Transformation 57: The Absence of Peter David.

14/6/2013

This week one of the single greatest comic book writers of all time doesn't contribute a fill in issue. Instead, some guy you've never heard of has to fill in whilst Bob Budiansky is off playing knock-door-run on Danny Fingeroth.

Surprisingly, this isn't as bad as you might think. All in my look at:

Plight of the Bumblebee! Part 1.

7 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

14/6/2013 05:48:25 pm

Curiously the same month this saw print in the US (January 1986 - cover date May) also saw Kaminski doing a fill-in issue on Peter David's regular series, Spectacular Spider-Man. I wonder if that meant PAD was otherwise indisposed (he had a day job in Marvel's sales department and his writing was frowned upon - this was still in his first year of it). The main source for the reasons behind the original story falling through seems to be Jim Owsley aka Christopher Priest who edited issues #5-9 of the US comic (and discovered PAD, giving him his fist gigs over on the Spidey titles) - this suggests this may have been a standby rather than a weekend commission. I suspect that Priest's reported comments are misremembering a little and that the actual problem was the writing out of about two-thirds of the Autobots in issue #12 rather than new toys given the ones that appear here.

This could also make PAD's script a very early piece for him and a contemporary of the likes of his Spider-Man stories "The Commuter Cometh", "The Death of Jean DeWolff", "Ace" and "Welcome... to My Nightmare". Two of those are very popular tales amongst Spidey fans; the other two the less said the better. So whilst we could be mourning a lost classic we may equally have been spared something.

I'm amazed that the video was so cheap as early as 1986 (ISTR it took time for the market to adjust from very expensive tapes pitched at rental shops to affordable sell-through ones) but back then my family didn't have a VCR so we never paid attention to prices at the time. The list of outlets on the advert is an eye opener - some of those are newsagent chains/franchises that I can't recall ever doing videos; others are names long vanished from high streets ("when I were a lad..." our town's main big newsagents was Menzies not Smith's); others I didn't realise were trading at all or under those names that early (a quick google reveals Asda was mainly northern based until the end of the 1980s)

Stuart

14/6/2013 06:54:47 pm

I'm no expert, but once when asking on a forum why the UK skipped the really obvious idea of releasing Five Faces of Darkness in "Movie" form on tape (regardless of the quality- though I rather like it- it'd have been easy to market as the sequel to the already successful in the rental market film) someone suggested that tape length was important to price.

IE, Arrival From Cybertron, assuming they did the usual thing of the time of removing the opening and closing credits between episodes, would run to just over an hour. And a 66 minute tape could retail at pocket money prices as opposed to the next standard size up. By the time they started doing five episode tapes Tempo were no longer receiving new material and were just repackaging already released stuff.

Considering he seems to have a love of Kitsch stuff (I can't imagine he needed the money so badly that doing the Battleship novelization wasn't mostly the result of having some fun on his part) I think David would have at least not been snoobish or looked down on doing a "Mere" toy book. But as you say, that's still no measure of quality.

I would really love for someone to go through that big box of Budiansky's that seems to be chock full of documentation from his time on the book. Bit and pieces of it have popped up here and there but it really needs a good scanning. There's a good chance there's memos and other documentation in there on whatever David was doing, especially as Bob seems to have, to all intents and purposes, really been editing the series (with the actual string of people credited doing it mainly giving him a very free hand, much as with the Furman/Rimmer relationship).

Tim Roll-Pickering link

15/6/2013 09:27:26 am

I used to have the AfC tape and it certainly removed the inbetween title sequences and also the previews/story so far. The lack of onscreen credits made it flow better than some of the later releases.

I've no idea when tape length became less of an issue in the video industry - I have a vague recollection that at one stage material had to be edited to fit the lengths of tapes already available but over time more and more duplicating companies would provide tapes at whatever length was necessary.

snowkatt

14/6/2013 07:03:00 pm

the price for the vhs tape even if you take inflation in account is rather cheap
especially when you consider that just 4 year prior star wars would have been selling for between $125 and $ 80
http://swhomevid.site40.net/vhs_anh.html

so 8 quid for a 60 min tape that wil be atched again and again and again and again untill it wears thin ( the tape nto the episodes themselves ) seem like an absolute steal

( and isnt it telling that two of the comments are more interested in the tape then the main story ? )

len kaminski also wrote iron man
several marvel comics presents
and ghostrider 2099 among other things
http://www.comicvine.com/len-kaminski/4040-42525/
http://marvel.wikia.com/Len_Kaminski
http://comicbookdb.com/creator.php?ID=307

anyway neough about the man on to his work

i cant really say much for this comic
its as you said nothing more then a bit of unassuming fluff
its neither great nor offensive
it could be a cartoon episode plot especially with the human shenanigans of the second part
and its not exactly one of my favorites

the ho hum art and dreary colors dont really help much either
slightly better then shooting star
but not as good as the first half of rock and roll out ( how is that for damning with faint praise ? )

Stuart

14/6/2013 07:09:57 pm

Indeed, I'd forgotten how solid the first half of Rock and Roll out was so I'm being a tad unfair on the previous 1985 Uncle Bob stuff.

Thanos6

20/6/2013 12:51:38 pm

Just found this blog, and I've really been enjoying it. I always enjoy looking at how American entertainment is viewed and altered in other areas (and the inverse; how Americans view and alter other areas' entertainment), and this goes double for comic books. You've got yourself a new follower!

Felicity

28/10/2019 05:22:55 am

Len Kaminski wrote my favourite “Midnight Sons” title (Marvel’s early-1990s horror hero group), “Morbius: The Living Vampire,” so he’ll always be cool for that. I also liked the lettering in this issue by Bill Oakley and the cool computer diagram of Bumblebee that Shockwave is looking at on the first page.

Transformation 57: The Absence of Peter David.

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