The Image Til All Are One compendia are arranged in a story order that, like my own, tries to balance chronology and publication in order to make a readable experience. They don't always make the same choice that I have made, but I find their choices defensible.
One place where we differ is with the stories from the UK annuals. Some of these stories were written to fit into the continuity of the weekly title, and do so quite well, but others clearly were not written with the weekly in mind. (In fact, this was done purposefully, as the annual stories often highlighted characters who had not made it into the regular series.) The compendia take the stories that don't fit well into continuity and place them all in volume four, presumably so they don't disrupt the experience of reading the main US/UK series. I didn't want to do that, though, so my approach has been to either 1) read them somewhere near where they kinda fit even if it's not perfect, or 2) if there's no such place, around the time the annual stories would have been read. (Annuals are usually released in the fall, but are thought of as Christmas gifts.)
With this week's post, I hit two stories from the 1985 annual. One is a flashback to Cybertron in the early days of the Autobot/Decepticon war; the compendia place this (along with a 1986 story with a similar setting) before the first UK story from the regular comic as a sort of prelude. The other is set during the time the Transformers' war came to Earth, but it has some continuity issues (most notably, it features the Insecticons, who would later be introduced in a completely different way in a US story) so the compendia place it in volume four. Following my system, I read them both after the 1985 Christmas story from UK issue #41.
For the first, "And Then There Shall Come... a Leader!", this worked well; it actually is referred to directly in the very next UK story, Crisis of Command! from issues #42-44. Now that I've reread it, I would actually recommend reading the other, "Plague of the Insecticons!", much earlier, around the same time as Man of Iron and The Enemy Within!, between US issues #3 and 4. Presence of the Insecticons aside, we have Megatron still leading the Decepticons, and both sides are obviously recently arrived on Earth.
"The Wrath of Guardian!" / "The Wrath of Grimlock!" / "Dis-Integrated Circuits!" / "The Next Best Thing to Being There!" / "Brainstorm!" / "Prime Time!" / "Christmas Breaker!" / "And There Shall Come... a Leader!", from The Transformers US #9-12 (Oct. 1985–Jan. 1986) / The Transformers UK #31-41 (19 Oct.–28 Dec. 1985) and The Transformers Annual [1985]; reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)
scripts by Simon Furman, Bob Budiansky, and James Hill; pencils by Barry Kitson, Mike Manley, Ricardo Villamonte, Herb Trimpe, William Simpson, and John Stokes; inks by Barry Kitson, M. Hands, Brad Joyce, Tom Palmer, Al Gordon, William Simpson, and John Stokes; colours by Gina Hart, Whitaker/Place, and Nel Yomtov; letters by A. Halfacree, Mike Scott, Rick Parker, Janice Chiang, Diana Albers, and Starkings
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| from The Transformers UK #32 |
This sequence of stories mostly concerns the rise of Circuit Breaker, the whereabouts of the Creation Matrix, the Autobots' deal with G. B. Blackrock, and the defeat of Shockwave. At the end of the previous arc, Ratchet and the Dinobots headed off for the Ark, where their deactivated comrades were stored. Here, the stories cover Ratchet and the Dinobots regaining access to the Ark (Shockwave reprogrammed the Autobot Guardian droid), Buster Witwicky struggling with realizing that he has the secret of Autobot power in his mind, and Josie Beller remaking herself into a supervillain, all while the Autobots struggle with the fact that Optimus is literally headless.
I found a lot to like in this sequence. There's some good comedy in the Dinobot stuff, especially with Grimlock. I like the kinda dumb Grimlock of the cartoon, but the smarter-but-still-hotheaded one of the comic is good too, especially his interplay with the other Autobots. Furman's story are small but usually have good character focus and one interesting formalistic technique per issue.
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| from The Transformers US #11 |
I kind of remember not having a lot of time for the Witwickys reading the US stories before, but I enjoyed them this time out, especially Buster's indecision over whether to tell his father about having the Creation Matrix, and Sparkplug's eventual realization that Buster is trying to do what's right—and there's nothing a father wants more than that. I think Budiansky's instinct that
Transformers needed to be grounded in the human is a good one, even if it doesn't always work out in practice... but that's more later.
The resolution to the whole Shockwave subplot is also a good one: the way Optimus finally returns and unleashes his full power is really well done. I will say, though, I though the art on many of the US stories in this run was rough. It felt like they were scrambling from artist to artist who didn't quite know how to deal with drawing giant robots on a monthly basis. Which, fair enough, does seem to be a specialized skill.
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| from The Transformers UK #41 |
The Christmas story is decent, but would be better if half of it wasn't recapping the arc you just read. Did they think a bunch of new readers would jump on at Christmas and need catching up?
Lastly, I thought "And There Shall Come... a Leader!" was fine. Like a lot of early UK stories, the art is a bit stiff, but this story gives us Emirate Xaaron and a lot of other key facts about the early Autobot/Decepticon war on Cybertron... though notably not what a "Prime" is; Optimus Prime here is just some guy promoted to battle commander, not the leader of the Autobots by name.
"Plague of the Insections!", from The Transformers Annual [1985]; reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Four (2025)
script by Furman, art by Collins/Anderson, letters by Starkings, colours by Hart
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this. Melodramatic, but solid. Clearly not high art, but good at tone and very visceral. As a one-off, it's basically everything you could want.
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