Starting ten years ago this month, continuing for over seven years and finishing in January 2024, I read every single issue of Marvel UK’s Transformers and photographed highlights to share on the blog’s Instagram in real time. Reading OiNK in real time was one thing, but here was an epic comic series with great character arcs, huge storylines and its fair share of cliffhangers, and I relished the challenge of using all of my will power to not jump ahead in what was a massive reading project!
Our version of Transformers had a whopping 332 issues and (during its run) 19 specials, seven annuals and a variety of other books. The word “epic” can be overused in comics, but it’s the right one to use here and reading it one issue per week just confirmed that. It proved really popular on socials and I loved every minute of it, never sneaking a peak at what was to come, reliving it the way it was intended to be read. What I didn’t count on was social media companies’ ability to make their platforms exponentially worse as time goes on.
When my read through was over I realised the posts were becoming lost in the past and even if I shared a link to any one post there was no longer any way for people to scroll to the next/previous issues. So I spent a week adding unique hashtags to all 375 posts, explaining them on the blog so that readers could also relive all of the issues in the correct order, or easily select any specific ones they wanted to see. However, now keywords have replaced these and when searching my #OiNKTransformersXX (‘XX’ for issue numbers) hashtags my posts are behind several dozen others, despite the tags being unique to me!
There was only one solution, to preserve my content myself by reposting everything here on the blog where I’m not at the mercy of further enshitification. Are you ready for a new, very (very) lengthy real time series on the blog?
TRANSFORMERS UK ON THE OiNK BLOG
Before I started the read through I’d actually wanted to do something with the comic on the blog for a while, but two things had stopped me. Firstly, reviewing a weekly comic for seven years was too daunting at the time (I was just starting out) and secondly, the stories had already been covered in depth all over the internet. I decided upon a photographic journey instead, as a way for fans to relive treasured memories of owning these, and to show the physical comics to fans around the world who’d read the stories in book form but had never seen the originals, their covers, back up strips and features, everything that made our version unique.
What had seemed like the perfect platform for such a project had turned out to be anything but, so I’m bringing everything over to the OiNK Blog on a monthly real time basis.
The first issue went on sale 20th September 1984 so on or around the 20th of each month (depending on other scheduled real time posts), I’ll show you all of the photographs of the issues from that calendar month. It felt like the obviously way to begin and it also means each December you’ll see the Christmas issues at the right time (rather than my original idea of summing things up at the start of the following month). Altogether this series will last for a humongous 89 months in total! It begins in just seven days from the time of writing this, on Sunday 20th September 2026, while the final post won’t be published until January 2034!
I won’t be taking any new photos because this is all about preserving the specific experience I had. It was the first time I’d ever read the first few years of it and the first time in decades for the ones I’d collected as a kid. So the photos showed what had leapt out at me during the read through, the first time I’d ever read the entire saga from beginning to end. While I won’t be rewriting what I thought as I read them, I’ll be updating the writing in the posts so they better match the style of the blog, improving their flow over the short-form captions of social media, and the early posts didn’t have credits so I’ll add them in too.
Also, don’t forget every Christmas we’re still celebrating the 40th anniversaries of the festive issues and annuals with full reviews of each when that time rolls around, and we’re already a couple of years into those at the time of publishing this post. Alongside the complete real time read through of Marvel US’ Transformers Generation 2, there should be plenty for fellow Transformers fan to read on the OiNK Blog for years to come.
OiNK Blog 