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19 May 2026

Marvel's The Transformers Year Two, Part V: Target: 2006 Part Two (US #21-22 / UK #85-92)

Here we wrap up the UK's Target: 2006, and thus can jump back into the story that my reading order wraps around it, the Transformers: The Movie comic adaptation. From there we then go back into the regular US book for the first time in a long while... but then my order sees us take another detour, as I'm reading installments of Transformers Universe by their publication dates relative to the US stories.

Target: 2006, Parts 7–9 & Epilogue / "Judgement Day" (part 2) / "The Final Battle!" / "Aerialbots over America!" / "Heavy Traffic!", from The Transformers US #21-22 (Oct.-Nov. 1986) / The Transformers UK #85-92 (1 Nov.–20 Dec. 1986) and Transformers: The Movie #2-3 (Jan.-Feb. 1987), reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)
scripts by Simon Furman, Ralph Macchio, and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Will Simpson, Geoff Senior, Anderson, and Don Perlin; inks by Tim Perkins, Geoff Senior, Anderson, and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey; letters by Starkings, Annie Halfacree, Janice Chiang, and Hans IV; colour by Jozwiak, Gina Hart, and Nel Yomtov

from The Transformers UK #85
Obviously the highlight of the closing portion of Target: 2006 is the Galvatron-versus-Ultra-Magnus battle. This is good stuff, of course, and thank goodness most of it is drawn by Geoff Senior! But overall I found the resolution to Target: 2006 very disappointing.
 
It's cleverly conceived: Galvatron has come back in time of 1986 to build a giant gun to destroy Unicron with; he can't do this in his own time of 2006 because there he's under Unicron's control. (Quite how Galvatron can nonchalantly jump through time is never explained.) But this entire plan is contingent on the idea that Galvatron is not changing history: it needs to be a predestination paradox, otherwise there won't be a big gun waiting for Galvatron in the year 2006. (Why Galvatron needs to build this gun on the future site of Autobot City, or why the Autobots would somehow let this gun sit there undisturbed for twenty years, are also not explained.) This means that Galvatron has to be very careful when in the past: if anyone who is alive in 2006 is killed in 1986, then the future Galvatron comes from will not come to pass.
 
Galvatron is followed to 1986 by three Autobots from 2006, Hot Rod, Kup, and Blurr. (One of the underwhelming aspects of reading Target: 2006 in the middle of the movie comic adaptation, by the way, is that Kup and Blurr barely feature in its first issue, so when they pop up in 1986, it's less "oh it's those guys!" and more "who are those guys?") Their plan to stop Galvatron is to trick him into thinking that he's created a divergent timeline: they manipulate him into thinking he's killed Starscream. Since Starscream killed Megatron in 2006, leading to his rebirth as Galvatron, this means Galvatron must have created a new timeline, and therefore burying a gun in this 1986 won't accomplish anything in his 2006, so he gives up and returns to the future.
 
from The Transformers UK #88
This is clever... but it's basically all communicated after it happens. The entire resolution is dependent on rules for time travel that haven't been clearly communicated to the reader! Thus it all comes across as arbitrary. If even just once, Galvatron had gone, "oh i must be careful not to kill x otherwise i will create a divergent timeline and undermine my whole purpose in the past," then the resolution would have come across as way less of an ass-pull.
 
I also didn't like that it turns out that the three 2006 Autobots had been sent back in time by Unicron and were secretly being manipulated by him. I mean, on the one hand, I get why Furman did this: it's ever weirded to believe the Autobots have this technology than to believe that Galvatron has it, and it kind of beggars belief that these characters could run off to have this adventure in the middle of the movie. But on the other hand, it gives Unicron a knowledge base and a power set that exceeds anything we see him use in the movie, and makes it hard to believe that he could actually be defeated if he can mind control his enemies this way!
 
So, as the first of Furman's "Furmanist" epics, this is enjoyable enough... but it leaves much to be desired. Hopefully future iterations are stronger.
 
from Transformers: The Movie #3
From Target: 2006 I jumped back to p. 5 of issue #2 of the movie adaptation. My main note on reading this is that the way scripter Ralph Macchio cut down the film is very inconsistent and ruins a lot of the gags and arcs of the film. For example, Kup's bit about always saying places remind him of other places he's been is down just to two iterations: one in issue #2 where that characters react to it like he's done it a bunch already, and then once in #3 where the joke is that for once it's something that doesn't remind him of anything... but this pay-off doesn't work at all if we've only seen him do it one other time. Similarly, the joke about the "universal greeting" actually working doesn't make any sense if we didn't see the characters try to use it and fail.
 
This is probably worst, though, with Hot Rod's character arc. Not that it's an incredibly complex one, but "young hothead learns to be responsible and becomes the destined leader" really only works if we saw him be a young hothead... and those scenes were largely cut from issue #1!
 
Still, I thought the art was strong; I think Don Perlin has very much bedded in as a Transformers penciller at this point, and Ian Akin and Brian Garvey match him well on inks every time.
 
It's very weird to go from the Furmanist style of Target: 2006 and the movie to the Budianskian approach of "Aerialbots over America!" Suddenly it's wacky hijinks at Hoover Dam. In particular, Megatron disguises himself in his gun mode... and a dam employee just walks into work holding him, right past a security guard! I guess the pre-9/11 world was a different one entirely. Also, I think we're at the point where the never-ending need to introduce new characters and concepts begins to escape Budiansky's control: so many new characters so quickly. I really do hate anything involving combiners.
 
Early in the compendium, they sometimes included the UK edits to the US stories to make it all stick together, but as of this point, they seem to have stopped bothering. You would never know reading US issues #21 and 22 that, according to the UK issues, Optimus had just spent a bunch of time trapped in a limbo dimension! 
 
Afterburner – Grimlock, from Transformers Universe #1 (Dec. 1986), plus other issues; reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Four (2025)
written by Bob Budiansky, art by Ian Akin & Brian Garvey, colored by Nel Yomtov, lettered by Brenda Mings

I want to read more about debbie downer Dreadwind.
from Transformers US #74
Transformers Universe was a four-issue guidebook to Transformers characters published by Marvel US: each page featured a drawing of a Transformer (usually in both robot and vehicle mode), a paragraph-long description of the robot's personality, and a brief description of its abilities and weaknesses. Annoyingly, these are uncredited in this compendium and on the Transformers wiki, but I think Bob Budiansky wrote the words and Ian Akin and Brian Garvey did the art. After the series's original four-issue run, further profiles were included as backmatter in issues of the US comic; this reprinting intersperses those alphabetically. (This stretches the issue's original 24 pages out to 58!)
 
The character portraits are solid stuff, nicely done. I usually skipped "abilities" and "weaknesses" but enjoyed the bios well enough. These profiles very much show up one of the big weaknesses of the Marvel Transformers comic, which is that there just wasn't enough space for most of these personalities to ever manifest in it. Too many new characters being added all the time for anyone to get an interesting moment.
 
I bet I would have loved this stuff when I was eight, though. Which is really the target audience for Transformers, not sad forty-year-olds. 
 
This is the eighth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #23-?? and UK issues #93-??. Previous installments are listed below:
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