Transformation 330: Put on Ice.

7/9/2018

This week, it's our final ever visit to Earth, and one of the book's main villains feels the big chill.

Plus, Bludgeon is bored and the Neo Knights are very nearly useful. It's all in my look at THE LAST AUTOBOT? PART 2!

12 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

7/9/2018 09:42:08 pm

Regarding Techno-X, I suspect the "it was all a training exercise" may have been driven by a desire to not have key elements of characters' backstories linked to properties Marvel might no longer have the licence for. Characters like Shang-Chi, various originals from the Micronauts and Rom books and indeed Death's Head have all been problematic to use because of their origins in licensed titles that tie up big chunks of their history with elements that can't be referenced (and writing around them to retell the origin or performing massive retcons hasn't always been the solution) and also with the tradepaperback market developing in 1991 it's again desirable to be able to reprint the introduction issues without gaps.

Most of the characters involved seem to have produced under different contractual arrangements from the ones Marvel & Hasbro had in the 1980s, or else there was a workaround that gave Marvel the rights. There may well have been some similar workarounds to secure the Neo-Knights. The legal information in issue #9 of the US book asserts "CIRCUIT BREAKER and the distinctive likeness thereof is a trademark of the Marvel Comics Group.", and this message appears again when she reappears and then permanently from issue #25 onwars (later issues have "...of the Marvel Entertainment Group, Inc."). From #74 the other Neo-Knights, Blackrock and the team as a whole are added to the list. Leaving aside that it's copyright not trademark that's the key concept, perhaps there was a little-known micro-print run ashcan produced to secure them as a Marvel property. Alternatively with the franchise winding down Marvel US may have been able to get Hasbro to sign over the elements, either in advance of their use on the perception they couldn't hurt the title and might ultimately help generate more income for Hasbro or else as part of a disposal of something they weren't planning to ever use themselves - this is how Lew Stringer secured Combat Colin.

Will Rigby

8/9/2018 07:23:46 am

"Darn, my dream is ruined! Come and help me somebody quicklyyyyyyahhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Stuart

8/9/2018 10:11:58 am

Haha, I did think about mentioning that, but forgot come the day.

Charles RB

10/9/2018 06:41:36 am

It feels like the Neo-Knights should really have been left on Earth in #73 and just Blackrock & Josie went to Cybertron - aside from them not hogging space in #75 and reducing Hi-Q's supporting cast to a more useable level, #79 might work better if it's the Neo-Knights-san-Josie-and-Blackrock fighting Galvatron. Then, instead of redoing #51, it's those guys bowing out by doing the obligatory 'can we do this without the guy who started us?' plot.

Alternatively just leave them out and have Buster & Spike. Or Buster does something with the Neo-Knights./ C'mon, comic, where's Buster?

bouncelot

10/9/2018 12:37:24 pm

That plot idea sounds quite appealing to me. I never hated the neo-knights like so many fans seem to, and having a plotline like that would have actually shown them to be useful.

It might also have been interesting to see Buster having retained more from the Matrix than just a dream about the Special Teams. That wouldn't have played into a hypothetical spin-off title, but it could have worked quite well within the Transformers narrative. Maybe a super-powered Buster could be played as awakening at the point "Primus" got destroyed by Unicron?

Charles RB

10/9/2018 07:59:07 pm

Matrix-Buster might actually work better as a thing for the Neo-Knights to deal with than a surviving Galvatron - the humans left over from the Transformer war having a clash, Earth is still transformed (ho ho) even though the Transformers are Gone Forever.

Snowkatt

13/9/2018 05:01:33 am

Well this shambolic poor excuse for a story lurches to it's inconsequential end, and tells nothing of note at all.
22 pages wasted in a dying comic.

Simon Tilley

26/10/2019 10:16:33 am

This along with issue 329 was always something of a weird story for me.

Missing it the first time around due the final weeks making finding a retailer who stocked this very hard. I cannot actually recall where I got the last 2 issues from but remember getting issue 332 after a visit to the dentist midweek having a tooth ripped out and being in pain (the end of the comic was a total shock to me and didn't make me feel better)

I didn't end up picking 330 until Transforce 2000 and then reading 329 on the internet in 2001 (had no idea the wonders you could find on the internet prior to this)

I ended spending the intervening years assuming 329 and 330 had so much filler in them as last I saw was the ark crashing down and the autobots hot on the heels of Bludgeon.

Even the recap page in 331 indicated there would be an awesome battle on Klo. I bigged up these issues so much that the reality would never live up to the fantasy and recreate a tiny chunk of my childhood that I missed out on.

When the issue had so little relating to the plot inside it, the disappointment was magnified 100 fold. Sure it was some of what I consider the most consistent story arc and epic of my childhood, written by Furman and drawn by Wildman, but still it left me feeling very very empty.

When reading the transformation page about issue 333 I was convinced that issue 332 was in fact planned for issue 333-334 and there was a filler issue that had been missed out and this had been shoved in its place (again not really knowing how the US series worked as I assumed that written by Furman they actually copied our stories to publish their own book)

On that note, stories like 2nd Generation, Distant Thunder and Ladies Night were epic stories that slotted well into the US material I do wonder that with the right money and sales, what stories would have been placed inbetween the final US issues, a good UK story on Klo would have helped padd out this story no end.

Finally missing out on the penultimate story at the time, I was in no idea how close to the end we actually were so was totally shocked when the axe fell on issue 332. As an adult the decline and winding down is obvious, as a child with tunnel vision, you focused on the content of each issue to get you through to the next. I do wonder if had we had the internet and forums now to read things over and over and bounce ideas off each other that our perceptions of the comic would have changed, we could all have known how screwed it was and would this have changed our enjoyment of it? Doubt we could have made a difference to keeping it going, but it is fun to re-examine how innocent we all were and took the issues at face value were as now issues are dissected and crucified which end up colouring our views of the stories before we even read them (AHM anyone)

Felicity

1/1/2020 11:52:33 am

It’s always possible that if the Neo-Knights comic had gone ahead, and fan mail had been negative toward the idea of the “Transformers” series being a simulation, Simon Furman could have reversed that decision and had the characters learn that whoever told them it was a simulation was lying, and it was real all along. Double-swerve!

Having the Neo-Knights’ mission statement be to fight every robot-themed character has mild similarity to a story arc in the 1990 “Deathlok” series, “The Souls of the Cyber-Folk,” in which a Doctor Doom robot develops sentience and begins tracking down every cyborg in the Marvel Universe, such as Misty Knight and Forge.

LiamKav

28/10/2020 12:41:24 pm

It's only a problem retroactively, but I strongly dislike that Fort Max was able to take down Galvatron here but had his bottom handed to him by Megatron in G2. It implies that Cobra gave Megs a more powerful body upgrade than actual Transformers Satan.

Simon Tilley link

28/10/2020 12:47:52 pm

Sorry but have to disagree here, Fort Max takes a lot of punishment from Galvatron with no evidence he was repaired, just shoved back in the Ark, in G2 Megatron even makes reference to wrecking his body so I'd say he was nowhere near 100% when he took on G2 Megatron but equally him being able to down Galvatron is hard to stomach given how powerful he had proven to be previously.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

19/4/2021 01:25:29 pm

Revisiting this I recently spotted that the announced monthly format here is not dissimilar to the changes that happened to The Real Ghostbusters around the same time. That also switched to a monthly reprint based title (including reusing old covers). https://ghostbusters.fandom.com/wiki/Marvel_Comics_Ltd-_The_Real_Ghostbusters_186

Ghostbusters may also have had a feel of a franchise dying down - the cartoon stopped new episodes that autumn (although I'm not sure what the UK transmission situation was), there didn't seem any likelihood of a third movie any time soon and so forth. However the comic had remained a weekly up to the end of 1991 so may well have been considered more viable for one more format change.

So a monthly mostly reprint licenced title was certainly something Marvel UK actually got to the shelves around this time and suggests the plans for Transformers may have got further than just this Transformation page.

However The Real Ghostbusters only last eight issues of the new format so we were probably spared such an ignominious end.

Transformation 330: Put on Ice.

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