Marvel UK comics marathon

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 5:26 am

Not to steal Spidey's thunder, but I thought I'd start the sister thread now and let the new job draw out the reading time.

I've read many of these stories once or not at all. I'm summoning eight-year-old Spencer, the dickwad, to the party. Keep your hands out of your pants, kid.

Man of Iron!

These were the only UK comics I read until I was 22. Nice to go back to them, in my old box of the complete US run. They were reprinted in US #33-34, just after the Scraplets and the Car Wash of Doom.

Don Daley or some other clever copywriter put a little intro above the first page:

"This month we take you to--England! Yes, in response to your overwhelming demand, we're finally printing some of the British issues of your favorite mag, which have never seen print stateside until now. Incidentally, you'll notice Optimus Prime leading the Autobots this ish since the events depicted occurred a while back. So don't sweat it! And now, without further adieu, from the land that gave us the fab four, Dickens and Princess Di, we bring you a tale of the Transformers!"

One hell of a good little tale. Reminds me of why Astonishing X-Men was so good: narrowed focus and a simple arc.

I'm really stunned by this story, especially in hindsight. 97% of "Transformers as aliens-among-us" stories are ****, even though Costa and Bay and everydamnone else thinks that's the way to go. Is Man of Iron responsible for this myth?

Because this is the one "aliens-among-us" story that GETS it. Sammy is just a plain, well-characterized kid who is a little scared of the admittedly sinister Autobots. The military isn't a bunch of caricatures. The TFs are genuinely scary and alien. The use of their toy designs, awkwardly un-anthropomorphized, is brilliant, though I doubt Ridgway did it for any artistic choice.

The violence is amazingly brutal and lasting, and the silent killing machine Decepticons are scary as hell. Starscream (it's supposed to be Skywarp, but Yomtov colors him as Starscream, even though he warps) blows the Man of Iron into scraps of what look like aluminum foil. Trailbreaker sits in a puddle of fire, legs forcibly amputated like a WWII Marine hit by shrapnel, moaning nonsensically "It's no good... everything's ruined." Thundercracker gets battered like a tin can.

Stellar narration, too. Parkhouse is Furman with RP. "The castle of Stansham once again bore witness to the sight and sound of battle. A flaming, wheeling dance of destruction. Instead of sword against sword, or spear against shield, this was the scream of laser cannon and the howl of rockets and the tortured shriek of exploding metal."

Best two-issue TF arc I've ever read.

Yomtov's recoloring (recolouring?) is far beyond his usual crappy standards, presumably because he was mimicking the UK color scheme. It's still dot-matrix pointillism, but it's got a lot of depth and richness.

It really looks muddy as hell, though. The inks don't reproduce well. I would love to see Titan reprint this one from the UK templates. US #34 is particularly muddy, as if they got lazier the more material they reprinted.

Eight-year-old Spencie thinks the art is too dirty and it's weird that they look like the toys, but the fighting is good fighting.

30-year-old Spencie slaps his eight-year-old self over the head and points out that this is F*cking High Art, you little snot.

Sunyavadin · Post by **Sunyavadin** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 8:37 am

"The castle of Stansham once again bore witness to the sight and sound of battle. A flaming, wheeling dance of destruction. Instead of sword against sword, or spear against shield, this was the scream of laser cannon and the howl of rockets and the tortured shriek of exploding metal."

I just read this out in my mind in the voice of a BBC history documentary narrator...

Awesome.

Post by **spiderfrommars** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 9:48 am

Man of Iron is lovely isn't it? The action as it hots up near the end is pretty brutal and grim - the Transformers involved actually look like they get wiped out! The ending is pretty bittersweet too.

The UK comic was obviously finding its feet here. The continuity is a little off (good luck finding a way to fit this amongst the action of US issues 1 and 4) and the art suggests they hadn't yet had the memo to follow the cartoon and not the toy designs. But this is a really well told tale.

Any interesting reaction from the US readers in the letters page then? I imagine it may have been an anti-climax.

Have you seen the story with the original colouring? Much much better.

By the way, has anyone seen my thunder? I'm sure I left it here somewhere.

inflatable dalek · Post by **inflatable dalek** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 1:37 pm

If you enjoy Man of Iron this is well worth checking out:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Grap ... 925&sr=8-1

Same creative team and most of the stories have a similar feel, a very olde English village with various mysterious alien things going on in and around it (including an ancient impossible artefact buried under the ground).

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 2:45 pm

Was reading some old 2000ADs the other day, and one of the Future Shocks was drawn by Ridgway. Didn't really register until I saw a kid that was the spit for Sammy Harker.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 3:09 pm

Spidey's thunder gets ALL the ladies.

inflatable dalek wrote:If you enjoy Man of Iron this is well worth checking out:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Grap ... 925&sr=8-1

Same creative team and most of the stories have a similar feel, a very olde English village with various mysterious alien things going on in and around it (including an ancient impossible artefact buried under the ground).

That's awesome! I will have to check that out.

US #34 features this gloriously goofy intro: "Tally-ho, faithful ones! Here it is, straight from Marvel UK: Man of Iron! Get a hold of yer wig-hat! Dear old Aunt Petunia never read anything like Man of Iron!"

spidey wrote:Any interesting reaction from the US readers in the letters page then? I imagine it may have been an anti-climax.

Letters page from "Toy Soldiers" (US#37) has a few comments that are more soundbites than anything. "After reading the saga, I was very impressed with the workmanship. 'Man of Iron' was a real blockbuster!" "It's fun reading stories from other countries." "The British have come, and 'Man of Iron' as worth the interruption on the fate of Blaster." "I pick up issue #33, intent on seeing that jerk Grimlock kick Blaster in his earphone jack. I liked what I saw instead. I really hope you have more issues with stories from England." We all did, buddy.

The US letter column actually had a running gag about some dude named "Shingo." Someone wrote in around issue #13 and said that his cousin Shingo had really gotten him into Transformers. I guess the editors just loved the name Shingo, because they started referring to Shingo in every letter column. There was even a "Spot The Shingo" contest in which fans could earn a prize by finding the word "Shingo:"

Well, in US#38, "Trial By Fire," Shingo finally wrote in on the subject of Man of Iron. A few choice clips:

"I hate to admit it, but we don't hold a proverbial candle to our neighbors across the Atlantic... On the one hand, we have the American Transformers, where the plot usually revolves around who can shoot the other guy the most, and where we get such intelligent dialogue and 'Don't worry, I'll blow out his optic sensors with my electrogiomatrithermalasermyxptlk gun!' On the other hand, we have the British Transformers book. This comic has genuine substance, a believable realism that we American Transformers enthusiasts have yet to see in our book. The plot in the British version was relatively simple, but it made sense and it had a dramatic human touch to it instead of a trivolous [sic] 'shoot em up with a null ray' routine played back over and over again... I woud like to see a great deal more concentration on the character personalities in the book... Thank you--sincerely, Shingo XXIV, Fresno CA."

The wiki article on Shingo is fairly entertaining:

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Shingo

Post by **spiderfrommars** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:28 pm

I love letters pages.

Where is Shingo now?

And what's a wig-hat?

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:38 pm

You should know; you gave us the Fab Four, Dickens and Princess Di. Wig-hats were included.

There is a segment of the fandom still looking for Shingo. "Spot the Shingo--" It never ends...

Post by **Best First** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:50 pm

Man i love these topics, you guys are awesome. Except 8 year old Spencer who of course remains a bed wetting snot burgler.

Man of Iron is sublime - in a way it's the perfect TF story, it gets the alien angle, it gets the brutality of war, it does the human angle in a way that doesn't demean any of the parties involved and it finds a way for the good guys to win, but not win well.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Fri Apr 01, 2011 10:33 pm

8-year old Spencer cries. His tears are cheap, though.

Unfortunately, it looks like my Amazon order of the Second Generation TPB is due to arrive... at the end of the month.

Anyone got access to an electronic copy of "The Enemy Within" in the meantime?

Post by **Kaylee** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:19 am

bumblemusprime wrote:8-year old Spencer cries. His tears are cheap, though.

Unfortunately, it looks like my Amazon order of the Second Generation TPB is due to arrive... at the end of the month.

Anyone got access to an electronic copy of "The Enemy Within" in the meantime?

Email/FB me and I'll send it over

inflatable dalek · Post by **inflatable dalek** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 11:10 am

bumblemusprime wrote:
That's awesome! I will have to check that out.

Though my memory was cheating on it being exactly the same team, John Ridgeway didn't come on board till the Colin Baker strips of course. Most of this lot is drawn by Dave Gibbons (who I'm sure most of you know from Dragon's Claws).

There is actually another point of commonality between Parkhouse's Who and Transformers work beyond the olde English village setting. Both are pretty much unlike anything else done with their respective franchises. With Who he seems to have decided to take the cricket outfit and run with it regardless of what was on TV, and with Transformers you've got something done so early in the day there was no "standard" set up for stories.

You can see that a bit in the American stories that predate Man of Iron, they're all over the place as they try to find a grove, not helped by the shifting and changing writers. That left Parkhouse in a pretty much unique position, "Here's the characters and rough set up, do what you like with it". No constraints, no precedent, it's a freedom no other Transformers writer would ever have really. Even when Furman comes on board things are already a little more rigid, he's clearly had the time to think about things a little more and come up with something that fits a little better (even with the exact placing being nebulous his first run starts with mention of Spider-Man and ends with a lead in back to issue 7).

EDIT: Oh, and according to the Thrill Power Overload book Sammy is based on Ridgeway's own son, hence him showing up in the Galaxy's Greatest Comic as well.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:41 pm

Thanks to a certain awesome, I now find myself in possession of The Enemy Within. Eight-year-old Spencer is pretty pumped to read the first Furman story. He wants root beer to go with it. You ain't getting the root beer, snotbrain.

After "Man of Iron," almost anything would be a letdown, but this is one serious, serious letdown. After a while we get some better characterization--Starscream shouting "For myself!" is a good one--but at first it's an absolute muddled mess of contrived story, Starscream's god-damn endless tiresome insubordination, and horrible art and colouring.

Ridgeway chafed with this script. The alt modes look great, but without the clarity afforded by the toy forms, his robots looks like they are all being seen through water. Parkhouse's script afforded a lot more space, while Furman's is rather cluttered with robots.

The story finds its feet a bit once we get to the violence. It shows that Simon is better at pacing out battle scenes than Budiansky. We get a great showdown with Ravage, and then Brawn smashing up a small town, and then the masterful fight between Starscream and Brawn. Ridgeway does hit hard on the action, as Ravage blows a nice neat hole through Starscream.

The "Tornado and Earthquake" sequence makes me think that Simon had not yet gotten over his ambition to be Chris Claremont.

Trivia crazy: according to Richard Starkings, in the letters page of Rage in Heaven, this was his FIRST comics lettering assignment. A pretty humble beginning for a guy who basically took over the lettering industry for a while. His words, if I remember them correctly, were: "A Transformers script called 'The Enemy Within!' or maybe it was 'The Enemy Without!' or 'The Enemy Below!'"

And this was apparently reprinted in IDW's Best of Starscream! In 2010! I'm assuming that it was all recoloured, unless IDW actually reprinted the black-and-white pages.

Thirty-year-old Spencer says: Simon has nowhere to go from here but up, unlike Bob, who struggled to live up to "The New Order."

Eight-year-old Spencer is mostly in agreement. Bad art. Why is Megatron yellow? Good violence. Where's the root beer? It's on the roof, kid. Go get it. Oh wait, time vortex death and all that... now I have to get him off the roof.

inflatable dalek · Post by **inflatable dalek** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:47 pm

bumblemusprime wrote:
And this was apparently reprinted in IDW's Best of Starscream! In 2010! I'm assuming that it was all recoloured, unless IDW actually reprinted the black-and-white pages.

Have no fear true believer, the full story was reprinted in colour by the original colourist in the Collected Comics series, which was then used for the reprinted again in the comic itself towards the end. IDW will basically have no excuse for not using that.

Raiders was the only one of those early half and half UK strips not to get the full colour treatment in the couple of years afterwards. Indeed, it's the only one of the UK main comic strips that has never been reprinted anywhere (though presumably that'll change with the Classics UK book). Furman's a bit embarrassed by that one it seems.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:57 pm

inflatable dalek wrote:Raiders was the only one of those early half and half UK strips not to get the full colour treatment in the couple of years afterwards. Indeed, it's the only one of the UK main comic strips that has never been reprinted anywhere (though presumably that'll change with the Classics UK book). Furman's a bit embarrassed by that one it seems.

Was Auntie the first instance of a Cybertronian female? If so, maybe that's why Furman apparently disowns it.

Oh wait. Maybe I should've let Eight-year old Spence read it first before commenting on it. My bad.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:58 pm

It's okay. He's playing quietly. Well, actually, he's crying about the root beer, so I sent him to his room.

This thread is going to get CPA called on me.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 8:24 pm

Raiders of the Last Ark!

We start with classic Simon narration! Awesome! "Impossible fast... enormously powerful... but ultimately vulnerable."

Anderson and Collins' artwork is splendidly clear after Ridgeway's muddle. Simon starts with good full-frontal violence. Lots of the classic terrible toy-spec-heavy dialogue that Shingo was so critical of in the US book! "You forget the electromagnetic shield that helps me avoid detection can also negate your power!" It ain't all Man of Iron, Shingo.

As of issue #19, Megatron's torso is yellow again. What is with the fixation on a yellow torso? It shows up as late as Dinobot Hunt, I believe. But he does use that black hole in the fusion cannon, thus making it fusion canon.

So... magnetic fields repel black holes?

Auntie. Oh, Auntie. The first and hopefully only time that the TFs had a mother complex. You know, she shows up, she holds them captive, she speaks of a trial, but not much happens until Ravage jumps down her throat.

Really not bad, except for the lack of a potentially interesting trial. Windcharger and Ravage's teamup was painfully fun and their collective MacGuffin of magnetism was cool and vital enough to the story. There have certainly been worse TF stories.

Ahem.

(Covers eight-year-old Spencer's ears.)

So, we have a comic written by males about sexless but nonetheless male robots, for young male readers... and a domineering female ties them up, does evil judgment upon them offstage, and dies when one of them forcibly leaps down her throat?

That's some f*cked up subtext, Simon.

Well done.

Post by **spiderfrommars** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:03 am

I think Ridgeway only drew the first part of Enemy Within, the rest was Collins. I quite like the first issue but it starts to become very contrived after that.

Like you say, the Windcharger/Ravage team up is fun in ROTLA, but other than that it's probably Simon's worst story.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:16 pm

Decepticon Dam-Busters:

Prime has a gloriously annoyed look on his face when Prowl says "That means taking out Megatron!" and he replies "Doesn't it always?" I challenge you, Prowl, to say one intelligent, non-suck-uppy thing in your entire goddamn life...

I love John Stokes' art! This guy really handles the large cast and the associated backgrounds well. I was reminded that he is the guy who did all the moody swamp and harsh desert battles in Dinobot Hunt. The shot in issue #29, which has the Autobots shooting up at the dam, was stellar. Same with the lineup of Autobots blasting away at the rocks in #30.

Bottom right of page 6 of #30--Bumblebee's face is frameable. The shot of Josie Beller on page 10 of #30 looks like it was inked over William Johnson's similar shot.

This really was better than a cartoon adaptation has any right to be, even if it wasn't on par with the later stuff. Probably because it was adapted from a good episode, and Simon cut the puny fleshlings out.

My younger self liked it, though he wanted to fight less water and more Decepticons. If only natural disasters were that simple, young lad...

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:34 pm

The Wrath of Guardian/The Wrath of Grimlock:

Gina Hart and Nel Yomtov should make drunk, inconsistent, expatriate coloring babies. PINK and YELLOW are not the same thing!

Kitson acquits himself well in his first story. He manages to make the Dinobot/Guardian fight fairly clear, if you ignore the colors.

Eight-year-old Spence squees, and thirty-year-old agrees that it is cool to see a segue from the end of New Order, in which Ratchet fixes Autobots now that the Decepticons have vacated the Ark. We get near-identical-to-the-US scenes of Shockwave and Prime expositing and Buster accidentally fixing stuff with his brain.

But we also also get Prowl and Wheeljack and co staggering back to life. And of course, the Dinobots hunting down Guardian for fun, which was pretty damn hilarious. "We're really sorry about the hand... that should do it... why don't you test it?" PUNCH.

I need to take eight-year-old Spencie to the bathroom after that one. He laughed so hard he blew snot bubbles... and peed.

He asked me if that part gets better as you get older. I thought of my reaction when I first read Last Stand of the Wreckers, and the many trousers that series ruined. "Hard to say, kid..."

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 3:39 pm

Christmas Breaker:

"Christmas must be really special here on earth if it can do this!"

Oh God... it's so bad. I want to frame it.

Post by **spiderfrommars** » Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:26 pm

I think The Wrath of Grimlock is where Furman finally found his voice on Transformers. Some really nice characterisation for everyone involved and some very tense scenes. And it's just nice to see more of The Dinobots - they don't appear in the US stories again for ages.

I actually like Christmas Breaker, but that's just me. It's really grim, until the cheesy ending.

bumblemusprime wrote: I love John Stokes' art! This guy really handles the large cast and the associated backgrounds well. I was reminded that he is the guy who did all the moody swamp and harsh desert battles in Dinobot Hunt.

Actually Dinobot Hunt was Will Simpson and Barry Kitson. But Stokes came back for Crisis of Command and Second Generation.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Mon Apr 04, 2011 2:59 pm

spiderfrommars wrote:I think The Wrath of Grimlock is where Furman finally found his voice on Transformers. Some really nice characterisation for everyone involved and some very tense scenes. And it's just nice to see more of The Dinobots - they don't appear in the US stories again for ages.

I actually like Christmas Breaker, but that's just me. It's really grim, until the cheesy ending.

bumblemusprime wrote: I love John Stokes' art! This guy really handles the large cast and the associated backgrounds well. I was reminded that he is the guy who did all the moody swamp and harsh desert battles in Dinobot Hunt.
Actually Dinobot Hunt was Will Simpson and Barry Kitson. But Stokes came back for Crisis of Command and Second Generation.

Me getting the artists wrong is part of the charm of this thread. Really...

Furman really is settling in at this point. For years I've thought about Budiansky and Furman's writing quality in situational terms--Budiansky had a lot of pressure to introduce new toys while Furman was able to just take Budiansky's stories and decompress.

But even in "The Enemy Within" I've come to realize that Furman is just a better writer. He's tighter. He bases everything on characters' decisions and traces the character arcs to a logical conclusion. So often Budiansky would invest a lot of time in a character only for that character to drop out of the story.

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 9:19 pm

Crisis of Command!

A fill-in, but a good one. Reminds me a bit of Len Kaminski's work on Plight of the Bumblebee, only this time Prime is the self-doubting one. Who could blame him after being a headless zombie?

Senior's art is stunning even in its rough gestation period. Prowl's bloodthirsty rant about Ultimate Wolverine/Omega Supreme Bots is stunning stuff. The shot where Soundwave launches Laserbeak off his arm was classic, in-your-face Geoff Senior. As much as I enjoy Stokes, it was a shame to see him back in #44.

Using Bumblebee's arm as a ransom note was fantastic. Nice and creepy and dangerous.

Hill really needed to read Prowl's bios. He comes off as an evil vizier.

And doesn't Optimus just go all badass in the end? Minus the crappy characterization of Prowl, Hill turned in a damn good story. It was far better than a fill-in had a right to be.

"You're just a missile with a mouth, Starscream!"

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Apr 05, 2011 9:48 pm

Aww.

#43 was the my first TF comic. But I didn't get another one until #49, so I had to wait nearly 2 years (and Collected Comics #8 ) to find out what had happened to Bumblebee after that cliff-hanger.

Post by **spiderfrommars** » Wed Apr 06, 2011 7:37 am

Senior's art was a revelation. My fave of the three issues is the middle one - Bumblebee's smackdown is brutal (though it did feel a bit repetitive when Plight of the Bumblebee followed a few issues later). The last issue was a bit of a let down though.

Also, have you noticed how much the art of the Ark and its surroundings seems influenced by the cartoon series? Looks more like Monument Valley than the Cascades in Oregon to these untrained eyes.

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:47 pm

bumblemusprime wrote:Prowl's bloodthirsty rant about Ultimate Wolverine/Omega Supreme Bots is stunning stuff.

A nice bit of foreshadowing to Omega's eventual "out of the blue" appearance later on. It looks like Prime gave in and allowed a compromise to be reached where they build a solitarary RMD and then let him sit around rotting to the point where Buzzsaw can take him down with a single blast...

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sat Apr 09, 2011 5:02 am

And There Shall Come... A Leader!

Ellipses and exclamation points led to salary raises in the comic book industry of the 80s. S'true. Look it up.

This is a great little story, and much smaller and quicker than I imagined all these years I yearned to read it. "We need to give power to a soldier!" And... that's it? That's how Optimus became the leader? I can't help admiring the straightforwardness of it. We acquired a ****-ton of baggage over the years now that Op is religious leader, spiritual leader, Last Scion of Numenor, etc...

Balls-to-the-wall, heroic Prime here is also much preferable to War Within Prime. Sorry, Simon, but I never liked the Optronix origin.

This Prime is ******* awesome. He's willing let himself get blown to hell to stop the Decepticons from getting into Iacon, and he doesn't agonize over the decision or do anything other than what needs to be done. Reminds me of the no-nonsense, I'll-rip-your-f*cking-faceplate-off fight in Escalation.

The ending is a bit of a cop-out, if necessary. The bridge blast really should have wasted Megatron. It would make more story sense to put another Decepticon figurehead in Megatron's place here, and give Op the credit of really striking a serious blow, instead of having Megatron magically dig himself out of the rubble.

Despite being reprinted in the slick-ass Best of Optimus Prime trade from IDW, Megatron's torso is still yellow here. HAAAART!

bumblemusprime · Post by **bumblemusprime** » Sat Apr 09, 2011 5:27 am

To A Power Unknown!

Wow...

To say that this is an awful story does a discredit to the root word "awe." And though eight-year-old Spencer doesn't understand a damn thing I am saying, he agrees. There is some good carnage near the end, but for the most part this reads like a one-off by someone who set out to make the most infantile, Saturday-morning plot they could.

I hate that the plot revolves around mind control. Feels cheap. Bob and Simon succeed by rooting almost every action in the characters' desires and passions. The characters are cheap templates.

Interestingly enough, it sort of ties into what is wrong with the ongoing. Costa seems determined to rob the Transformers of their power and their agency. Prime throws himself on the mercy of the humans, while Rodimus stupidly trusted Swindle, and even the characters who retain their agency, like Thundercracker, don't do much.

It's odd how this story makes it clear.

We don't so much want the TFs to go back into space, or to leave the humans out, or to stop bickering. We want them to ******* take control, Costa. We want our robot heroes to call the shots, not some asshole army jock.

Post by **spiderfrommars** » Sat Apr 09, 2011 10:55 am

AFAIK To A Power Unknown has one thing going for it - the bit where the guy gets squashed inside Starscream's cockpit. Nasty!

There Shall Come A Leader has always felt like a really important story for the UK canon, but it's worth remembering that it was a very early one and was in the first annual (which was a very kiddie affair with join the dot puzzles etc).