Transformation 320: God is Dead.

29/6/2018

This week, Xaaron is an X-deity; Galvatron feels cursed; Highbrow loses the high ground and Finback is better than all of you.

All this plus the defeat of Combat Colin in my look at the next part of Unicron's smash and grab on Cybertron; ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION PART 2!

11 Comments

John D. link

29/6/2018 10:44:00 pm

Absolute classic this one Stu! All Killer No Filler! I had assumed the chat about “not running..again” was a call back to the guy’s tech specs? Galvatron felt so over used in Marvek U.K. that scorponok’s dialogue seems a bit stilly.

Kevin McCluskey

30/6/2018 12:44:17 am

This was my first issue in over two years. I'd become disillusioned with the changes to the comic by issue 227 and moved on to what I considered more grown-up fare at the time like Spider-Man and Batman.

I came across this issue in a newsagent when I'd gone for a walk round my old neighbourhood on my own one day. I hadn't even turned 14 years old yet and already I feeling nostalgic for the simpler times of my earlier childhood. The fact that it was Furman and Senior, (always my favourite Transformers creative team) was enough to make me part with 55p from my paper round wage, to check back in, and I was hooked again. I sneaked this issue into my bedroom for fear that my parents would chastise me for buying something so childish now that I was a teenager. None of my friends were into Transformers anymore and that's what made it so great. It felt like it was all mine again. My own little secret. Maybe even a bit of a dirty one by this point. Unfortunately I could only find the next couple of issues before the newsagents where I lived stopped stocking the comic altogether. Still, 322 was a much better issue to go out on than 227. It felt fitting to me. It felt like closure.

My Dad caught me coming home with 322 and seemed surprised, even disappointed at my shame, telling me that when you've earned money, you get to spent it on whatever pleases you. He obviously didn't have the heart to smarten me up to taxes and bills quite yet.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

30/6/2018 12:57:41 am

I'm another who always took Scorponok's line to mean he didn't see Galvatron up close. And given his background Galvatron may have mentally detached himself from Cybertron and everything going on here, no longer thinking of it as his planet (in his timeline it's been destroyed) and not really identifying with the Transformers of a different timeline.

Before now I had never really given much thought to Unicron's surprise at encountering Primus. Although the Matrix is described as his life force, it's never really been depicted as being him, so I guess I never really understood just how Primus had wound up such a weak shadow of his former self. Have later versions of the TF story kept this concept or is there a fully powered Primus who's the equal of Unicron even though the Matrix also exists?

Marvel UK did keep some of the licenced books going for a good while - Thomas the Tank Engine lasted until the end of the decade and of course there was still Doctor Who Magazine - so it's possible Transformers could have lasted in the new era and may even have benefited from an expanded talent pool when Marvel UK started doing more original stuff. All of the Meltdown strips are from the Epic line (although Akira was translated manga) whilst Havoc is more mainstream Marvel. There's clearly an attempt to try to build a tiered set of comics that readers could move upwards too but neither lasted - Havoc was cancelled after just nine weeks, Meltdown lasted just six months.

Jon Talpur

1/7/2018 03:03:39 pm

I always simply took Scorponok's line as being consistent with the US-only continuity, i.e. Furman had stopped writing the US comics with an eye towards keeping continuity with the UK comics that most of the US audience would be unfamiliar with, so this really was the first time anyone saw (a) Galvatron before and that there was no "Time Wars", etc.

It's a definite change in tactic after explicitly referencing "Deathbringer" in a US issue, but I suspect the inconsistencies that built up in the Earthforce stories had a hand in this streamlining of continuity. I don't know how the production lead-times differed between the UK and US titles, but it's interesting to note the US #65, where "Deathbringer" was referenced, was published only just over a month after "Perchance to Dream" began.

You're spot-on with the observation that Paul Neary's time as Marvel UK's Editorial Director was already underway; he joined up earlier in the year in March 1991, roughly concurrent with Transformers #310, which was the issue that ironically confirmed that Death's Head was due to return in an upcoming US-format comic by Furman/Senior. Oh dear...

Aside from the launches of Havoc and Meltdown, you can see his impact on the company as that year's batch of annuals (the 1992 annuals) was the last that contained the heavy hitter licenses (Transformers, ThunderCats, The Real Ghostbusters, G.I. Joe... :) ), despite some of those licenses still being popular enough to sustain occasional specials over the next two years.

As an aside, I hope you will give time to those final Marvel UK Transformers specials that post-dated the main title and ran until 1994!

The Real Ghostbusters as an ongoing title even outlasted Transformers by several months after it became an all-reprint monthly, running well into 1992 and the "Genesis '92" era. I suspect the higher media profile of the RGB cartoon on UK television probably played a part in that, similar to how ThunderCats reprint specials lasted up until 1994, which would be otherwise inexplicable if not for the BBC continually repeating the first season of the series up to the mid-90s.

LiamKav

27/10/2020 09:18:04 am

Why were the BBC so bad at showing later seasons of long running US cartoons? They did it with Thundercats, and I remember Turtles popping back to the start of season 2 on multiple occasions.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

27/10/2020 01:05:18 pm

I guess this is where British Brevity met US saturation. With most such cartoons the BBC normally only ran one episode a week (with later holiday and early morning daily screenings invariably repeats) and so by the time they'd got through a season and taken a break they'd reckon attention spans were such they could go around again or drop the series rather than paying for the next big batch of episodes.

TV-AM did the same with only purchasing the first season of Transformers that was run and rerun over a couple of years and similarly I don't think they got the second series of Mask (although as those are the racing episodes that probably was a relief).

Simon Hall

1/7/2018 09:52:51 pm

Like Kevin, I ended up picking the next two issues after this up my local Morrisons. Which meant I missed the first part of the poster! Still, I was impressed by what I read, but like many others seemed to have noticed, finding issues was becoming increasingly hard.

Havoc! I still have all 9 issues of this (I bought a lot off ebay a few years back, as it was easier than picking up the issues I was missing). It was my first exposure to Ghost Rider (I picked up #4 as my first issue in a service station somewhere whilst travelling on a family holiday to somewhere). It's interesting re-reading the Deathlok story in Havoc (it reprints the Marvel Comics Presents story and the first issue of the 1990 Bookshlef series, plus a few pages of the second one), as there are some elements here that are very similar to Death's Head II's in comic origins (the shady corporate organisation, the cyborg that breaks free of its programming after being introduced to a dominant personality) and I wonder if this was what inspired the Death's Head remodeling.

I hadn't really been paying attention at the time, but Jon's right - a lot of the licensed titles that had been Marvel UK's bread and butter for so long were sidelined into specials. I suppose these sorts of things didn't sit so well with the direction the company was trying to move in, but interesting that they kept publishing specials of these right up 'til '94.

Cradok

2/7/2018 12:27:20 pm

I don't believe MIsfire appears again until RG1, so he's probably supposed to be 'dead' at this point. You missed Snapdragon's cameo as well, and we know he survives this, because he's the one kicking Muzzle around on Klo.

Regarding the colouring error... I'm not sure. Back before Titan started reprinting, scans of the original comics were pretty plentiful, and there was two different sets of scans of On the Edge floating around, one from the US and one from the UK printings, but their colouring was different. Now, it may just be differences in scanning quality, but my memory says that it was more than that. I'll try and dig them up, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Snowkatt

3/7/2018 01:57:48 am

Err I hate to be THAT person.
But there seems to be a mistake in the title, this is issue 319 not 320.

Snowkatt

3/7/2018 02:19:39 am

no wait it was the previous issue that was mislabled as 318
this is 320 after all
that wil teach me to jump to conclusion

Felicity

29/12/2019 08:29:54 pm

So, Primus invested all his power in the Matrix and in the Transformers, and doesn’t have enough to fight Unicron himself. Presumably he could have done what Unicron did and kept all his power to himself and made Cybertron a Transformer, but (a) he tried fighting Unicron one-on-one already and Unicron defeated him, and Primus just barely managed to pull off the trick with the two asteroids; (b) he figured there would be no point in continuing the cycle of fighting on every plane of existence; and (c) he’s the creative force in the universe, so it’s in his nature to use that energy create new life rather than keep it all to himself.

I checked my copy of US #75 and yes, the ink is a little lighter on that “Xaaron!”/“Primus!” page.

I like here how Geoff Senior normally draws the Transformers’ eyes as the polygonal glass panes of the cartoon, but for added expression they can also go circular, which Optimus Prime’s eyes do here. It looks cool!

OTOH I don’t like Bomb-Burst’s facial expression as he says the line quoted at the top of the review—he looks a little too human.

“Meltdown” and “Havoc” both seem pretty good. I read the Epic Comics translation of “Akira” and I have all four issues of “The Last American” (which, interestingly, diverges from the “Marvel Age” article promoting it, in that they said that it would be about Ulysses S. Pilgrim finding clusters of survivors and even a man who claims to be the President, but in the actual comic, everyone’s dead, he never meets another human being, and he slowly goes insane…still a good comic, though!). I never got to read “The Light and Darkness War” but it always looked interesting in the ads.

“Havoc” looks good too. Robocop and Deathlok have a lot in common. I still wish I’d saved my “Robocop” comics by Lee Sullivan. One thing I just remembered is that OCP VP Johnson gets a little character development in one issue, as he deploys upgraded versions of the ED-209s into the tough neighbourhood where he grew up, hoping to make it a safer place than it was for him. It doesn’t go well, but at least his heart was in the right place.

All those Marvel VHSes are good. I think I have “Rude Dog and the Dweebs”!

Transformation 320: God is Dead.

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