Fire on High! / "Vicious Circle!" / "Mechanical Difficulties!" / "Crater Critters" / "The Cure!" / "Ring of Hate!" / Ancient Relics!, from The Transformers US #28-30 (May-July 1987) & The Transformers: Headmasters #1 (July 1987) / The Transformers UK #119-27 & 130-3 (27 June–22 Aug. & 12 Sept.–3 Oct. 1987), The Transformers Annual [1987], and Action Force #24-27 (15 Aug.–5 Sept. 1987); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Two (2025)
written by Simon Furman and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Dan Reed, Geoff Senior, Anderson, Don Perlin, and Frank Springer; inks by Dan Reed, Geoff Senior, Dave Harwood, and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey; letters by Mike Scott, Starkings, Janice Chiang, Diana Albers, and Annie Halfacree; colour by Steve White and Nel Yomtov
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| from The Transformers UK #120 |
Fire on High! and "Vicious Circle!" wrap up the ongoing story about Galvatron, Rodimus, Ultra Magnus, Goldbug, and Death's Head. It's totally fine—nothing too clever, but I did enjoy, of course, getting to see a Galvatron/Ultra Magnus throwdown once again drawn by Geoff Senior. It's too bad he didn't get to draw the story's final installment too!
From there, we go into a run of US stories detailing how Grimlock's leadership is shaking out, and focusing a bit on new-ish Autobots like Blaster and Goldbug. The first of these, "Mechanical Difficulties!", inexplicably brings back "the Mechanic," the human villain from just a couple issues ago who made off with some of the Autobots' equipment... when they were all being very dumb. This guy did not need to come back; this story about him is also not very good either. Things improve with "Crater Critters" and "The Cure!", a two-part story where Goldbug and Blaster—having gone rogue due to their dislike of Grimlock's leadership—discover some Decepticons newly arrived on Earth bring with them an infection of metal-eating "scraplets." Some decent character dynamics... plus I always love any Transformers story featuring my favorite Decepticon fuel auditor, Ratbat!
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| from The Transformers: Headmasters #1 |
Then I jumped to the first issue of
Headmasters. As noted above, I'm reading this (roughly) in publication sequence. But also, the IDW reprints of the Marvel US comic (inexplicably) placed this in the final volume... which I never got, so I've never actually read this story before. I found it interesting and kind of odd. I like the idea of a bunch of Autobots growing weary of war and deciding to leave Cybertron, though it seems a bit mean of them to go to an inhabited planet and potentially bring the war there! Like a lot of
Transformers stories of this era, it suffers from needing to introduce lots of toys and thus lots of characters, no one's personality really pops. The present-day versions of a lot of characters introduced in the movie appear here for the first time: Kup, Hot Rod, Blurr. This answers my question from last post of "Kup is always portrayed as one of the longest-serving Autobots... yet
whenever 2007 Kup travels back in time to 1987, none of the 1987
Autobots know who he is. So where did he serve and who with?" But on the other hand, I feel like Uncle Bob is barely trying when it comes to conveying personality: Kup, Hot Rod, and Blurr all have very distinctive even if simple personalities, and you get absolutely no hint of them here! They're just generic Autobot filler.
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| from Action Force #24 |
Lastly, we get
Ancient Relics! Since
G.I.Joe and the Transformers (see items #10 and 11 in the list below) couldn't be run in the UK, this was its equivalent there, with the UK's
G.I.Joe adaptation, Action Force. (Though, this reprinting changes all instances of "Action Force" to "G.I.Joe." I am not sure if that was done for this volume or some previous reprint.) The first part ran in the
Transformers comic and the other four in
Action Force, I'm guessing to convince loyal
TF readers to check out the other mag.
I really don't care about G.I.Joe, but I found this pretty enjoyable. Trying to find the missing Goldbug and Blaster, Blades instead finds Megatron—damaged and deranged after blowing himself up on the space bridge (see #10 below)—in the sewers of London. Blades, Grimlock, and Centurion must try to bring him down with the help of G.I.Joe, who are totally outclassed. It's a pretty simple story, elevated like a lot of Simon Furman's work by using punchy first-person narration from a variety of different characters. And, of course, five whole installments of Geoff Senior art! (But who else could ever be given the assignment of drawing Megatron vs. Grimlock?) One problem: in previous stories, Centurion was a human-built robot remote-controlled by a human being, but here is clearly a reasoning being on his own! Whoops.
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