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Collection published: 2014 Contents originally published: 1988 Read: April 2021 |
This volume opens with its biggest story. "The Legacy of Unicron!" is an epic entirely set in the future timeline (though the future characters are battling over a time portal, so it is about a threat to the present day, even if we never actually go there. Like a lot of Furman's epics, it's a pile-up of conflicting factions and motivations: the Autobots, the Decepticons, Death's Head, and Unicron all have their own aims, and alliances shift throughout. It's a thing he's got quite good at by this point, and this is no exception. I don't think it's the best of these, but it is the kind of thing I enjoy-- and the kind of thing I wish I'd read when I was fourteen, because I would have enjoyed it even more then.
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| Also, these days, faux-mythic stuff in Transformers leaves me cold, but I would have ate it up then. Crazy to think that Furman's ideas here had an influence reaching all the way to Michael Bay! from The Transformers #150 (script by Simon Furman, art by Jeff Anderson & Stephen Baskerville) |
Notably, this story features my whole excuse for reading these Transformers stories as part of a Doctor Who Magazine comics marathon: at its climax, Death's Head falls into a time portal and disappears. He will never again appear in a Transformers story, but the next installment on my list will reveal where he went... (Cyclonus and Scourge are sent back in time, explaining how come in the UK stories they are created by Galvatron in the year 2006, but in the US stories they work for Scorponock in the 1980s. I'll be honest: I hadn't noticed. The way Furman handles it, it even makes sense that it hadn't previously come up that they were from the future.)
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| You're never gonna live the good life, dude. Just accept it. from The Transformers #146 (script by Simon Furman, art by Geoff Senior) |
After that, we're back to the present day, with stories that do the usual Transformers UK thing of weaving in and out of US tales.* A few focus on Galvatron manipulating the Decepticons; others let us know what is happening on Cybertron. I mostly enjoyed these. These are some of the better Galvatron stories-- when he has BIG PLANS you know they are going to fail because otherwise the universe is doomed, but when his plans are smaller scale, he can demonstrate his intelligence and cunning by outmaneuvering Shockwave.
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| You don't mess with Galvatron because he is always messing with you. from The Transformers #152 (script by Simon Furman, art by Jeff Anderson & Stephen Baskerville) |
We also have undead zombies on Cybertron, which is fun stuff, though alas, the Wrecker leader Springer is often improbably indecisive. But it's nice to see Ultra Magnus cut loose, even if he somehow wasn't able to find the Ark in two years(!) of traveling across America. And then he's back to Earth for a showdown with Galvatron, building up to something bigger. (That evidently never actually happened!)
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| How did Emirate Xaaron get to be the leader of the Autobots with a face that dumb-looking? from The Transformers #167 (script by Simon Furman, art by Jeff Anderson and Dave Elliott) |
We also have a couple stories from the 1989 Annual. I will admit I zoned out during "Prime Bomb!" (Ian Rimmer is not a great prose stylist, I guess), but I did enjoy Richard Starkings and Robin Smith's "Peace," set in the far future, when the Autobots have finally won... and are so used to war that peace only lasts a day before hostilities restart. It's mind-boggling to contemplate, but the Transformers have been at war for four million years. How could they ever adjust to peace after that? It's a theme that James Roberts and John Barber took up to good effect in their IDW runs, but it's nice to see a bleaker take on it here.
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| Hey, kids! Comics! from The Transformers #169 (script by Simon Furman, art by Robin Smith) |
My big complaint about this volume is not really its fault per se: it's the last one! In his editorial notes, James Roberts often mentions the forthcoming volume six, but seven years later, it has never come to pass. I am sure there are valid financial reasons for this, but it's depressing; this was a high quality reprint series, and the UK stories are pretty tricky to access otherwise. Titan did collect many of them, and I will track those down eventually, but these were beautiful volumes and Roberts's interviews and commentary were amazing.
* The chronology for this volume is a bit smoother than that of the previous volume. (Allowing for the fact that it overlaps with the previous volume, but I'll ignore that here). Mostly these stories overlap with ones collected in the US Classics, Vol. 4. My suggested sequence is: UK #146-53; US #37-39; UK #160-61; US #40; UK #164-73; US #41-42, 44.
This post is the eleventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers A Cold Day in Hell! Previous installments are listed below:
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