the whole family" Huh huh huh

It was good to see Scorponok cut loose after months of doubting himself but this truncated civil war plot does make Shockwave look crap. All the buildup and his plan was "bomb a base, did it work, no, have a punchup"! Even given that he's got to move faster than he planned because of the Autobot surrender, this is a feeble plan for someone who used to have big schemes (and be really good at brutal violence). Did he even need minions for this??

I wonder if the cop-calls-this-up-to-president bit is a tip of the hat to the similar sequence in Moore's early Swamp Thing, which also ends with the President calling the superheroes? (Furman had previously done a dual TFTM/Judge Dredd nod with Rodimus' "REQUEST DENIED" execution)

Tim Roll-Pickering link

31/5/2018 06:25:45 pm

One thing I've just remembered is that this issue & next is (I think) the last example of the UK reordering pages to get a better cliffhanger.

In the original US issues, pages 10 & 11 (not counting adverts) are the scenes on Cybertron and the Hydrus 4 scene is page 12. Here the Cybertron scene is moved back a few pages to allow a cliffhanger of Grimlock remembering the warning.

Stuart

31/5/2018 06:46:20 pm

Good catch there!

Felicity

27/12/2019 08:25:31 pm

I can’t blame Mindwipe and Triggerhappy for being scared. Attacking the entire Decepticon army with only seven warriors seems tactically unwise. In order to beat those kinds of odds you have to be the main character.

Starscream should blame himself. He was the one who press-ganged those “rejects and scrap-heap warriors,” insisting at every turn that they join him or die.

At the time I didn’t get the cop’s line about “I assure you my parentage can be proved,” and even now, I’m just guessing it’s a G-rated way of saying that the person on the other end of the phone called him a bastard.

I have to give props to Andrew Wildman (that’s a nineties expression); that’s some good perspective and Transformer anatomy in the drawing of the four Decepticon dissidents firing at once.

LiamKav

26/10/2020 11:07:58 am

One thing I do like about this era is that Prime picks up more and more battle damage that (due to a lack of repair time) stays consistent between issues. I don't think he ever fixes that... speaker thingie on the side of his head.

I'm not sure Furman or the artists realised that those things on Prime's shoulders were guns (I'm also thinking of Kup handing him a pistol to take down the Ratchet/Megatron fusion). Did he ever use them outside of his first issue in either the US or UK?

(It's an odd thing to forget at Furman/Wildman remember that Fort Max has leg guns towards the end of the series, and they're far less obvious.)

Transformation 313: Drum and Base.

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