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!

3 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.

Transformation Armada 1: Mini-Comic.

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