Salvage! / "Pretender to the Throne!" / City of Fear! / Legion of the Lost! / Meltdown! / Deadly Games! / Wrecking Havoc, from The Transformers US #40 (May 1988) / The Transformers UK #160-73 (9 Apr.–9 July 1988), reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Two (2025)
scripts by Simon Furman and Bob Budiansky; pencil art by Lee Sullivan, José Delbo, Dan Reed, Jeff Anderson, Robin Smith, and Bryan Hitch; ink art by Lee Sullivan, Dave Hunt, Dan Reed, Dave Elliott, Robin Smith, and Bryan Hitch; letters by Tom Frame, Glib, Bill Oakley, Annie Halfacree, Glop, and Steve Parkhouse; colour by Euan Peters and Nel Yomtov
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| from The Transformers UK #160 |
Back in the early days of
Transformers UK, the UK stories would weave very carefully in and out of the US ones. As the series went one, Simon Furman largely moved away from this approach; once he gained access to his own cast of future characters in
Target: 2006 (see #7 and 8 in the list below), UK stories would tend to be about revisiting what the future characters were up to, rather than trying to slot in between what Bob Budianksy was doing with the present-day cast. But
Salvage! in UK issues #160-61 is a rare example of the old approach, slotting in between two issues of the US series (#39 and 40), picking up with the ramifications of Shockwave launching the Decepticons' tropical island base into space. (Furman throws in a little shade from Galvatron's perspective in his recap: "For someone who's usually so
logical, few of his recent actions make any sense!") I think in the US stories, Shockwave would be treated as dead from now, on, but Furman establishes he returned to the Decepticons' original base on Earth, bringing some followers with him.
Salvage!, though, does something interesting in how integrates the US and UK storylines, showing how what has happened in the US stories has ramifications for Furman's ongoing plots in the UK ones, specifically Shockwave's fear of Galvatron. Here, Shockwave recovers the body of Megatron from the Thames (where he ended up after the events of Ancient Relics!, see #13 below), so he can use him as a weapon against his own future self in Galvatron. Ultra Magnus is revived, setting up for a rematch with Galvatron. It's not a great story, it's definitely a tale that is primarily there to setup the future, but I found it an interesting example of an approach Furman had largely moved away from.
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| from The Transformers US #40 |
We then go into the only US story in this run of seven stories, "Pretender to the Throne!" Unfortunately, this story shows just how awful the US comic has become, though in ways that are not really Bob Budiansky's fault. This issue has to introduce the Pretenders, who are surely one of dumbest Transformers concepts ever conceived—Transformers who disguise themselves... as giant monsters!? Like, why would the "robots in
disguise" disguise themselves as something like this? In this issue, the humans have to be like, "whoa i thought i was being attacked by giant monsters but actually im being attacked by giant robots im so surprised!" You can tell, I think, how uninterested Bob Budiansky is in this concept because the issue speedruns through it, giving us a whole mess of Decepticon and Autobot Pretenders as fast as possible so that he won't have to deal with the idea any more in future issues.
And the story has to set up the return of Optimus Prime, because having killed him off last year, now Hasbro is releasing a new toy of him. I appreciate his instinct there, but it is surely the worst issue of this series thus far.
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| from The Transformers UK #166 |
After this, we get a good long stretch of UK-original stories, one of the longest in a while, I think... and unusually for Furman, all set in the present. Ultra Magnus returns to Cybertron* with the Sparkler Minibots to meet up with the Wreckers, but they are missing—and Cybertron is overrun by zombies!
City of Fear!,
Legion of the Lost!, and
Meltdown! all have separate titles, but really make up one big story. It's not great art, but it's fun enough, though I am starting to realize Furman has no way to characterize Autobot leader characters than giving them crippling self-doubt; Springer's problem here is the same one we see in his takes on Ultra Magnus, Rodimus,
and Optimus. But aside from that, I enjoyed this with all its weird twists and turns.
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| from The Transformers UK #173 |
Then we get two final one-off stories. In
Deadly Games!, Ultra Magnus breaks up an alien syndicate forcing Autobots and Decepticons to fight each other. Ultra Magnus keeps quoting intergalactic law to the aliens; I wonder if this was the spark of inspiration for when
Furman reinvented Magnus as duly-appointed enforcer of the Tyrest Accord in the IDW continuity. The other,
Wrecking Havoc, shows what the Wreckers are doing at the same time, as they follow Galvatron to Earth without Magnus, only to battle him when Cyclonus and Scourge have also caught up to Galvatron. Even though the events of
Headmasters forced Furman to relocate Cyclonus and Scourge from 2008 to 1988 (see #15 below), he cleverly is able to keep them going as characters, something I had not remembered at all. I enjoyed this story a lot. Fun twists and turns, good use of lots of the UK characters.
This is the sixteenth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #41-44 and UK issues #174-87. Previous installments are listed below:
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