Transformation G2 1: Blog Without End.

28/9/2018

Yes, it truly is carrying on for another 18ish months. I must be insane.

Still, at least I'm off to a strong start, looking at the first attempt to revive the franchise with a very 90's pissed off Optimus Prime in a rogue Sonic the Comic strip, all in WAR WITHOUT END!

Plus, the crossover the UK went out of its way to avoid, in G.I. JOE ISSUE 138-142.

It's good to be back.

17 Comments

Snowkatt

28/9/2018 10:54:42 pm

Here we are now,
entertain us.

Never the end huh ?

Charles Ellis

29/9/2018 12:15:42 am

The theory that UK-G2 was meant to be its own version of the story and then became all-reprint _does_ make more sense - #2 is full of G2 Decepticons boasting about their newness but they never show up, and why arrange it so you don't reprint #1 or #3 of the US run? Hasbro might have said "PUT MORE TOYS IN #1" but that still doesn't explain having Jhiaxus appear as a flashback in #2 instead of whipping out a toy-heavy #1, then reprinting the other War Without End to say "and this is what other Autobots were doing".

(Nor does it makes sense to end with Megatron and Bludgeon both escaping instead of having Megatron kill Bludgeon, avoiding the need to reprint Tales Of Earth in #4 and indicate Bludgeon's redoing his same plan again)

Andrew Turnbull link

11/10/2018 10:27:16 pm

I don't think it was ever intended to be all-new material. Fleetway had already dipped their feet in that particular pond with Turtles and the short lived (also featuring Furman and Yaniger) Toxic Crusaders.

I don't think it was given much care and attention by editorial, outside of the twenty years ahead of it's time presentation of the comic. Fleetway G2 as is, with a cover mount would fit nicely on supermarket shelves now.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

29/9/2018 12:44:21 am

"Fleetway" is a name with a bit of a complicated history of multiple mergers. In 1991 the line was aquired by Egmont, the parent company of London Editions Magazines, who I've mentioned before with their DC reprints, and late that year the LEM and Fleetway imprints were combined as "Fleetway Editions", though in the ex-LEM titles at least the impression given was that this was LEM absorbing Fleetway but using the more historic name. Fleetway had done the 1980s MASK comic and LEM did Masters of the Universe, so the combined line could claim the most experience in the field outside Marvel UK.

I spotted the comic at the time - an independent newsagents/stationers had opened in our town to compete with Menzies and I recall seeing the comic there one evening on the way home from school. However I felt underwhelmed by it - it was clearly pitched far younger than the previous UK comic, and I'd been following the US G2 comic as well and this simply didn't hold up. Now okay I was a few years older and not the target audience but Bludgeon was probably included so that ex Marvel readers could see this as a legitimate continuation. However the result is the storyline is distorted by having too many elements at the outset and I think someone should have stepped in to say that it would have been better to assume that the Marvel UK generation had either moved on or else would buy the comic regardless rather than kicking off with the mess of a power struggle in the Decepticons instead of building things up for new readers.

As for the G.I. Joe crossover, it sounds like you had the Marvel Mart pack. This controversy just predates recorded history on the web but was quite a mess. Marvel published a mini-catalogue of back issue packs, collected editions and merchandise in some of their comics around March/April 1994 (including TF G2 I think), resulting in a lot of outcry from retailers who saw it as the company trying to sell direct to the customers. (So the following year it instead went into self-distribution and nearly destroyed the market.) One of the particular outcries was that a number of the items were in heavy demand but were not available to retailers for re-orders, even when the original Marvel solicitations had screwed up. (A particular bad case was the penultimate issue of Avengers West Coast, which was part of the joint 30th anniversay Avengers/X-Men crossover, but this wasn't publicised in advanced so the issue was badly underordered and rapidly soared in price. Then Marvel started offering the whole crossover through mail order.) Some of the packs later showed up in Forbidden Planet, suggesting that in at least the overseas markets Marvel had given into retailer pressure (given how much of the market just couldn't easily make overseas distance payments). The Transformers pack was probably one of those attempts to make early issues of a series available to readers in the hope of keeping them onboard - Marvel has often done similar things, although usually in the form of a quick reprint special through existing channels - and perhaps an acknowledgement that many of us only found out about the crossover after it happened (and so spent a few years pouncing on back issues of a series that comic shops rarely bothered with) but the slightly random nature of the contents suggests either a selector who didn't know what they were doing or an attempt to clear an overprint.

Hama's another writer who had a clear vision of the fictional universe he'd created around the toys and never liked some of the external impositions that distort that universe - in particular he disliked the science fiction elements but was often forced to write stories around animated adverts.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

1/5/2019 01:59:42 pm

Since I wrote that there's been a post on Comichron about Marvel Mart. (There were two versions of the catalogue; my recollection is that it was the cover not shown that appear in TF G2.)

https://blog.comichron.com/2019/03/25-years-ago-marvel-tries-to-launch.html

Anonymous X

29/9/2018 06:37:07 pm

Didn’t this Fleetway comic co-exist with the last few Marvel UK Collected Comics specials? I’m sure they did. I bought the last two (the ones which reuse the art from 321 and 322) well into 1994, desperate as I was for anything Transformers related with the end of US Generation 2. I had not even seen or heard of the Fleetway comic until 1996, when I read the capsule reviews on Dave Van Domelen’s old website, and still have never seen the actual Fleetway comics. Wonder if licensing issues existed with two comic publishers printing Transformers comics simultaneously (probably not).

Stuart

30/9/2018 08:38:36 pm

Yep, plenty of anecdotal evidence the last special was alongside the first G2 issue, and with an off-sale date of November, probably the first two or three.

That's my guess as to why the last special didn't have the promised poster, with that being Fleetway's gimmick, Hasbro UK may have told them not to include it.

Tetsuryu

30/9/2018 01:41:46 pm

You just couldn't resist going on a tirade about incels, could you?

Stuart

1/10/2018 06:56:52 am

A paragraph is a tried? Someone's a thin skinned snowflake.

For complete clarity, any self identified incels or Comicgaters can fuck off.

Geoff link

2/10/2018 06:02:15 am

The crossover! For nine year old me, this was basically my the most exciting thing ever. Transformers was basically dead at the time, here in Canada. The Turbomasters and Predators had popped up briefly the year before, but the toyline had mostly become clearance-shop fodder a year or two before. The comic was gone, and the cartoon (which had lasted forever in reruns) was gone too. All the kids at school had moved on to TMNT and X-Men, and I had managed to convince myself (in the serious way that only little kids can manage) that I was the only one left in the whole world who remembered or cared about Transformers.

And then this happened! My family and I were on our way home from our yearly summer camping trip when we stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere for fuel and snacks. I wandered off to flip through their small comic rack, not really expecting to find anything, but one cover in particular caught my eye. I wasn't sure why, at first. It was a G.I. Joe book and I didn't really read G.I. Joe, but that guy in the background looks familiar HOLY SHIT IT'S MEGATRON THERE'S TRANSFORMERS IN THIS COMIC! Megatron's talking like Spock for some reason, but still, Transformers! And Megatron's getting remade into a new body! In spite of my excitement I somehow managed not to pick up any more issues until the last one of the crossover, but somehow that only made #142 seem even more awesome. I'd come into the original comic pretty late (Rhythms of Darkness was my first issue and in retrospect I'm amazed my mother let me buy any more after that), so I'd never really seen Megatron in action. So seeing him effortlessly smash a team of C-list Autobots really sold how powerful his new body was, in a way that probably wasn't anywhere near as effective for people who remembered him soloing the Dinobots a decade ago.

As an adult, of course, it's easy to look at this and say it's not very good, and that it was a totally unnecessary intrusion into a different series that actually had very little to do with the plot of the G2 book itself. But as a kid? It did exactly what it was meant to do -- it made me super-excited for the G2 comic (which, alas, I wouldn't be able to read until a decade later because no local shops stocked it) it renewed my excitement for the franchise and it ensured that I and a few of my friends were in the shops buying G2 toys for the next three years. In particular I was very excited to get my hands on Skydive (not Air Raid!) because of his starring role in the final issue of this crossover. So regardless of quality, it'll always have a special place in my heart.

In retrospect, it's actually really weird that Hasbro would commission a 12-issue US comic (presumably at a loss, the way people say they were guaranteed the 12-issue run regardless of sales) and not bother to make sure that it actually featured the new assortment of toys. Yes, four out of the five leads had G2 figures on the shelves (Prime, Megatron, Grimlock and Starscream), but this is Simon Furman we're talking about -- no one pressured him into writing about THOSE guys. And the entire rest of the toyline, be they returning characters or G2-originals, were all basically shoved into the background when they weren't ignored entirely. Skydive is the only one who has more than a handful of lines, but that's entirely down to Hama leaving him as a loose end, and Furman shuffled him out of the way as soon as he could.

All of which is a fancy way of saying...the UK book makes way, way more sense. Packed to bursting with new toys, all the returning cast proudly showing off their new G2 colours, toy-accurate wacky weapons too I think...quality or not, well-distributed or not, the screenshots you posted from this one issue do a better job of selling the G2 toyline than the entire run of the US book did.

Stuart

2/10/2018 07:18:41 am

That's a great story Geoff, and it's good to hear some contemporary positive feedback to counter the reaction in the letters pages of Joe itself.

Snowkatt

2/10/2018 06:06:18 pm

Don't forget that 1993 was a very different place for comics.
It was the height of the speculator boom, with every publisher pushing out as much product as possible. Which were snapped up by the public, because this one would fund their kids college tuition !!
..Instead of lining the bird cage, as was more likely.

The G2 comic was released in to this with the minimum of interest and support from Hasbro, who were willing to fund 1 years worth but no more depending on the sales.
For the time G2 underperformed, selling around 120 k units which ironically today would be a blockbuster these days post implosion. But during the height of the boom, comics had a print run of a million or more.
See Youngblood 1, X-men v2 1, Superman 75, Spider-man 1 and so on.

G2 as a toyline, was most likely also a very low effort for Hasbro. Cause G2 was mostly augmented with repaints of G1 toys.
G2 was most likely a floater, to see if Transformers were still viable or a dead end franchise.
It took Beast Wars, to get Trandsformers coming back to life and its been a tentpole franchise ever since. ButTransformers has never been as massive as it was in the 80's.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

4/10/2018 12:18:07 pm

Sales information about the US G2 book is hard to find (it falls completely in a period when Comichron doesn't have the information up; though for what it's worth G.I. Joe #141 was not a conspicuously high seller) but from recollection the comic arrived a month after the bubble reached its maximum extent - ISTR figures that showed August 1993 had the highest ever orders in the direct market showing an industry out of control (this was the month Superman officially returned, Batman was replaced, the X-Men were in the midst of 30th anniversary celebrations and more).

Thus TFG2 was running in a twelve month period where the market was rapidly collapsing as readers started abandoning comics because of the spiralling costs, mismanaged shops started collapsing as income failed to meet the expenditure on over orders, distributors started getting tough with non-payers and so forth. A reply in one of the letters pages said that the title's ultimate problem was that retailers kept cutting their orders each month. Toy tie-ins were not particularly valued in the direct marker in the 1990s (back issues were especially scarce compared to other series) and the attitude seemed to be to order a handful, let them sell out and not raise orders further. And this doesn't seem to have been a title with much newsstand sales or subscriptions (there was a period in the 1990s, although maybe just after this, when Marvel put some major energy into selling subscriptions, particularly on the licenced books, working in conjunction with various mailing lists and some of the %s on the period are astonishing).

John D. link

3/10/2018 11:26:57 am

I am aniseed to see that I am a predictable member of the herd that flocked to sonic the comic. To be honest I never got anything like the same satisfaction out of it though I did persevere with it when a really good artist was on board for a while - I think it was Richard Elson? The fact that that Lew stringer was involved was completely lost on me. I never really liked combat Colin though. Anyway I think I dropped sonic the comic around issue 50 which probably coincided with the arrival of britpop.as for this issue itself the art looks very dependent on character models and the plot seems a bit confusing and will jaut bet worse with all the swarm chat to come...

Geoff link

4/10/2018 06:57:56 pm

I must have been half-asleep when I first commented, since I used my real name instead of a screen name people might recognize. Oh well, stuck with it now...

Dalek: I totally sympathize with the Joe readers who didn't like having Transformers shoved into their comics. It would be pretty hypocritical not to, since I dropped the IDW Transformer books as soon as they decided to make them a giant crossover with the Joes, Rom, and whatever the heck else. On top of that, the G.I. Joe book had actually been on death's door for a while at this point (there was a letter in the US version of Edge of Extinction that mentioned that, and that was, what, three years earlier?). Most of the long-term readers probably didn't expect the book to last all that much longer, and this was four issues that they were never going to get back. And I think it only lasted another year or so after this?

But as a kid who loved Transformers and was lukewarm about Joes, obviously none of that mattered to me at the time.

Snowkatt: I would love to hear what the thought process behind the G2 toyline was, but I don't know that I'd call it "minimum effort" as much as "confused". At launch it was basically a reissue line, and it felt like an attempt to cash in on nostalgia and/or to generate some sales from kids like me who had grown up with the original cartoon but had been too young to pick up most of the toys it featured. The first few years of toys were long gone by the time I was old enough for Transformers, but obviously I knew who characters like the Dinobots, Aerialbots, Beachcomber or Jazz were and it was super exciting to be able to own some of them. It seemed to be based on the same motivations as the Euro "Classics" line from a few years previous, just with a more 90s colour palate. And they spent a year or so establishing that as the primary identity of the line...and then they did a 180, canceled the Protectobots and Stunticons outright and launched into a stream of new characters with new molds instead. I guess that was an attempt to draw in younger kids who didn't want 80s bricks, only they'd already alienated those kids by starting the line out with 90% 80s bricks, so the only ones buying were people like me who wanted the 80s bricks and now they'd alienated us as well.

I would argue your last point, though -- if 2007 to 2010 didn't equal 1984-87, it came really, really close.

Tim: I actually just finished rereading G2, and Furman talked about this a bit on the final letters page. Unfortunately it's hard to sell a comic when none of the middle men are willing to give it shelf space. And anecdotally, I'd agree with you about it not getting much newsstand exposure. I lived in a small town so that was the only option for buying comics, and I never saw a single issue of G2 on the racks. It was a major change from the G1 book, which was readily available from those same outlets along with other kid-oriented tie-in products I was familiar with (G.I. Joe, Archie TMNT, the adaptation of the X-Men cartoon...)

Colin H

5/10/2018 02:49:41 pm

Perhaps all Hama's right-wing stuff is just him trying to be satirical?

Laughing_tree

22/10/2018 03:13:30 am

Is it really much of a surprise that Hama would be against Comicsgate? Whatever his politics and however much or little they've changed, he's -- as you pointed out -- Japanese-American, and the CG chuckleheads have a quite noticeable propensity towards racism.

Transformation G2 1: Blog Without End.

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