Transformation G2 5: Born Yesterday.

25/10/2018

This week, it's the final Marvel continuity post as I hit the fifth issue of the Fleetway comic:

THE POWER AND THE GLORY!

Plus, the AMERICAN G2 COMIC!

And my friends, is where the third book will end. So thanks again to everyone who's read this far.

But, the journey continues next week...

10 Comments

John D. link

26/10/2018 11:06:51 pm

I never saw any issues of G2 in Glasgow, it came as a total surprise to hear about it years later. I think I had moved on to Sega and sonic the comic anyway! Was Roy of the rovers still going? I recall getting the reboot of that (a monthly supposedly) starring Roy Race Jr. It was, like G2, very grim in tone and with similar art (heavy black ink lines, a lot of primary colour). In his debut match Roy Race Jr plays rubbish and actually gets sent off! I wonder where they took that story. Anybody know? I never saw another issue of that again so maybe the reaction was very bad.

Stuart

26/10/2018 11:19:09 pm

I've (possibly exaggerated over time) memories of Roy having his foot amputated? Not sure if it was from that comic though, or even that extensive an injury.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

29/10/2018 01:06:25 pm

He had a helicopter accident (how predictive) at the end of the weekly strip and then the monthly title showed he'd lost a foot and was now a manager. However there was quite a bit of retconning and ignoring continuity in the last few years as the strip jumped from title to title.

Charles RB

27/10/2018 02:37:29 am

I too remember the days of "budding is a cool sci-fi idea" and agreeing (I still think it's a neat idea for a 'what man was not meant to do' story), and that days led to a subplot in Roberts' Eugenesis that people used to look down on "constructed cold" Matrix-built robots as freaks which got nicely reverse-engineered for IDW.

My favourite thing about the Liege Maximo is that he ended up as trhe Very Important Thirteen Old Guys but since the Fallen was in there too, and he ended up in the films, poor Liege ends up being completely changed in design and personality in all his post-Alignment appearances! If Bay et al had picked up Maximo instead, the last nine years of Transformers fiction would look different (and maybe we'd get G2 trades).

Warcry link

27/10/2018 05:15:17 pm

I actually just reread G2 last month, for the first time in probably a decade and a half. I was really surprised at how slowly it got going! The first issue is obviously magnificent, but most of the rest of the first half of the series felt like it was killing time. Which is really odd because Furman must have known that there was a >90% chance that it wouldn't go past 12 issues. #6 through the end are great, though that obviously didn't help you UK readers much.

The almost total lack of new toy promotion is really odd -- there was, what, four pages in New Dawn and a few panels at the end with Rotor Force? It's strange because the series featured tonnes of mostly-replaceable background guys and there was absolutely no reason they couldn't have had, say, the Axcellerators or SkyScorchers bopping around during the fight scenes instead of random Powermasters. At the very, very least, it's baffling they didn't give Marvel updated model sheets for the Aerialbots, Constructicons, Combaticons, Minibots, Ramjet and Starscream that matched the new toy schemes.

But onto the big controversy...G2 is one of my favourite bits of TF fiction but I've always thought that “budding” was an awkward idea. Transformers are supposed to be machines and I really don't like it when the fiction does things like this to “de-mechanize” them. The rationale behind including it mainly seems to have been “how do I make the Swarm make sense?”, though, rather than whether the budding itself did.

But as far at the talk of eugenics...G2 isn't the problem in that regard, not really. It's more like an inevitable corollary to what came before. Once the Transformers stopped being simple living machines and became the children of a light god with literal, tangible souls made from his essence, this sort of thing was always hanging around as a bit of uncomfortable subtext. This is the first story to make it explicit, but the Primus origin explicitly sets the Transformers above all other, lesser forms of life, because their god is real and they really ARE made in his image. G2 runs with that to its logical conclusion by showing us what Transformers would be like without that divine blessing. But I don't think that's a problem with G2 as much as it's an elephant in the room that comes from the Primus origin itself.

Richard

29/10/2018 10:20:10 am

I’m a huge fan of the G2 series. I think I first discovered it when I randomly found issue 11 in a comic shop when I was about 13, thinking the whole franchise was long dead, and its over-the-top, 90s madness blew my tiny teenage mind.

The “genetic morality” aspect and the way it robs characters of agency is certainly my biggest bug bear. And it’s a surprising theme for Furman to keep returning to when many of his most successful characters (Grimlock, Scorponok, Carnivac – even Jhiaxus as mentioned here) are wrestling with choices, and seemingly of their own free will rather than with pre-programmed morality.

I’m surprised to hear about a backlash to Budding. I’m of the generation who found it weird but really interesting. It certainly feels like it gels with the spark metaphor introduced a few years later in Beast Wars: why shouldn’t a spark be able to light another spark? In my head-canon, you would just need the right “kindling” – if sparks are anchored to a spark crystal or laser core of a TF’s body, then maybe bringing an empty crystal or core close enough to cause the spark to divide or splice across. Then BOOM: part of the original / parent Transformer turns back into protoform / sentio metallico material and provides a basic chunk of body for the new / child Transformer. Ever since the Matrix turned Hot Rod into Rodimus, we’ve seen Transformers physically change in seemingly non-mechanical ways. To me it’s what makes them more interesting than mecha - they’re oddly alien and biomechanical at times, but mostly on a metaphorical level.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

29/10/2018 02:04:26 pm

I did pick up the final issue of the UK comic but for whatever reason I never wrote off to Transmasters. Maybe I had decided to let it end, maybe I was put off by the "Your father's Autobot is back" suggesting going backwards not forwards or maybe some other reason. (I do recall that after I'd put an advert for missing issues in Comics International I received a letter from someone at the club asking me to pass on any replies. They sent the letter with the stamp sellotaped on so Royal Mail charged excess postage on delivery.)

I discovered the US G2 book about midway through the run. Most of the earlier issues were easy to find as back issues and I had all but one by the time #10 came out. However #2 was a nightmare to find and took me over nine years before I finally found a copy at a time when interest was renewed by Dreamwave. I don't think I missed much in the interim. As I've said before, "Generation 2" is a rubbish name for a mass market toyline but *is* a good name for a nostalgia based franchise; however when the original target audience are at most university students if that then it's far too early (nostalgia normally works on about a 20 to 35 year scale). A line of "toys your elder brother had and probably still has in the attic" isn't that appealing.

Furman seems to have grasped just what the actual readership would be hence the comic is basically written for people who knew the original title *but* it's also wise that it can't just pick up where the original left off as much of the readership either didn't see the later years or can't necessarily remember them. Instead this has to be self-contained and it more or less works. That said my impressions are based heavily on an issue #2~less reading at the time and Megatron's origin is the fly in the ointment - he's a major character in the franchise and the first major new toy of the line so hard to ignore but it requires more work than most characters.

Beyond that this was Transformers for the 1990s and it gives it in style. Anyone can die, the action takes place on a grander scale, there are great revelations about the past and more. It was an incredible ride and felt like the ultimate adventure, with an amazing climax. Not even the art changes could deter from this.

I don't think I ever felt any strong views about budding one way or the other. The story was increasingly into "living metal" and the origin had shown the planet forming and the first Transformer solidifying out of a substance so it wasn't that much of a stretch to suggest there was more to the Transformers than meets the eye. And of course one of the big problems with the four million year gap is the assumption that no new Transformers could be created in the interim due to the lack of the Matrix (or a lot of waffle to support Ultra Magnus) which ultimately doesn't make much sense. So this ultimately works as an extension of what we already knew.

Jon Talpur

29/10/2018 09:56:49 pm

Yaniger still remains an inspired choice to spearhead the artwork of the first Transformers comic reboot. Which makes it all the more crushing that he obviously struggled badly to meet the monthly deadlines. Back then of course Marvel were still aiming on meeting deadlines, so Yaniger's days as the regular artist on the title were numbered pretty quickly. It all seems quite quaint now, compared with the almost-expected regular delays from IDW.

It's also kind of remarkable that, despite his art style still being well-regarded, to the point of alternate heads specifically in his art style being provided with two Japanese figures, Yaniger's last piece of official TF art remains the cover to G2 US #12 in 1994.

The lack of new toy promotion in the US G2 comic is a bit baffling, but then so was using decade-old animated episodes on the by-then slowly dying syndication market that by their very nature could only effectively advertise the re-used molds (not even in the G2 colour-schemes) and none of the newly-designed figures.

G2 did bring lasting design innovations to the line (light-piping, ball joints), so obviously it can't be completely written off, but Hasbro really were quite half-arsed in its approach to the franchise as a whole, beyond the toyline itself. You could almost argue that G2's most lasting legacy is probably the implicit retroactive naming of the original range as Generation 1.

Maybe if there had been a new animated series (the DIC G.I. Joe series had only ended the year before G2 started) or if the proposed SNES G2 game from Argonaut Software had been released and was successful, G2 might have had a stronger standing as a franchise beyond just the toyline.

I wrote to Transmasters UK as a result of the plug in G2 UK #5, after which I subsequently received copies of The Continued Generation 2 from #13 (as it continued the numbering from the US G2 comic) to #29 in December 1997, although I gather it lasted a further four years at until #39. At least I managed to read some early work from James Roberts, Jack Lawrence and Nick Roche!

In more recent times, Transmasters UK's Matt Dallas was looking at reprinting the CG2 material due to the interest surrounding the work, although I gather there's a bit of a roadblock in that one of the key creators (and it's not any of the guys who went on to IDW) doesn't want to see any of their work reprinted at all, which probably puts a cap on that piece of TF history.

Felicity

5/1/2020 09:45:03 am

To 2020 me, 1993 is a simpler, more innocent time, with lots to be nostalgic about. To 1993 me, it was the scary, depressing present-day, a dark time in my life, and with the quality of popular culture going steadily downhill to make matters worse.

Also, I hadn’t yet learned that no new version of anything from my past would ever be done “right” and to just stop hoping and getting upset when it didn’t do justice to the original. The only winning move is not to play.

But as a thought experiment I’m going to imagine that it’s 1993, it’s *not* a dark time in my life, and “Transformers: Generation 2” turned out at least OK, just not perfect by my aesthetic standards.

In this alternate 1993, the toys were either re-releases of the original 1980s toys with different colours (but tasteful, not the tacky Day-Glo nightmare we got) or were upgraded to improve on the anatomy of the figures, as Action Masters and Heroes of Cybertron did (except transformable).

There’s a new “Transformers: Generation 2” cartoon but it bears as much resemblance to the original as possible, from the design of the model sheets, to the writing style, to the animation (it should be at least as good as “The Rebirth,” which was average for the series and very good for Akom), to the voice acting. Despite the over-all quality of TV animation in 1993 being much worse than in 1986, there were still some bright spots, so I know it could be done.

The comic could be gritty and serious but the art would be attractive and strive for the high-water-mark of your William Johnsons and José Delbos and Geoff Seniors, and not be flat and cartoony and exaggerated. The lettering would preferably not be digital, but if it were, it would have to be in a very good font. If the balloons are going to be colour-coded to show who’s talking, they’ll be tastefully done with normal balloon shapes and the standard white background of the balloon replaced with a single colour (no patterns or logos).

It’s possible that with toys and cartoons and comics being a business, motivated by profit and not making great art, that nothing we ever got was ever more than hack-work churned out for the lowest cost they could get away with. But perhaps in the 1980s the profit margins were thicker and the budgets were bigger and the minimum aesthetic standard of what they thought we’d accept was higher. In other words even the schlock was better in the 1980s. ☺

LiamKav

30/10/2020 11:24:25 am

I think its more a case of "the 1980s where when I was a child and therefore everything is better". The G1 cartoon was largely pap enlivened by some extremely good voice acting and a simple but effective trick of "funny voices are quick characterisation". Plus the 3rd season genuinely had more mature writing.

But you forget all the terrible 80s stuff because it hasn't lasted. But in terms of 80s vs 90s I'd struggle to argue that He-Man is an intrinsically better cartoon than, say, Street Sharks.

I'd argue that you don't start getting actually good Toy-cartoons until the late 90s. TMNT doesn't quite count due to being very much a multimedia property, but Beast Wars is definitely written by adults who aren't ashamed to be working on a "kids" property and know how to sell toys and tell good grown-up (but not "mature") stories.

Transformation G2 5: Born Yesterday.

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