SATURDAY 8th OCTOBER 1988
It feels like no time at all between each part of this series. The weeks are really flying in. It’s reminding me of how much I loved getting new comics every single week and this week 37 years ago was no exception, with The Real Ghostbusters #18 (cover by Brian Williamson and Dave Hine) waiting patiently at my newsagent’s. For my friends the 187th edition of The Transformers and Visionaries (cover by Andrew Wildman) provided all the entertainment they’d need that morning.
The Ghostbusters met Mother Nature this week in a nice ecological tale before three ghosts appeared in their fire station HQ to play cards with Peter. This strip included a memorable moment when the Grim Reaper said he’d go blind with this next hand… and proceeded to pick his eyes out of his sockets! Meanwhile the gigantic Metroplex made Godzilla look more like that rooster from the Kellogg’s advert as he went on a rampage after being woken up from beneath Autobot City.
There’s also a famous page in Transformers history where a conversation between Ultra Magnus and Soundwave is laid out on the page as a homage to a Batman/Joker scene from The Killing Joke. Batman fans can check it out at the link below. Also, the Visionaries began another excellent story that would be their final new comic strip, ever. An excellent week already for Marvel UK but what else was available? To begin with, Transformers fans would definitely have been making a return visit to the newsagent for what was surely an unmissable issue of Dragon’s Claws.
It was one of the very best of their run and because they were up against that Transformers comics creation, Death’s Head! The full review of that one is in both the Dragon’s Claws and Death’s Head real time read throughs on the blog. The Galaxy Rangers story sounds completely bizarre this week, even more bizarre than the millennia-spanning crossover in the pages of Flintstones and Friends, and was the content of the Alf Autumn Special originally intended as a hardback book?
In weeks four and five we saw one-page comic strip adverts for Marvel UK titles, an idea by editor Richard Starkings. The idea was that they could be reused over and over and act as a sample of the kind of strips and art prospective readers would find in their comics. While the Doctor Who Magazine advert below is enjoyable, Richard told me he felt it missed the point of the brief by producing a comical take instead of an example of the magazine’s art. Written by friend of the blog and DWM editor at the time , John Freeman and drawn by Nick Miller, it actually reminds me of a scene in OiNK’s time travel issue when Uncle Pigg comes up against the ‘Butcherleks’ as he introduces the comic to Earth’s inhabitants of the future!
The other advert was a one-off page created by the Transformers comic to promote not only the Cybertronians’ own superb annual but also those of the two cancelled comics that shared the back up strip space (not at the same time). Although, if readers had read the Visionaries comic as stated here they’d have been disappointed with the news the strip was a reprint, especially since it was only a handful of months since its original publication. Despite that, it’s still a favourite annual of mine and a jewel in my collection.
Next week that Alf special gets an advert that made us laugh even though it didn’t involve the titular alien and Thundercats would begin its confusing period of not knowing how often it wanted to appear! Do you remember any of these specific issues released this week way back in time? Did this issue of Dragon’s Claws introduce you to the freelance peace-keeping agent? Did anyone actually build Bedrock?
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TRANSFORMERS 187 (Instagram)
TRANSFORMERS & ViSiONARiES: PART TWO
DOCTOR WHO MAGAZiNE POSTS #135 & #147
TRANSFORMERS ANNUAL #4 (Instagram)
WEEK TEN < > WEEK TWELVE
Oh, and just to be clear, I love that Kellogg’s advert.
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