Transformation Special: Farewell 1987

21/2/2015

So we've finally made it, another 12 months without me having a comedy brain death. Oddly I found it much harder to do three in a week than I did the last two years, I must be getting old.

Still, it's Doomsday for Nebulos, Volcano Day for Ultra Magnus and changed ending day for Optimus Prime. Only one of them is going to really enjoy their respective days.

All in my looks at:

The 1987 Annual!

and:

The 1987 Collected Comics!

10 Comments

snowkatt

21/2/2015 05:33:08 am

This is gonna be a bit different,Iam commenting as I read.

But first, here is a link to a Marvel UK house ad, with all the 1987 Annuals on offer.
Including the TF UK annual, Thundercats, Action Force and more.
Thought people here would find it interesting.

http://starlogged.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/1987-marvel-uk-annuals-house-ad.html#comment-form

Whats in a name :
That's a damn cool Prime.
Distan,t aloof and all the more cool for it. His face just has 2 yellow optics, which just serves to remove us the reader and Swoop from him.
He is just a faceless commanding officer.

And Prime mitth just have waited at the last possible second to save Swoop, I could see him doing that.

While its a great little storyline, that seques perfectly in to the two parter, but the highlight ( and the biggets dissapoint for me) for the annual is Visceous Circle.

Doomsday for Nebulos:
..It's it's a recap.
No matter how well written, its still a recap of event I have read in a four part mini series.
And as it stands, i'd rather read the mini, even with its lousy ending.
It packs in, quite a lot of story.
Introduces a bucket load of characters and two whole new concepts in just four issues.
For that alone, The Headmasters mini is a triumph.
The summary is a bit ...wel its a summary.

Viceous Circle :

Yes the high point and the low point for me.
High point because I like the volcano story line as portracted and drawn out as it may be.
And im happy to see it concluding, instead of being forgotten.

But the conclusion is so weak, so perfunctory that i cant get enthusiastic about it .
It all feels a bit too clean, too neat and too pat

Galvatron has beaten the snot out of everybody that came up against him in the story.
And beaten Ultra Magnus several times except for issue 116, and even that was brief.

So how could he and Goldbug possibly win ?
Why, with a huge contrivance off course!

It seems that Marvel was a bit fond of the, "show massive changes early and then retrace how we got there" trope in the 80's.
This is the second time it happens in Transformers.
And this annual ( Whats in a name was the previous one. And we saw Galvatron and Ultra Magnus frozen in the volcano in, Ladies Night. )
Very Secret Wars
Or maybe that's just because I have been reading Secret Wars.

The art is lacklustre however and the script follows suit.

Highly dissapointing.

Stylors story:

Ehhh,
I always founs Stylors motivation to become a Headmaster ring a bit hollow.
And he never had much of a personality.
This story didnt help much either.

Funny, but I tend to skip it.

Ark duty :

I like this better then Stylors story or Viceous Circle. It migth be slight but is more interesting then Viceous Circle.
...Shorter too and its just a nice little character study to underscore hot rod's recklessness and gung ho attitude.
Something that contrasts sharply with his war weary Rodimus self.

It also ties nicely in to the contruction of Autobot City.

The Final Conflict :

Mostly interesting to see what could have happend for The Headmasters story.
But nothing more then that.

I would say that the dislike of Annual 87 is undeserved.
It has 2 duds in its line up. ( Viceous Circle and The Final Conflict)
But its still quite a solid little title, that holds up well.

As a whole 1987 was a solid year.
But the rot was starting to creep in the US material and Budiansky's burnout is starting to become obvious.
He can only get enthusiastic for the Headmasters and even that's only for 6 issues.

Unfortunally Marvel or Hasbro refused to let him move on for another year.
And instead of ending on a high note ( Dark Star ) we get wrasseling.

but 1987 is still solid.

Ralph Burns

21/2/2015 09:29:27 am

I still have huge nostalgia for this book though even at the time I felt it wasn't as good as the previous ones. 'Vicious Circle' looked bad to my eyes with the lettering, the comic strips look small on the page and the general design of the book is a bit bland. But! I loved with a fiery passion back in the day and read the text Headmasters story to death!

Ralph Burns

21/2/2015 09:43:02 am

Whoops. Was referring to the Annual there.

The specials and CW2 featured here were among some of my most prized possessions back in the day. In this internet age it's hard to fully quantify how amazing these publications were. Comics were ephemeral so to get to read them again and also in lovely reprints of cover to cover TF action really were special events. At school those who started reading the comics earlier would recount in hushed tones what happened in earlier stories. So for example I had been told about the stories in CW2 but this was my first chance to read them! So I read the changed ending about 14 years before I got to read the original ending. It was very confusing. Had the Robot Wars features lied to me?!!!

Tim Roll-Pickering link

21/2/2015 02:50:18 pm

Nice timing! Most schools have just had their half-term and I first read the annual book during a half-term when staying with my grandparents and the boy next door lent it to me. It was a treat to discover but later when I owned a copy myself I found the lettering and colouring weakened the strips whilst the Headmasters story felt rushed at the end to infodump nearly all the toyline in one chapter. And it just doesn't compared to the highs of the previous one (although fairness it also doesn't have weird forgettable tales in it either.)

I think Prime's saving Swoop falls into the trope of help only arriving at the crucial second but it's easy to see how a paranoic could take it.

Odd that as late as 1987 science fiction was predicting a world government in just sixteen years time. I guess wild optimism about the millenium proved hard to shift.

Of the reprints I have very fond memories of when Decepticon Dambusters was reprinted again in the Winter 1993 special. That was a rare piece of delight during a horrible winter. When Wrath of Guardian was reprinted the following spring it had the page with Buster removed - did that edit stem from Collected Comics #6?

On Man of Iron:

"Sadly none of the covers online are of the version I had (direct edition?) which went as far as adding Shakespeare in place of the barcode."

Got it in one. Marvel comics from the era have two versions of the cover, one with a barcode and a "CC" in the info box for newsstand distribution and the other is a direct edition for comic shops has a UK price added and a visual in place of the barcode. This is because of the differences in distributions - newsstands work on a sale or return basis with unsold copies originally all returned but later to cut cost the practice developed of stripping the covers and sending them back and credit being made. (Or just making a declaration.) Comic shop distribution works on a pre-order basis with unsold copies not returnable except in special circumstances. Because of concerns that comic shops would abuse the system by putting over orders back via the newsstands, variant covers were used. (Also most comic shops at the time didn't have barcode scanning. Heck some of them didn't even have tills until Marvel ran a special programme.)

In practice most collectors seem to regard the two versions as interchangeable. Marvel seems to treat the newsstand version as the main when it comes to collected editions and the like but sometimes the direct edition version pops up.

Regarding the possibility of a Marvel US series reprinting the UK book, it would certainly have been possible. Shooter's policy wasn't against any reprints at all - there were a lot of dedicated ongoing and special reprint titles in the period - but rather against the practice of using a reprint as a fill-in in a regular series. This happened a lot in the 1970s and was part of the disorganisation at Marvel that he set out to tackle. (I think he stepped up the practice of having emergency stories on standby to have something new instead.) But it didn't apply to a dedicated book.

One thing that might have made Marvel US wary is the copyright situation following a bust up with Alan Moore who got angry when some of his Doctor Who strips were reprinted without permission or paying reprint royalties and it got worse when a big X-Men storyline was planned using characters and elements originally created by Moore and Alan Davis for the UK Captain Britain strips. Moore protested and Marvel US realised the differences in UK IP law put him in the right (although I don't know which rights or clauses he was asserting). The X-Men storyline was quickly altered to remove the Moore co-created elements (this is one of the reasons why the key motivation in the "Mutant Massacre" crossover is lacking). The whole thing may have made increased wariness about relying on too many other reprints from abroad. I'm guessing for Man of Iron someone had either checked through the contracts or re-signed all the creators but it could have been too much work to make sure the UK creators' work was available.

(I am not a lawyer but I did some basic UK intellectualy property law. UK copyright differs from US in several regards - in particular the concept of "work for hire" doesn't exist here. In the UK legally the person who writes something is the author whatever their employment status or how the contract assigns initial copyright, whereas under US work for hire the contracting party is legally considered the author - a wfh creator is selling their services not the end product. And the UK has the concept of moral rights which doesn't exist in the US but which gives authors the right to object to distorted reproduction. Add in that contracts from Marvel UK and indeed the British comics industry in general weren't always great in foreseeing future use and the mess increased.)

Andrew Turnbull link

22/2/2015 09:33:56 am

The resuse of panels for the last page of The Complete Works V2 is from a Don Perlin pencilled issue, I used to be able to say which one, but I cannot recall off the top of my head.

I do miss The Complete Works, a missed opportunity as in essence they were European Graphic Albums a la Asterix. If only they had continued. At least until the end of the first year of US tales, those two issues by Johnson/Baker deserved a nice large format HC presentation.

Staurt

22/2/2015 01:10:07 pm

@Snowkatt: Lovely summing up there and thanks to the link to the advert, nice to see there was a "Proper" Marvel Annual that year as well.

@Tim, I've put the issue away now but I'll check Wrath during the week for missing pages.

@Andrew: It would have been nice (and forced them to reprint Raiders!), though I suppose at two books a year of four issues it wouldn't have gotten very far even if it had carried on right up till the point Fleetway got the licence.

John D. link

1/3/2015 11:46:24 am

As luck would have it I am an IP lawyer and I think the problem with UK reprints would be that Marvel UK was likely paying writers but not according to any particular Ts and Cs that definitely assigned copyright in the works to Marvel UK. Creator characters such as Deaths Head would have made things even more complicated - why would you want to introduce into the US cast a character owned not by Hasbro but a UK creator?

John D. link

1/3/2015 11:49:13 am

Ps well done to Tim for so excellent legal analysis! The idea that this non-Transformer Deaths Head joined the cat and seemed more powerful than most of the actual transformers actually really annoyed me as a kid. You can imagine I was not too impressed with next week's showdown between Deaths Head and Shockwave (the sensational Geoff senior artwork excepted). As for the annual I don't recall this headmasters text at all, which is odd as I would usually read and re read all transformers stuff. I just do no think I liked the headmaster/target aster gimmick one bit.

Felicity link

5/11/2019 11:44:20 pm

I wasn’t able to leave a comment on the previous entry (#145) as the “Comment” link takes us to the same page that it’s on (the article). I thought about manually modifying the URL but as I found out from examining another comments page, it turns out I’d have to know the comments page’s secret title to do that. :-)

So here’s what I would have said:

I liked “Heavy Metal War.” Some great animation (alternating with some bad animation) and a nice season finale. The giant Autobot hologram totally got me first time I saw it—I had no idea what it was or where it came from until we pulled back and saw Hound creating it.

The GI Joe video game looks good.

Did Budiansky have Zarak go crazy after this? He was certainly evil but I don’t remember him being insane. I’ll have to keep reading these reviews and find out!

As for this entry:

I kind of guessed that what Swoop had against Prime was that he saved him (i.e. by interfering in a battle). From Prime’s POV he probably waited as long as he did to do it because he wanted to be sure Swoop really needed him, and to give Swoop every chance to save himself. Ironically, people leaping in to save someone during a fight is what will get Prime killed in the movie, as Hot Rod interferes in Prime’s battle with Megatron. I’m sure Swoop was amused by this!

Maybe Ian Rimmer was a fan of Reginald Perrin.

Stylor’s profile mentions that he’s a foppish clotheshorse, social butterfly, and trend-follower, but we don’t get to see this very much during the comics and not at all during the cartoon (“The Rebirth” was pressed for time just mentioning each character, though). So it’s nice that there was at least one place where this manifested.

Felicity link

6/11/2019 01:42:51 am

That changed ending to “The Last Stand” is more of a Mike Tyson punch than “Man of Iron” was! I’m surprised the British lettering merged so well with John Workman’s lettering. It helps that they kept the balloon style consistent, with the square balloons with electric spark corners rather than using oval balloons with electric zigzag tails.

As to “Man of Iron,” the tone is certainly different from what we were used to from the American issues, but I wouldn’t say it struck us as more mature. There was still very much a sense of this being a children’s comic, but an old-fashioned one from a time when children’s stories were grimmer. Conversely, the American issues keep things light but otherwise blended in with the normal Marvel superhero style and tone that one would expect from a non-children’s comic like “Spider-Man.”

Jim Shooter might be able to get by on a technicality since “Man of Iron” was a reprint but not a reprint of anything previously seen in the US, so in that sense it was “new.”

Transformation Special: Farewell 1987

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