Transformation 332: The Last Salute.

22/9/2018

It's just coming up till half two in the morning and I've been battling food poisoning and insomnia for the last few days. In a few hours I have to go catch a train to meet Arthur Dent at the BFI.

So any grand words I had planned are going to have to make way for a thanks to you all who have come this far (and come back next week!), as we reach the end...

END OF THE ROAD! PART 1

1991-1994 COLLECTED COMICS

18 Comments

Tetsuryu

22/9/2018 04:31:31 am

Prime's speech at the end almost feels like it's homaging him giving a similar speech at the end of...whichever UK issue US #4 ended up becoming, except with the alternate, happy ending.

Which might've been deliberate, since it does end up giving the story a nice bookend feel.

Will Rigby

22/9/2018 09:02:33 am

Are Kangabots a team of Autbots with Kangaroo altmods or a species of Cybertronian animal? This will haunt me for the rest of my life.

The next volume of Classics UK is apparently due in November. Only took 'em four years.

Ryan F

22/9/2018 10:18:07 am

I know you’ve got a few bits and bobs left to cover (G2 and the modern day U.K. comics), but, like Edge of Extinction, this feels like the grand finale of your magnum opus, with the rest as a quieter coda.

It’s been an absolute blast from start to finish, and I’ve really enjoyed following your journey over the last six years. It’s made me look at these comics (which I previously assumed that I knew like the back of my hand) in a whole new light.

Whilst the Transformers strips were always the main selling point of the book, until this blog came into existence it was rarely acknowledged that the U.K. comic was more than just the robots. It was the Fiendish Feet ads, the letters pages, the competitions, Combat Colin, Transformation, Robot Round Up, Action Force, Hercules and the rest of it. The modern-day reprints of this material collect the actual strips, but simply reading the U.K. adventures of the Transformers is far removed from the original experience of sighing at badly-organised calendars, looking for hidden Micromaster symbols, and wondering why - every now and again - the colours were all messed up.

So cheers for this, and for all your hard work thus far. It’s been a wild nostalgia trip that’s made me relive some of my greatest childhood memories.

Thank you!

Dave Barker

22/9/2018 02:20:22 pm

Agreed. Thanks for all the hard work you've put in on this over the last few years, Stu. It is appreciated, even by weird lurkers like me who never post anything. Incidentally, do you have a mailing list or anything? I would like to get the third book when it comes out, and I keep worrying I'll miss it...

Stuart

24/9/2018 01:24:08 am

I don't think I do enough for a mailing list, but don't worry, you'll hear me loud and clear when V3 comes out (probably mid-2019).

Tim Roll-Pickering link

22/9/2018 02:40:02 pm

And so it ends... for now.

Primus wasn't the smartest deity in the universe was he? Splitting off most of his essence to leave him weak & vulnerable, making a form that could be awakened with a single ricochet, making it difficult to awaken him normally and now leaving behind a guardian to save the planet without an automatic detection system to wake him up, instead relying on some Chosen One showing up in time.

I'll stand corrected but my understanding is that Hasbro had given up on the toyline in the States by 1991 (not returning until 1993, although Canada seems to have got some Turbomasters in 1992), so any Action Master promotion would either be aimed at the international market (I can vaguely recall some of the Action Masters still kicking around on European shelves into 1992) or is perhaps just Furman following the old mandate rules (which can be a good constraint for a writer) to allow Grimlock and Optimus Prime a final hurrah. And this is a good final showing, even if the main battle's confined to a single page and it's to liberate a strange alien world about which we know next to nothing. But yes, Furman missed a trick by not having Bludgeon killed in this and Soundwave leading the survivors away.

It's clear from Furman's comments in both the final US issue and the first G2 one that he genuinely believed Transformers would never be revived so I'd guess the Decepticons fleeing off world and later the new generation mentioned in the annual are really there for the fans to be able to give their own continuations a legitimacy.

Cold Comfort & Joy felt rather a cheat, being in black and white, coming out when pretty much all the Christmas stuff was over (4th January may be the 11th day of Christmas but it's not celebrated like that) and being a bit of a "what self-contained five page story can we grab?" (not as easy a task as it seems) - but then what could disgruntled readers do? Not buy the next issue?!

Combat Colin comes to a great end and it just feels so appropriate that he would go out not killed by his arch-enemy but by his own foolishness. Still it was amazing many years later to discover that Lew had done an official revival.

As for the ending of the title... I remember being saddened but not that surprised to see it go. And in a way it's better that it went out like this rather than limping along as a monthly of mostly reprints plus a tiny portion of new strip probably written by a new writer with little grasp of the franchise and continuity (a lot of other toy tie-in comics of the era were not so well written and edited to weave it all together) and then expiring. Plus it actually had an announced ending whereas some other comics just disappeared from the shelves and their demise was only mentioned elsewhere. I drifted into other interests, especially Doctor Who - this issue came out the day after the Resistance is Useless documentary and the beginning of the BBC2 repeat season - but from time to time would briefly return to the world of the Transformers thanks to the specials. More on them in another post.

Snowkatt

24/9/2018 11:16:18 am

Yeah Hasbro pretty much gave up on the toyline in the USA at least.
It limped on in one way or another in Europe at least untill 1993 with G2.
Where it briefly blazed back to life, and then Beast Wars happened in 1996.

Kevin McCluskey

22/9/2018 03:53:49 pm

Congratulations, Stuart. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading Transformation every week since I discovered it. You've been a huge part of drawing this old fan back deeper and deeper into the world of my childhood favourite transforming robots and for that I can't thank you enough.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

22/9/2018 04:04:54 pm

Ah the last specials. These repeatedly proved quite a treat. I remember finding the summer 1992 one very hot Saturday in May and then reading it in the car whilst my parents wandered around garden centres. By this stage I was used to long storylines being started and not finished that it was a treat to get a self-contained piece.

(By the way the months these were published can be determined from the bar code boxes. The two digits at the top of the smaller section are the month number.)

City of Fear/Legion of the Lost/Meltdown was the big highlight and quickly became my favourite saga. I was still blown away to find the second half of the special in a Shrewsbury newsagents that Easter Saturday during a traditional last minute Easter Egg buying session on a holiday with my grandparents.

The Deadly Games special was clearly not put together by anyone who had been around the Marvel UK office five years earlier! Did the cover provoke renewed outrage from Millwall FC? (This was right around the time they moved to the New Den.)

Winter 1993 was a terrible period for me personally and the special was like an old friend giving comfort and a brief moment away from it all. And it was fun to see a story from the earliest days of the comic. I still had no idea it was based on the cartoon. And once again the cliffhanger was actually resolved the following year.

I disagree about the "thrown together" approach to the Summer 1994 one - Salvage and Dry Run are a very natural combination even if they are only part of a longer storyline that doesn't easily lend itself to individual reprints. Salvage was a story that I hadn't read before (and turned out to be the last new-to-me story Marvel UK put out) and it was great to see it at last.

If there was any free poster in the final special my copy didn't have it either. I hadn't seen the annual so this was my introduction to the colour version and again it's a good piece to go out on. By this point the US G2 book had been and gone, the UK G2 book had come and put me off (I felt the first two issues were way too childish and too focused on promoting the new toys, then it went to reprints of stories I already had and so I didn't bother buying the remaining issues bar the final one) and so this felt like a good final hurrah.

As for the decline of Marvel UK - well they were still trying to follow some past formulas and try multiple things - the back page of the final Transformers special is an advert for their new X-Men title, trying to feed off the cartoon which had just debuted over here. And some of the old licenced warhorses were still going, whether Doctor Who Magazine or Thomas the Tank Engine. But I think they assumed that the children's licensed titles were a dying market and they needed to follow the trends into the direct market.

Part of the problem is the British comics market was never quite a copy of the US one. We don't seem to have had quite the boom and bust of the US direct market, perhaps because there wasn't an equivalent to the independent trading card shops to foolishly wander into comics and feed a speculator bubble, and British originated titles never really made much headway into the US focused shops. Marvel UK were following the trends that, to be honest, just about all the US comics market was following but also trying to ape 2000 AD as the thing that made British comics different from US ones. And there's an old adage that things aimed at both sides of the Atlantic tend to land firmly in the middle.

It's true that outside the comics world a lot of superhero stuff was of a different take. But that interest wasn't necessarily translating so well into sales. For example with Superman, London Editions Magazines had now become Fleetway Editions (preserving the better known name despite the takeover) and they replaced the bimonthly with a fortnightly in 1993, presumably feeding off the back of the renewed interest from the Death of Superman storyline, but the separate book soon dropped back to monthly and then folded not long after the New Adventures of Superman (no "Lois and Clark" here) began on BBC1 in early 1994. There was a final merged Batman & Superman title that lasted nearly a year before expiring rather than waiting for any boost Batman Forever might deliver. Some of this may be down to content choice (I found it a bit strange the merged title was reprinting the Death/World Without Superman and Knightfall when the full storylines would take years to conclude and the tradepaperbacks had good distribution here), but it also suggests a limited overlap between the audiences.

Simon Hall

23/9/2018 10:36:51 am

What a rubbish cover that final one is. Never liked it. It looks really rushed and half arsed.

I'd just like to say what everyone else has said and say a big THANK YOU for this blog, Stuart. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading it and the books have been ones I've re-read a few times now. I've also enjoyed reading the contributions from everyone who has (and I hope will continue to) posted here.

I agree with Ryan - TF:UK was more than a comic, it created a community and the strip reprints can't really convey what made the comic as a whole so special. This blog has gone a long way to show how the comic functioned and what made it so great, even on the days when Combat Colin was the best thing in it.

I can recall flicking through this issue in Morrisons, and this being the final issue feeling a bit bittersweet. By 1991, I was heavily into comics in general, and discovered things that made Transformers look a bit passe by this point. My relationship with the comic probably wasn't so deep as I'd never managed to read it in any sustained fashion, just picking up the Collected Comics whenever I found them. That said, I will always hold it high regard for this comic and Marvel UK in general pushing me into discovering the wider world of comics. Although aware of 2000AD, I only really clicked with that title in my late teens, and found the stuff pushed by Marvel UK - especially in Havoc and later with Overkill (at least when it focused on the KOP, Warheads, Hell's Angel, Motormouth and Digitek), of all things. to be much more what I was looking for / hoping to find. 30 years after I first set foot in a comic shop, I'm still reading the funnies today as it's a medium I continue to find inspiring and fun. So thank you, Transformers, for introducing me to all this cool stuff and showing that comics can be more than The Beano.

The 1992 Summer Special with Grudge Match I still have, along with the '94 Salvage one, and although I was disappointed that Time Wars never got finished, I enjoyed them all the same, More than that, I liked that they were still made! I was fully onboard with Generation 2 (US) when it launched in 1993. And that run of 12 issues is still probably my favourite run of TF comics.

As for British Comics, yeah, agree with Tim. The UK comics market was borne out of satire, rather than superheroes, leading to a market that is more focused on humour which, over time skewed towards children and nursery titles. 2000AD being the sole standard bearer (still) for original content aimed at the teen and up market (I was going to say that Titan seem to be doing decently well with similar titles these days, but their stuff is mostly licensed - although I do like their collections of European strips). Being a much smaller territory, it's never seemed to be able to withstand supporting too much of the same thing. The brief boom in UK comics around the late '80s, with stuff like Deadline, Crisis and Revolver all followed the anthology format of 2000AD and superheroes have never really formed part of the mix of snarky ultra-violence such things contained. Although Marvel UK did ultimately fail, it did have some strong initial success by presenting superhero type fare through our uniquely British lens. It's just a shame that uniqueness was smoothed out to make the characters a better fit for the US market. The most egregious examples coming in the forms of Death's Head II and Pendragon II, as well as altering dialogue 'Mom' instead of 'Mum' and so on, which is a nonsense when you consider John Constantine never had to put up with this :P

Tigerbread

24/9/2018 01:06:08 am

Yes, thanks Stuart, looks like everyone's thinking the same thing, so I'll just add my penny's worth. Reading this blog inspired me to reinvigorate my tattered old UK collection (what with it being hole punched and mutilated for the A to Z) replacing a good chunk of the comics took a while but it was worth it. It's nice to have a bit of (pristine) history around again. I know your reviews will continue, but the upcoming comics are a different animal compared (in terms of community) to the original run. I look forward to what you'll make of G2 and beyond.

Snowkatt

24/9/2018 11:35:01 am

So this is the way Transformers UK ends.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Yes well, somebody has to paraphrase The Hollow Men, might as well be me.

This story always felt like an odd rushed deal to me, with limited set up and almost no backstory. The Autobots are defeated mostly of screen and pop up just as easily thanks to the convenient deus ex machina.
It all feels very perfunctory.

The previous issue wasting 22 pages on a useless story that went nowhere, doesn't help much either.

But here we are now at the end of Marvel UK
Well almost,
but after tackling the odds and sods what will you do next ?
G2 ?
G2 uk ?
Dreamwave G1 ?
If that's the case you will need a lot of luck. I reread v1 and v2 recently and it has not hold up well at all.

Or ReGeneration one ?
if thats the case you need even more luck, cause that series was such a dissapointment.

And this might be a tad premature considering there will still be an odds and sods entry.
But TF UK is now at an end.
And reading the column the past 5-6 years was my pleasure. Even if I didn't comment all that much for the last stretch of it.
I wil miss it and i wish you well with whatever else you plan to do.

Jon Talpur

26/9/2018 09:31:01 pm

Echoing the other posts here, this was a tremendous achievement Stuart, and many congratulations for seeing it through to the end (of this chapter?). I only discovered your blog later down the line, but I had to go back to the beginning and catch up with your analyses of each and ever issue, even the specials. Love the actual Transformation books as well!

Your thoughts became even more valuable later on, as a continuation of your fellow analyses of the Marvel UK comics in IDW's Classics UK series looks to be an increasingly unlikely prospect as the years pass on. Given what's happened with IDW over the last 12 months, I wonder if we'll ever see Volume 6 at all?

(Possibly not, if current e-mails from the IDW online store are correct).

Onto more specific comments pertaining to 1992-1994, I always assumed that Marvel UK's Transformers license might have ended up as a ten-year deal, explaining how the specials were published until late 1994.

And I don't know if it's proof that distribution of their final special was indeed poor compared to the others, but I certainly missed this one at the time and didn't even find out about its existence until years later; up until then I successfully found and picked up all of the other post-332 Marvel UK specials.

Based on a November publication date, the last special would indeed have been on sale at the same time as the G2 Fleetway comic, likely around #3 or #4 of that comic.

John D. link

28/9/2018 02:03:12 am

Congratualations Stu. I first found this blog around January 2014, and it has been a sheer delight ever since. I was a lonely child and these comics were a great comfort to me. It's wonderful to discuss them. Often your writing has been laugh out loud funny. I have found myself waking up in Berlin, Amsterdam, Saigon - all over the world - looking forward to a new entry. I hope we can all go for a pint or 3 sometime soon. I hope you are going to write about G2, and also Regeneration One. Congratulations again, and thank you.

gary

12/10/2019 12:09:16 am

Hi Stuart

Just now got to the end and I just want to say a big thank you for this

your incites into the history of the comic run were wonderful especially with volume 6 of the uk collection run being cancelled never to see the light of day, this blog has filled in all the missing gaps

its been great and has really taken me back

Felicity

2/1/2020 09:14:37 am

The comic book ended 29 years ago and this entry of this blog was two years ago (it sounds like) and still I have a lump in my throat too. I guess finality just has that effect. It looks like you did continue with more reviews after this entry, so I’ll still have that to look forward to, but this is the end of the material that I consider personally canonical. In my personal canon neither “Generation 2,” nor anything after it, exists. However, your reviews of it might end up being the antidote to how soul-crushing it was when I read it at the time, so I’ll try to think positive!

That opening lyric is beautiful and something we all need to hear sometimes. I decided to track it down and have the song playing now. It reminds me of “It Will Come in Time” from Rod Hull and Emu’s Pink Windmill Kids ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqQXHVFqbIo ) in a way I can’t explain.

Action Master Optimus Prime’s debut is indeed glorious, and is one of the positive memories I have of this era of the comic. And I’d forgotten how delightful Bludgeon’s comeuppance is as he discovers the Ultimate Warrior is the Last Autobot.

Ha! So Combat Colin ended up doing what I unwittingly suggested as an alternative for Simon Furman’s plan for the Neo-Knights to discover the events of “Transformers” were all a simulation! That is, to find out that that also was a lie. I wonder if Lew Stringer knew what Simon Furman had planned for the “Neo-Knights” premise and was riffing on that.

I only just discovered this blog recently, well after you’d already completed your review of the entire run of the original series, but FWIW, it’s been a pleasure on this end too. I too can remember specific “Transformers” issues attached to specific childhood experiences. For example, the first issue I ever physically saw was #7 (“Warrior School”), and it was in the hands of another child at school (where they prepared us to do battle in the real world someday!). I can even remember the exact panel. It’s the one of Megatron appearing at the end of the corridor, when Ratchet first sees him.

Kudos for including letterists in that legacy. To me they are a huge part of the experience. Great lettering can even elevate the surrounding art, so that, for example, Frank Springer’s pencils in #4 (“The Last Stand”) actually look better with John Workman’s letters next to them. And Janice Chiang made a big impression on me.

I’m glad to have found this blog. It makes me feel better about the world.

Stuart

2/1/2020 09:38:36 am

Thanks Felicity, enjoyed all your comments as you've gone through. Been interesting to have a Canadian perspective, especially on the wilderness version Furman wrote.

Felicity link

3/1/2020 10:30:54 pm

Thanks! ☺

Transformation 332: The Last Salute.

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