Transformation Armada 1: Mini-Comic.

2/11/2018

This week, another new new era as we enter the 21st century and a whole new take on Transformers in the first issue of Pamimi Transformers: Armada, FIRST ENCOUNTER!

Plus I look at the eight year gap between comics in THE INTERIM YEARS PART 1!

Apologies for the image quality, I've had to do start scanning the comics myself now. Hopefully I'll get better at it!

6 Comments

Charles RB

3/11/2018 12:14:44 am

The art is worse than anything Megatron has done or will do.

It's depressing to see the state of Armada #1 compared to the Transformations and letter's page of Marvel UK. Powers-that-be at Panini clearly had a dimmer view of what the target audience could handle or would care about.

(And cor, the days when "OH MY GOD THAT TOY LOOKS A BIT G1" was a thing to yell about and not "oh, that toy looks like the old one again". Familiarity breeds boredom. Beast Wars bringing in the Ark and the like felt _epic_ at the time, now G1 is never going anywhere and on rewatches I sometimwes think "I wish there was less G1 so Beast Wars could do more of its own thing")

Simon Hall

3/11/2018 11:53:03 am

I thought Armada was fine for what it was. It gets better over its short run, but like all domestic comics (bar Panini's X-Men and Spider-Man reprints of the time and stalwart 2000AD), it is definitely aimed at the nursery market. By this time, the boys adventure comic market is dead and UK newsstands are awash with stuff like this - gossamer thin on original content and stuffed to the rafters with puzzles and posters and pebble-dashed with a range of plastic tat in the form of 'free gifts'.

On one of Metrodome's DVD sets of the original series, there's an interview with Simon Williams about the art work he did for the UK Armada comic and there seem to be very tight editorial controls on the artwork produced for this type of comic.

Furman himself wasn't totally out of the loop in terms of comic writing - he had contributed work for Panini's Rugrats comic around this time too.

Got to admit, I do agree with Charles' sentitments that Transformers has got a whole less imaginative these days. I miss the days of Beast Wars/ Machines pushing things on and bringing some freshness to franchise. It would be nice to get a deck-clearing reboot again, that isn't beholden to the original 1980s version.

Charles RB

4/11/2018 07:01:01 pm

The film series is the closest we'll likely get to a deck-cleaning (and of course are now part OF the status quo of later takes, just like Beast Wars became). I think the only one since then that's not a G1-ey one is Rescue Bots.

Felicity

5/1/2020 08:30:05 pm

Why don’t we just designate *today* as Optimus Prime’s birthday! We’ll have a party tonight!

Felicity

5/1/2020 11:43:43 pm

I don’t want to get too negative again, but just for the historical record, I’ll note how I, as a fan of the original series and child of the eighties, experienced these shows.

J. Michael Straczynski (I’m assuming that’s “the script editor of Babylon 5”) had worked on cartoons (plus “Captain Power”) all through the 1980s, so that was potentially a good sign.

“RUINED FOREVER” is an unfortunate straw-man characterisation of the pain of being an original fan of “Transformers” in the 1990s (and another example of how toxic “Transformers” fandom is). As I mentioned in an earlier comment, it takes a while to make the journey from hoping you’ll get more of the thing you love and that it will be done “right” to realising that nothing will ever done “right” ever again and you’re better off not getting emotionally invested in the outcome. The only winning move is not to play.

Fortunately, as long as you have access to the original thing, the “RUINED FOREVER” effect is greatly reduced. It’s important to remember that when “Beast Wars” came out there were no DVDs of G1 and no downloading episodes from the Internet. I didn’t have most of the original cartoon on tape, so it was much more important to me that “Beast Wars” be a new source of G1.

Plus, it’s laughable to think of now, but imagine if you loved G1 and had no idea what “Beast Wars” would be like, and you truly believed that it potentially could be like getting more G1. Imagine how crushed you’d be. Not only was not new G1, *they didn’t even try* to make it new G1.

And when all you’ve known up until now is the original thing which you love, the first new version to come is what “RUINS” the perfection of the original “FOREVER.” Of course you can eventually get over it and accept that you’ll just have to limit yourself to the part of it that you like and ignore the part you don’t like, but that was never necessary before, and now it is. So in that sense, it has been “ruined.” “Forever.”

So, when I saw “Beast Wars” in the TV listings, I was cautiously optimistic. “Generation 2” hadn’t “RUINED” “Transformers” “FOREVER” yet, despite the comics, toys, and CGI spam in the cartoon.

Nevertheless, I was disappointed by the ugly computer animation, beast modes (including, yes, a simian Optimus Prime), childish writing, and voice over-acting. But the heavy metal guitar background music was nice. Oddly soothing, in fact.

This is also when I noticed that in online fandom there were “Transformers” fans young enough to believe the exact opposite about “Beast Wars,” claiming that it had superior animation, writing, and acting to the original. Among other things, they’d point to the fact that “Beast Wars” had an ongoing storyline instead of being self-contained episodes (with the required “reset” at the end of each episode) of G1. It was quite a shock. It’s one thing to have to grudgingly accept that the new version of your favourite thing isn’t going to be as good as the old version, but it’s something else altogether when you meet someone who thinks the original is terrible and only likes the new version. Sacrilege!

“Robots in Disguise” was a step in the right direction, but only a step. The animation, while technically good, was too anime in style, making it harder to connect to than G1’s American/Japanese hybrid style. The writing and voice acting were still not up to the standard of the original series. “Truck Not Monkey” became “Truck Not Fire Truck.” Still, we were one step closer.

A few years later, I was able to get into “Robots in Disguise” thanks to a friend showing me an episode with some nice animation and a story focusing on an interesting character, Scourge (the character who looks like Optimus Prime painted black). Even now I still can’t quite get past how anime the art style is, or the kiddification of some of the writing, but I have warmer feelings about the show. Enough so that when I saw “Robots in Disguise” in the TV listings more recently, I was horrified to discover that there’s a new show by that name!

The night before the morning that “Robots in Disguise” premiered, I had a dream that I watched it and it was just like G1, right down to the font used for the title of the episode. That unfortunately set me up for a disappointment when I saw the show in reality.

As a child of the 1980s, I can tell you that there has never really been a 1980s revival the way that there were 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s revivals. In fact, the 1970s have come back a few times, while the 1

Felicity

5/1/2020 11:47:27 pm

Hmm. Looks like half of my comment got truncated. I should have backed it up in a text file first. I’m too depressed to rewrite it now. I’ll see how I feel later.

Transformation Armada 1: Mini-Comic.

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