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Collection published: 2012 Contents originally published: 1986 Acquired: December 2020 Read: January 2021 |
Art by Barry Kitson, Will Simpson, Geoff Senior, John Stokes, Tim Perkins, and Jeff Anderson
Letters by Richard Starkings, Annie Halfacree, and Mike Scott
I continue to alternate volumes of Panini's DWM reprints with volumes of IDW's Transformers UK reprints, and the Transformers UK comics continue to weave in and out of the American stories I read a few years back.* This is kind of a lot to wrap my head around at times, to be honest (my memories of the fine details of Bob Budiansky's Transformers run are foggy at best), but I am enjoying the experience. James Roberts argues in his editorial commentary that this is where Simon Furman's writing on Transformers begins to come into its own, and I agree.
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| Dinobot pathos. from The Transformers #50 (script by Simon Furman, art by Barry Kitson) |
Like with volume one, what makes this work is the more character-based focused on the UK comic, which I think it kind of had to have, given the big plot events could only transpire in the US comic. In this volume, the big thread is the Dinobots, who come into the spotlight in "The Icarus Theory," "Dinobot Hunt!", "Victory!" and "In the National Interest." We see their hidden desires in "Victory!", we see them break out and undertake action in "In the National Interest." This latter story was probably my favorite in the volume, as it effectively draws together threads from a number of recent US and UK stories in a way that makes it serve as an effective "season finale" for the volume. The Dinobots frustration meets Robot Master meets Triple I meets tv reporter Joy Anderson meets frustrated scientist Professor Morris. A lovestruck Dinobot is a fun concept.
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| I would not have dreamed she would become a recurring character! from The Transformers #48 (script by Simon Furman, art by Barry Kitson) |
We also get a little plotline involving Buster, the Autobots' human friend, across "Robot Buster!", "Devastation Derby!", and "Second Generation!" Thanks to his time hosting the Creation Matrix, he begins having visions of the future, foreseeing the coming of the Special Teams, those Transformers who can combine into gestalts. Buster, alas, has never done much for me; give me more Sparkplug and Jesse. These stories are no exception, but I did like the way Furman reconciles a plot point Budiansky dropped from the US comic, explaining how Megatron and Shockwave came to share Decepticon leadership. (Continuity-gap plugging becomes a bit of a theme; James Hills's "The Return of the Transformers" indicates why in volume one, Optimus Prime was opposed to creating new, more powerful Transformers while here he initiates development of the Special Teams.)
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| UK comics Soundwave is pretty awesome, too. (Much better than cartoon-aping Soundwave of late IDW.) from The Transformers #62 (script by Simon Furman, art by Will Simpson) |
The lowlight is definitely "To a Power Unknown!", a daft story of a morality-reversing energy pulse that feels more like the mediocre cartoon than something from the more grounded(!) comic, but the other highlights are two text stories from the 1986 Annual. "State Games" by James Hill is okay as written, but once I read it, I realized how hugely influential it was: this is the origin of the IDW version of Megatron, for example, and many incarnations as well. "The Mission" (by future Hellblazer scribe Jamie Delano) is a neat little standalone tale about Jazz and Hoist on a desperate Arctic mission.
* The stories in this volume mostly overlap with those contained in volume two of the US reprints. I suggest the following order: UK #45-50; US #13-16; UK #59-63, 54, 64-65; US #17-20; UK #74-77. The annual stories, as ever, make things complicated, but "Victory!" works well after UK #50.
This post is the fifth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Voyager. Previous installments are listed below:
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