Marvel's The Transformers Year One, Part II: Raiders of the Last Ark (US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30)

Here, we have the last of the UK stories that supposedly take place during the original four-issue US miniseries, letting us finally wrap up that sequence of stories and then move onto a four-issue run of US stories that is pretty continuous. We then segue into the first UK story that was actually written to fit smoothly into the US continuity. Unlike the kind of jumbled storytelling I covered in the first post in this series, this very much feels like it all goes together; everything is starting to pull in the same direction.

Raiders of the Last Ark / "The Last Stand" / "The New Order" / "The Worse of Two Evils!" / "Warrior School!" / "Repeat Performance!" / Decepticon Dam-Busters!, from The Transformers US #4-8 (Mar.-Sept. 1985) / The Transformers UK #7-8 & 18-30 (15-28 Dec. 1984 & 18 May–12 Oct. 1985); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

scripts by Simon Furman, Jim Salicrup, and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Mike Collins, Frank Springer, Alan Kupperberg, William Johnson, and John Stokes; inks by Jeff Anderson, Akin & Garvey, Alan Kupperberg, Kyle Baker, and John Stokes; letters by Starkings, Aldrich, John Workman, and Rick Parker; colour by Gina Hart, John-Paul Bove, Nel Yomtov, and Steve Whitaker

from The Transformers UK #21

Raiders of the Last Ark is the last of the UK stories that supposedly takes place during the original four-issue run; in this one, the Decepticons invade the Ark, but a malfunction in the Ark's computer, "Auntie" (mentioned but not seen in the US stories), means she turn on the Autobots, forcing Optimus and Megatron to team up to take her down. This one has some good moments, but is very jumpy, like Simon Furman thought he was going to get twice as many pages as he did. The best part is when Megatron accesses his inner black hole, a totally badass power I think was on his tech specs but never used in the US stories... though UK writers who later worked on the IDW comics remembered it, presumably because they read this story. I did think it was clever that at the end the Autobots discovered that the Decepticons scrawled "WE'LL BE BACK" into the walls of the Ark, setting up the fact that the very next story chronologically would also feature the Decepticons invading the Ark.

That story is the last issue of the US miniseries, where it seems like the Decepticons have triumphed... but then they all fall over, because Sparkplug Witwicky put a poison in the fuel he created for him. (It's impossible to imagine that all those UK stories somehow take place between issues #3 and 4 of the US series because of this.) My favorite part was the flashbacks to Sparkplug's time in Korea, a surprisingly dark direction for a kid's comic! You can tell that even from the scripting stage it was known this comic was going to become an ongoing, because even though the Autobots kind of win, the whole issue is spent setting up new threads: it ends on a cliffhanger with Shockwave arriving to defeat the Autobots, but also sets up the key to Shockwave's eventual defeat with the Dinobots.

The next four issues see Bob Budiansky debut as writer, and I very much enjoyed this stuff. My eternal bugaboo with Transformers stories is that there's just too many characters a lot of the time, so anything that strips down the cast a bit is always a good move in my book. Here, every Autobot bar Ratchet is offline, so the Autobots' gentle doctor must find a way to overcome the Decepticons and their new leader Shockwave on his own... which means a trip to the Savage Land to find the Dinobots and striking a deal with Megatron, his only ally being a human boy, Buster Witwicky. I like seeing this emphasis on clever thinking and character dilemmas as opposed to Giant Robot Battles, though I did find the way Ratchet ultimately defeats Megatron a little underwhelming—more due to art than writing, though, I expect.

from The Transformers UK #30

This leads into a final story where, as Ratchet and the Dinobots make their way back to the Ark, Ratchet tells them a story about the Decepticons trying to destroy a dam, yet another story somehow crammed into the timespan of the original US miniseries (apparently the same gap as Man of Iron, in the middle of issue #3). It is a very boring action-focused story, but I enjoyed the frame. 

This is the second in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #9-12 and UK issues #31-41. Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)

Marvel Action: Black Panther by Kyle Baker, Juan Samu, Vita Ayala, Arianna Florean, et al.

Marvel Action: Black Panther is a six-issue miniseries; I think the idea of the "Marvel Action" line is that it's made up of continuity-light stories aimed at younger readers. (I previously read a Marvel Action story featuring Elsa Bloodstone.) The League of Comic Geeks website tells me it's set on "Earth-18157," though most of the details (particularly its depiction of Shuri) seemed pretty consistent with the main Marvel universe as of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, aside from the fact that T'Challa isn't in space; I wonder if it could fit in somewhere after that storyline is resolved.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #3

Anyway, this is really two separate three-issue stories. The first, by Kyle Baker and Juan Samu, is about T'Challa and Shuri dealing with increasing amounts of bad weather around Wakanda. I found it a little too light to be interesting, and not very much tapping into the things that make Black Panther comics interesting; it mostly focuses on generic superheroics. Some things happen fairly quickly in a way that I found frustrating, and the villain seemed to gain too much ground too quickly to be plausible. (It must be hard to write stories where someone can plausibly take on a king on a regular basis, to be fair.) I found the humor pretty cheeseball and forced.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #4

The second story, by Vita Ayala (who wrote a two-issue fill-in on Shuri) and Arianna Florean (who I predominantly know as a colorist on Titan's Doctor Who comics, but who also drew the diary extracts for the tenth Doctor's companion Gabby), is more three one-shots with some gentle links; as T'Challa and Shuri prepare for a scientific conference in Wakanda (nicely tying into what Nnedi Okorafor was doing in Shuri), T'Challa must first undergo a Wakandan tradition where he lives as a laborer for a day, and then Shuri learns a lesson about traditional Wakandan folkways versus science, before the story culminates in the conference itself. 

The stories do a good job of being rooted in ideas specific to Black Panther and Wakanda: what makes for a good king, how to accommodate tradition alongside new discoveries, why it's important to share your success with others. T'Challa having to work as a common laborer and deciding to single-handedly take on corruption was great; so was Shuri teaming up with a warthog to collect traditional medicines. The humor is light but effective; I particularly felt like Ayala and Florean had a good handle on Shuri. I'd gladly see more Black Panther work from them.

Marvel Action: Black Panther originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-June 2019). The stories were written by Kyle Baker (#1-3) and Vita Ayala (#4-6), illustrated by Juan Samu (#1-3) and Arianna Florean with Mario Del Pennino (#4-6), colored by David Garcia Cruz (#1-3) and Mattia Iacono with Sara Martinelli (#4-6), lettered by Tom B. Long (#1-2, 4) and Shawn Lee (#3, 5-6), and edited by Denton J. Tipton.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Truth: Red, White & Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker

Captain America: Truth

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2003
Read: September 2024

Writer: Robert Morales

Artist: Kyle Baker
Letterer: Wes Abbott

Truth: Red, White & Black is a 2003 miniseries published by Marvel Comics, about a group of black men who were experimented on with the same super-soldier serum that was used to create Captain America; it was later collected as Captain America: Truth, which I accessed via Hoopla. I read it as part of my ongoing Black Panther project (see link below) because its main character was the father of one of the characters featured in Christopher Priest's The Crew, which also featured a former Black Panther. Okay, so that's kind of tangential as a "Black Panther" comic, but it seemed to me I ought to read it before I ended up even further away from the point where I read The Crew.

The story is made up of two distinct halves. In one, a bunch of black men join the U.S. military after Pearl Harbor, all from various walks of life, all for their own reasons. They encounter, unsurprisingly, racism in the institutions of the military, and soon they are being experimented on in what is clearly a riff on the Tuskegee experiment. Writer Robert Morales and artist Kyle Baker introduce us to a diverse and sympathetic group of characters—and then put them through some really heinous, racist stuff. I've never read any other comics by Morales (he doesn't seem to have written many others, actually) but here he shows himself to be a thoughtful, interesting writer. I think this could have been pretty hamhanded, but the racial dynamics of it ring truly. I have read other work by Baker, who has a pretty cartoony style, and who I usually associate with more, well, comic work; his big claim to fame other than this is a Plastic Man miniseries, for what it's worth. He has more of a dynamic range within that cartoony style than I might have guessed, with some characters (usually the very racist whites) being drawn as almost literal caricatures, and others as fully fleshed out people. Some moments are quite horrifying even in his style. I don't think it's what I would have chosen, but I think it works.

from Truth: Red, White & Black #6

In the second half of the comic, though, the perspective shifts; it's the present day and Steve Rogers is investigating the events of the 1940s that he never knew anything about, which continue to be filled in as flashbacks. This, to me, diminished some of the potency of the whole affair. It seemed pretty clear to me that the experiments in the first half were meant to be forerunners of the experiments on Steve Rogers, it just doesn't make sense any other way. But to fit with Marvel continuity, it has to turn out that all this happened in parallel with what happened to Rogers, that he has to be the first super-soldier. To me, this really disrupts what was surely the whole point of the story: that we would want to do this to a person of color. But it turns out we did it to a white person first? It also turns the narrative focus onto a white person, the problem of the book becomes how does a white person find out about this injustice? Which is a marked difference to how the opening chronicles the black experience.

from Truth: Red, White & Black #5

All that and yet—I have often said superhero stories are power fantasies, and thus that makes the superhero stories that explore powerlessness particularly interesting to me. It's a powerful metaphor, and even if this comic doesn't make the best use of it, it's clearly trying to do something more interesting than 95% of the superhero comics out there.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE