SATURDAY 5th AUGUST 1989
John Marshall’s and Dave Harwood’s front page to The Real Ghostbusters doesn’t stand a chance this week, not when it’s alongside Nightbeat as a private eye on Andrew Wildman’s Transformers and Action Force cover!
Last time I said if this was the cover this week I’d be so excited I might read the issue again, despite having done so countless times before. Well, I did! The Big Shutdown was a superb two-part story that saw Autobot Headmaster Nightbeat investigating a disappearance, and with its classic detective movie clichés it’s a brilliant tale (and Nightbeat a fantastic character!). Alongside the terrifying new Decepticon Thunderwing, this was the beginning of writer Simon Furman introducing important new characters from his American strips to UK readers first. Our exclusive stories foreshadowed the US ones, added depth to proceedings and gave us a rich, memorably epic feel to the whole final couple of years of the comic. A genius move and a brilliant story in its own right.
Talking of stories coming across the Atlantic, the Ghostbusters were in England on holiday so all of this week’s tales were set there. Even the Dead True feature about local urban myths focused on the Tower of London. While The Real Ghostbusters comic’s stories were rarely longer than four or five pages, they would often find other ways of making them special such as these themed issues, or linking them together with an overall arc. Not that anything was made of this special issue on the cover, strangely enough. At least the “jolly spiffing” nature of it is plugged as such on the checklist.
Again, the need to tell us the titles and credits of every story reduces the brilliant Transformers contents to quick sentences that wouldn’t really entice new readers. The second issue of The Sleeze Brothers still didn’t get to be the big comic, despite their premiere issue holding the record for the number of weeks in the top spot. Nope, once again The Punisher weekly gets that honour. It was being given a big push so we can’t really blame them for giving it to him again; if it had been a new monthly we’d have expected it.
This week’s advert is actually for one of our mainstays. Even after 230 issues there’s no harm in plugging Marvel UK’s top-selling comic of the 1980s. In fact, I’d say it was about time. Both it and The Real Ghostbusters were rarely advertised post-launch, the excellent strip adverts notwithstanding (which you can see in weeks four and 21, although that was part of a publisher-wide push). I suppose when they’re already a hit there’s not much need. However, as fun as it was seeing one favourite comic pop up in the other, the advert feels somewhat phoned-in.
Like most of the publisher’s adverts there’s very little in the way of information and it relies solely on a few choice images. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever, the main purpose was to alert the younger readers of its existence and give a general feel of what to expect. On that level it does the job, but even when I was 11-years-old I couldn’t help thinking the image of Optimus Prime just looked wrong. That big gap above him where a speech balloon must’ve been made an otherwise powerful ad feel a bit slapped together. It’s not like the comic was short of images of him that would’ve fitted properly!
No adverts next week. In fact, for the rest of the year we seem to get a few weeks of a drought at a time and then suddenly we’ll be inundated. On this occasion we’ve only to wait two weeks until we get some more memory-firing images. In the meantime, next week there’s a bumper checklist to look forward to with our regulars, a special issue of a semi-regular and the final ever issue of a fan favourite. You can check it out next Wednesday to see what they are.
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