SATURDAY 20th MAY 1989
It was a very exciting Saturday for me 37 years ago! Andy Lanning, Stephen Baskerville and John Burns teamed up for an excellent celebratory The Real Ghostbusters cover spoofing the cinema poster for RoboCop. Then, as an adult, having finally read the earlier issues of Transformers from before I started buying them as a kid, the return of Skids on John Stokes’ cover was equally as exciting.
Ecto-X was Egon’s newest invention and just like modern day automation it tried to steal their jobs! But just like modern AI it was a bit pants and it all went horribly wrong. At least in this comic it was beautifully drawn (unlike AI) and very funny. Like the first weekly (#14) it’s all one big story this week and ties in with the other features and prose story too. The Design-a-Spook competition was also launched. I drew a possessed HQ firehouse but never sent it in. You’ll never guess what someone else drew and won with?! Grrr!
In Transformers and Visionaries, Skids hadn’t been seen for 100 issues, languishing in the void after being displaced by time-travelling Cybertronians (it makes sense in context). He’s being stalked by inky black creatures from void space and Dan Reed was the perfect artist to bring these nightmarish creatures to life, and they look even better in black and white! His nighttime scenes in this story are particularly atmospheric. It’s the beginning of the Survivors arc, a brilliant months-long series of tales focussing on characters on both sides left out in the cold after the recent Underbase and Time Wars sagas. Some truly memorable times ahead.
In the other Transformers story, the wonderfully written, strong female leader of the alien planet just has to go against her character and fall for the male lead, doesn’t she? (In this case, Cloudburst’s Pretender shell.) Why did male writers always have to undermine the strong women characters they’d created? It so infuriating. Visionaries comes to its end (for the final time) and why the 50th issue of The Real Ghostbusters isn’t the big comic of the week on the checklist I have no idea.
That honour goes to the 13th edition of Action Force Monthly, or G.I. Joe The European Missions as it was called when exported. As exciting as it may have been to have Cobra going berserk in London, the milestone issue for the Ghostbusters really was superb and deserved that spot, especially as how this issue of Action Force could’ve been given the slot anytime over the next three weeks. Sometimes, I just don’t understand the choices made in these checklists. Oh well, part of the fun is seeing which one of our faves would make the cut each time.
No comics ads this week. No new ones at least. Next week however, a very popular cartoon character can be seen in an ad for their own monthly comic that I never even knew existed at the time. Until then, Make Mine… um, the MiNK Mlog.
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