The Worst She Will Do Is Throw Shadows At You, But She's Always A Woman To Me.
Issue 183: Space Pirates! Part 2. 10th September 1988.
I was so impressed I bought the company!
I talked a little about memories not necessarily being completely reliable or fitting into a perfect narrative for a written recollection last week. But whilst there are some aspects of the story that follows which do feel like they’ve been exaggerated with the retelling (I’m quite baffled that I would have been so behind on my reading as I hurtled towards my seventh birthday, nor that school would have been such a strange experience when I would have been just starting my third year of it), this is genuinely something that has stuck in my memory with a staggering amount of clarity for 27 years. Whilst the broader strokes may have been expanded, I have almost perfect recall of the specific details.
The main reason of course is that this comic genuinely changed my life. And whilst I’m going to be quite harsh on a lot of it when reread through adult eyes, that is the important thing to remember. Maybe I’d have always latched onto something that would have expanded my imagination. If it had been a Real Ghostbusters issue I’d been bought, perhaps I’d be clogging up their fan forums and writing a book called Real Busted (a clever title as it’d trick the Busted fans into buying) about it. But it was this and it was a seismic shift in how I viewed the world.
Hyperbole? Perhaps. But in that Autumn of 1988 I was really not enjoying school in any way shape or form (thinking on it, as we’d have only just gone back, perhaps I wasn’t adjusting well after the Summer holidays?), and after meetings and discussions and one day where I did manage to behave myself I was bought a treat, as part of a what would become a weekly deal whereby I would get each issue of the comic. From the same “Reserved copy” cabinet in Smith’s my mother used for her copies of Starburst, which of course made me feel incredibly grown up. No wonder that within weeks I’d start keeping the issues in a folder just like she did with her magazines.
But I’m getting ahead of myself there. My mother (and all my childhood memories of the Transformers comic are associated with her even though my father would still have been around. Rung would have something to say about that. My father was probably off drunk out of his skull somewhere. For the entire three years I’d be buying the comic) had to put up with a lot of crap from my siblings and I when it came to the entertainment we liked. As a serious minded science fiction fan who despised sexism, just about all forms of children’s TV and literature seemed designed to rub her up the wrong way. “Why is it boys only get the action stuff? Does no one actually think these plots through? How useless is the token girl one!!!?”
I was so impressed I bought the company!
I talked a little about memories not necessarily being completely reliable or fitting into a perfect narrative for a written recollection last week. But whilst there are some aspects of the story that follows which do feel like they’ve been exaggerated with the retelling (I’m quite baffled that I would have been so behind on my reading as I hurtled towards my seventh birthday, nor that school would have been such a strange experience when I would have been just starting my third year of it), this is genuinely something that has stuck in my memory with a staggering amount of clarity for 27 years. Whilst the broader strokes may have been expanded, I have almost perfect recall of the specific details.
The main reason of course is that this comic genuinely changed my life. And whilst I’m going to be quite harsh on a lot of it when reread through adult eyes, that is the important thing to remember. Maybe I’d have always latched onto something that would have expanded my imagination. If it had been a Real Ghostbusters issue I’d been bought, perhaps I’d be clogging up their fan forums and writing a book called Real Busted (a clever title as it’d trick the Busted fans into buying) about it. But it was this and it was a seismic shift in how I viewed the world.
Hyperbole? Perhaps. But in that Autumn of 1988 I was really not enjoying school in any way shape or form (thinking on it, as we’d have only just gone back, perhaps I wasn’t adjusting well after the Summer holidays?), and after meetings and discussions and one day where I did manage to behave myself I was bought a treat, as part of a what would become a weekly deal whereby I would get each issue of the comic. From the same “Reserved copy” cabinet in Smith’s my mother used for her copies of Starburst, which of course made me feel incredibly grown up. No wonder that within weeks I’d start keeping the issues in a folder just like she did with her magazines.
But I’m getting ahead of myself there. My mother (and all my childhood memories of the Transformers comic are associated with her even though my father would still have been around. Rung would have something to say about that. My father was probably off drunk out of his skull somewhere. For the entire three years I’d be buying the comic) had to put up with a lot of crap from my siblings and I when it came to the entertainment we liked. As a serious minded science fiction fan who despised sexism, just about all forms of children’s TV and literature seemed designed to rub her up the wrong way. “Why is it boys only get the action stuff? Does no one actually think these plots through? How useless is the token girl one!!!?”
The worst case of indigestion he ever had.
She could rant to the level of enduring an aneurism, and of all the things she was forced to put up with through having three children it was only Danger Mouse she had even the slightest time for.
Of course, as we’d have already seen Transformers: The Movie and would have owned some of the toys she was well versed in what she was letting herself in for. “Robots wouldn’t be men or women! If they have to have them played by actors who are either men or women why only one woman actor? And why the Fraggle Rock is she pink?!?! Throw in terrible plotting and this is awful stuff!” And that’s an exact quote.
But, and this is what I have the real visceral memory of (I could tell you what the bedsheet looked like), despite pretty much hating the ground everyone involved with Transformers walked on she still sat kneeling by her bed and read the comic with me. This was pretty essential thanks to my very limited literacy skills. Parents: At least 50% of them are pretty decent people.
And as a child who wasn’t especially aware of any wider issues, it’s very easy to see why this comic hit my mind like a bucket of bricks. As part of Furman’s efforts to create a full on sequel to the film we get a rerun of one of its best set pieces (in much the same way every Police Academy film would have the One Who Played The Same Basic Character In Mannequin end up at the end of a YMCA line in a gay club) as the Quintessons launch their full on attack on Autobot City. Blaster even describes it as a “Blitzing” once again just to make sure we get it.
It’s a fantastically realised sequence as; whilst it’s not the largest fight we’ve yet seen it’s certainly the nastiest. The Autobots being caught so unawares is a flaw for reasons we’ll discuss, but watching them getting shot down with massive amounts of damage is hugely exciting to a bloodthirsty kid. There’s also a very nice trick played on any older, smarter readers who would have noticed it’s only brand new redshirt characters who are being killed (Hopper basically explodes, Beachcomber is lightly bopped on the head). Just as you’re lulled into a false sense of security about how all the Autobots you’d recognise are safe, Blaster is brutally shot down with a massive hole right through his chest. This is by far and away the highlight of the issue, and is sure to have stuck in the minds of more readers than me.
Of course, as we’d have already seen Transformers: The Movie and would have owned some of the toys she was well versed in what she was letting herself in for. “Robots wouldn’t be men or women! If they have to have them played by actors who are either men or women why only one woman actor? And why the Fraggle Rock is she pink?!?! Throw in terrible plotting and this is awful stuff!” And that’s an exact quote.
But, and this is what I have the real visceral memory of (I could tell you what the bedsheet looked like), despite pretty much hating the ground everyone involved with Transformers walked on she still sat kneeling by her bed and read the comic with me. This was pretty essential thanks to my very limited literacy skills. Parents: At least 50% of them are pretty decent people.
And as a child who wasn’t especially aware of any wider issues, it’s very easy to see why this comic hit my mind like a bucket of bricks. As part of Furman’s efforts to create a full on sequel to the film we get a rerun of one of its best set pieces (in much the same way every Police Academy film would have the One Who Played The Same Basic Character In Mannequin end up at the end of a YMCA line in a gay club) as the Quintessons launch their full on attack on Autobot City. Blaster even describes it as a “Blitzing” once again just to make sure we get it.
It’s a fantastically realised sequence as; whilst it’s not the largest fight we’ve yet seen it’s certainly the nastiest. The Autobots being caught so unawares is a flaw for reasons we’ll discuss, but watching them getting shot down with massive amounts of damage is hugely exciting to a bloodthirsty kid. There’s also a very nice trick played on any older, smarter readers who would have noticed it’s only brand new redshirt characters who are being killed (Hopper basically explodes, Beachcomber is lightly bopped on the head). Just as you’re lulled into a false sense of security about how all the Autobots you’d recognise are safe, Blaster is brutally shot down with a massive hole right through his chest. This is by far and away the highlight of the issue, and is sure to have stuck in the minds of more readers than me.
I guess the flamy moustache was actually a script thing then?
I also remember clearly loving the Wreck-Gar plot. I mean, he’s fighting giant robot sea monsters, what’s not to enjoy? The sequence of him electrocuting his attackers with a massive charge through his body is a pretty neat idea as well, complete with Carry on Screaming quote (“Frying tonight!”). However, when read in the context of what’s gone before, a fourth straight issue of Wreck-Gar is rather too much and the dialogue gets rather tortuous as Furman tries to have him recap the Quintessons motivation out loud to himself whilst still talking like Wreck-Gar and fighting monsters underwater. It doesn’t work and feels somewhat redundant as we don’t really need to know why the Quintessons are doing what they’re doing for this issue to work.
The fact he’s then rescued by Wheelie as part of the attempt to recreate the feel of the film was incredibly annoying, even as a kid. No one liked Wheelie or his rhyming and this is the equivalent of Jar Jar Binks showing up in The Force Awakens.
But we’ve been dancing around the real issue, the thing that so outraged my mother at the time that it became expedient that I learn to read the comic by itself: Arcee.
Now so far, with the exception of Cindy, Furman’s treatment of female characters hasn’t been too bad. They’re perhaps not hugely well represented (despite the efforts of Ladies’ Night), but then Furman isn’t generally interested in writing humans anyway.
The fact he’s then rescued by Wheelie as part of the attempt to recreate the feel of the film was incredibly annoying, even as a kid. No one liked Wheelie or his rhyming and this is the equivalent of Jar Jar Binks showing up in The Force Awakens.
But we’ve been dancing around the real issue, the thing that so outraged my mother at the time that it became expedient that I learn to read the comic by itself: Arcee.
Now so far, with the exception of Cindy, Furman’s treatment of female characters hasn’t been too bad. They’re perhaps not hugely well represented (despite the efforts of Ladies’ Night), but then Furman isn’t generally interested in writing humans anyway.
I'm a girl!
His real issue seems to be with Arcee herself. He very much doesn’t like the idea of gendered Transformers (to the point it’s easy to forget it’s actually Uncle Bob who will first firmly say they’re not boys or girls), ironically for pretty much the same reason as my mother. It would frankly have been wiser to simply not feature her at all—she doesn’t have a toy to promote and no one would have missed her if she hadn’t been there—but the decision to make this story mimic the feel of the film as closely as possible results in what is comfortably the worst sequence Furman wrote for Marvel as his contempt for the idea of the character shines through and we get something that, whatever the cause of it, is undeniably horribly sexist.
So Arcee is a petulant whiner upset her boyfriend Hot Rod doesn’t want to hang round with her anymore. And because she’s bored she runs away from guard duty outside Autobot City so she can go on a joyride (the one mitigation is that she correctly points out Hot Rod would have once done the same—and indeed will screw up in a similar way in Aspects of Evil—but at least when Hot Rod does it he’ll be redeemed by the end of the story), abandoning her post. It then turns out that the entire Quintesson strategy for the takeover of this massive military base depends on her acting in such an irresponsible way. Arcee is so famously an idiot the villains can base their plans around it with complete reliability.
By any reasonable standards however what follows shouldn’t be presented as her fault, more whoever is in charge of security should be taken to task for having their defences entirely dependent on one lookout despite this being just two years after a nearly disastrous surprise attack on the city. Instead however the fall of the City is treated as being entirely down to her; Ghyrik even bangs on about her “Betrayal”. Women, eh?
Just to show how really stupid she is, when confronted with a mysterious force that’s taken on an entire city upon her return, Arcee thinks she should try and fight it by herself. And she loses of course, in an embarrassing fashion. The fact Ghyrik plans to use her to get the Matrix gets rather lost amidst how uncomfortable Arcee’s entire plot is.
An author actively disliking a character isn’t automatically a problem, but when they’re the only female and the only reason for them to be in the story is to emphasise how awful they are, it can’t help but be sexist in a very nasty way, however unintended. My mother was right to rant and shout at this comic and the entire thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth now I’m an adult. It’s lucky I didn’t really care about such things as a seven year old or I would never have come back. And the worst thing is, this is only the start of the humiliation of Arcee in this story (and indeed, across the entirely of Furman’s time writing her across both Marvel and IDW).
Dan Reed’s art adds to the problem, constantly drawing Arcee in catwalk model poses and paying more attention to her shapely arse than to remembering which Throttlebot is Chase. It also doesn’t help that the cover (our first work from Andrew Wildman) has Arcee being threatened by a massive penis substitute. It was probably intended as a homage to pulp novel covers (considering Furman's interest in spy fiction he may have been thinking of those '70's Bond reprint covers with women straddling massive guns), but when coupled with the contents it has unfortunate unintended consequences.
Before moving on to the rest of the comic, it is worth emphasising that sexism has been--and as much as I enjoy them will likely remain the case as long as Michael Bay remains involved in the films (though oddly my mother likes the first and fourth films. Women, eh?)--a massive problem with Transformers. From the first female Autobots we meet in the cartoon being defined as girlfriends of the boys through Headmasters making Arcee a secretary in SPACE arriving at the "The only girl is a crazy post-op psychopath who was forcably turned into a woman by a vagina excavator" of the early IDW stuff there's a lot to shake the head at. The current comics and cartoons are making a much better job of it by simply treating the female characters as characters, but we've been through a lot of bad stuff to even achieve that much.
So Arcee is a petulant whiner upset her boyfriend Hot Rod doesn’t want to hang round with her anymore. And because she’s bored she runs away from guard duty outside Autobot City so she can go on a joyride (the one mitigation is that she correctly points out Hot Rod would have once done the same—and indeed will screw up in a similar way in Aspects of Evil—but at least when Hot Rod does it he’ll be redeemed by the end of the story), abandoning her post. It then turns out that the entire Quintesson strategy for the takeover of this massive military base depends on her acting in such an irresponsible way. Arcee is so famously an idiot the villains can base their plans around it with complete reliability.
By any reasonable standards however what follows shouldn’t be presented as her fault, more whoever is in charge of security should be taken to task for having their defences entirely dependent on one lookout despite this being just two years after a nearly disastrous surprise attack on the city. Instead however the fall of the City is treated as being entirely down to her; Ghyrik even bangs on about her “Betrayal”. Women, eh?
Just to show how really stupid she is, when confronted with a mysterious force that’s taken on an entire city upon her return, Arcee thinks she should try and fight it by herself. And she loses of course, in an embarrassing fashion. The fact Ghyrik plans to use her to get the Matrix gets rather lost amidst how uncomfortable Arcee’s entire plot is.
An author actively disliking a character isn’t automatically a problem, but when they’re the only female and the only reason for them to be in the story is to emphasise how awful they are, it can’t help but be sexist in a very nasty way, however unintended. My mother was right to rant and shout at this comic and the entire thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth now I’m an adult. It’s lucky I didn’t really care about such things as a seven year old or I would never have come back. And the worst thing is, this is only the start of the humiliation of Arcee in this story (and indeed, across the entirely of Furman’s time writing her across both Marvel and IDW).
Dan Reed’s art adds to the problem, constantly drawing Arcee in catwalk model poses and paying more attention to her shapely arse than to remembering which Throttlebot is Chase. It also doesn’t help that the cover (our first work from Andrew Wildman) has Arcee being threatened by a massive penis substitute. It was probably intended as a homage to pulp novel covers (considering Furman's interest in spy fiction he may have been thinking of those '70's Bond reprint covers with women straddling massive guns), but when coupled with the contents it has unfortunate unintended consequences.
Before moving on to the rest of the comic, it is worth emphasising that sexism has been--and as much as I enjoy them will likely remain the case as long as Michael Bay remains involved in the films (though oddly my mother likes the first and fourth films. Women, eh?)--a massive problem with Transformers. From the first female Autobots we meet in the cartoon being defined as girlfriends of the boys through Headmasters making Arcee a secretary in SPACE arriving at the "The only girl is a crazy post-op psychopath who was forcably turned into a woman by a vagina excavator" of the early IDW stuff there's a lot to shake the head at. The current comics and cartoons are making a much better job of it by simply treating the female characters as characters, but we've been through a lot of bad stuff to even achieve that much.
I think that took about five minutes.
The comic itself is subject to a redesign as part of the relaunch. Most notably Transformation now looks awful, with a tacky silver sideways logo and sparse layout that has dated more than the previous look by a considerable margin. I’m not sure who thought it was a good idea, but it’s telling that despite this being when I started reading the book I have no residual fondness for it. Or indeed any memory of it from when I was a kid. Clearly it wasn’t just the sexism I was trying to repress.
With most of the actual Brand New Look stuff having been done last week, there are two specific things that are designed to excite the reader. The first is the unveiling of the new letters page host. As with the last changeover we get a special Robo-Capers covering the transition. Written by Furman, it reveals Grimlock is off on holiday, but not before he buries his replacement Dreadwind under a pile of suitcases. “I wonder if I’m really suited to this?”
Just for fun, the strip ends by encouraging readers to turn to the last page of the comic to find out what was in the suitcases—which turns out to be all the letters Grimlock had yet to get round to answering. He was actually planning to run off with the lot!
This is a fun one page strip, and I’m especially curious to know which member of the Marvel UK staff the helpless stubie Grimlock shouts at is based on. With red hair and yellow tartan trousers they must have stood out in a crowd.
The other key promotional piece of this issue is the arrival of the new backup: Visionaries. Though as this is salvaged from a comic cancelled because no one was reading it, it may not have attracted that many new readers.
I’m actually a fan of the Knights of the Magical Light, and that Christmas would have several of the toys and vehicles as presents (with another strong memory of forcing my mother to assemble the vehicles in my Grandmother’s living room. What a horrible child I was). I’d say it was comfortably the best Sunbow cartoon, with a self-deprecating wit that was about a decade ahead of itself and made up for the repetitiveness of some of the plotting.
Visionaries recap page.
What we get here is the start of issue five of the American Visionaries comic, Quest of the Four Talismans. The American comic only actually lasted six issues (hence us already knowing Action Force will be back) and, apparently, ends partway through a multipart story, bringing back memories of Inhumanoids. This makes it unlikely that Furman had much of a choice in taking this on as the new backup, though whether this was at Hasbro’s insistence or because Marvel UK needed to recoup the costs of the licence—we’ll also get a one off Collected Comics with this same issue in it, plus an Annual reprint of issue one and another run round later in Transformers. All of which is insanely over representative for a quickly cancelled book—but it actually fits the science fiction feel of the comic better than Action Force did.
The plot is standard Visionaries: wizard Merklyn summons the heroes and villains to him so he can send them on a quest to find the four magic talismans (Earth, air, fire and water) that can turn the possessor into the ultimate force for good or evil on the planet. So far, so Key to Time. What’s missing though is the wit of the cartoon, everything is much more dry and serious here and it’s not nearly as much fun.
What is interesting considering the problems of the lead strip is how it does try to deal with some of the inequalities of Visionaries. When Galandria, one of the women (yes, Visionaries has two female characters! One token one for each side. That’s twice as many as Transformers) , points out it’s quite sexist they don’t have magic staff’s like the men, Merklyn agrees and gives them shields with similar properties. I’m not familiar enough with Visionaries to know if the toys came with these and the cartoon didn`t feature them for some reason or if writer Gerry Conway is trying to compensate for the sexism, but it does help to deal with one of the issues that, yes, my mother had with the series.
I said back at the start that this comic changed my life. It got me interested in reading and let me into a world I’ve never really left. It’s a shame it’s actually a fairly flawed issue, but it will never be less than an essential one to me, and I owe it all to my mother’s patience. Just imagine if I had become that Ghostbusters fan instead...
Wait, what do you mean that you’d have preferred that?
Next week, I hope you’re not sick of Junkions yet, because we’ve got more incoming!
ISSUE 182
1988
COMMENT
The plot is standard Visionaries: wizard Merklyn summons the heroes and villains to him so he can send them on a quest to find the four magic talismans (Earth, air, fire and water) that can turn the possessor into the ultimate force for good or evil on the planet. So far, so Key to Time. What’s missing though is the wit of the cartoon, everything is much more dry and serious here and it’s not nearly as much fun.
What is interesting considering the problems of the lead strip is how it does try to deal with some of the inequalities of Visionaries. When Galandria, one of the women (yes, Visionaries has two female characters! One token one for each side. That’s twice as many as Transformers) , points out it’s quite sexist they don’t have magic staff’s like the men, Merklyn agrees and gives them shields with similar properties. I’m not familiar enough with Visionaries to know if the toys came with these and the cartoon didn`t feature them for some reason or if writer Gerry Conway is trying to compensate for the sexism, but it does help to deal with one of the issues that, yes, my mother had with the series.
I said back at the start that this comic changed my life. It got me interested in reading and let me into a world I’ve never really left. It’s a shame it’s actually a fairly flawed issue, but it will never be less than an essential one to me, and I owe it all to my mother’s patience. Just imagine if I had become that Ghostbusters fan instead...
Wait, what do you mean that you’d have preferred that?
Next week, I hope you’re not sick of Junkions yet, because we’ve got more incoming!
ISSUE 182
1988
COMMENT
