SATURDAY 14th OCTOBER 1989
It took the talented trio of Brian Williamson, Dave Harwood and Robin Bouttell to produce the week’s cover for The Real Ghostbusters, while Andrew Wildman had to cope all on his lonesome to knock out this fantastic front page for Transformers and Action Force with some funny hidden gems in there (a toaster, bike pedal and a UK plug?).
At last the New York team got the same paper upgrade the Cybertronians had been enjoying on-and-off for a while. Speaking of things finally happening, that Pharaoh story mentioned in week 59’s checklist saw the light of day, but now of course Spengler’s Spirit Guide no longer matched up. A child’s letter questioned the science behind the naming of their Proton Packs and for once the comic gave a considered, serious response! Again, this issue was all-new but the checklist describes some stories as reprints. There could be a reason for this, one which we may get a definitive answer to on the blog in the future.
First, that Transformers cover represented a very funny strip also drawn by Andrew. It involved a double-dealing ‘bot and The Mechannibals in a tense stand off followed by a magnificent 80s-style bar brawl, but the highlight was (letter answerer) Dreadwind and his partner, Darkwing. Drunk on dodgy oil after the failure of their most recent mission several months back, the story jumped back and forth between their slurred speech and feeling-sorry-for-themselves comedy in every left-hand panel, while the drama and action played out in every right-hand panel. It’s hilarious stuff and indicative of the kind of thing the comic was perfect at in this three-story format. It also broke up all of that tension and darkness from previous weeks nicely.
As you can see, this week’s checklist was light on quantity but the comics featured made up for that in quality. Not only was the UK Transformers story magnificent this week, the imported US stories changed hands, with Brit Simon Furman now writing for both sides of the Atlantic. Hasbro had brought back four toys from the original line up as Pretenders and this was the beginning of Simon’s wonderful take on their reissue. From here until the end (in January 1992) Simon would do a magnificent job of creating back stories for any toy release they could come up with.
Also, check out the link below to see Lew Stringer introduce Dara O’Briain in Combat Colin! (Not really.)
The only other new point of interest this week was the latest issue of The Punisher and, while the comic itself did a better job of it (from what I’m told), I’m really not comfortable with how these checklists have generalised certain things (groups, historical moments, plot points) at times. It’ll be interesting to see how the comic itself portrayed these stories. In the meantime, you can look forward to an absolute bumper crop of goodies in next week’s post with five comics on the checklist and three new adverts. Well, two really. Well, technically three. You’ll see what I mean in seven.
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TRANSFORMERS 240 (Instagram)
“Mecannibal” is probably the single most misspelled word in Transformerdom. Even the comic struggled to get it right and at least one letter was printed picking them up on it.
Dreadwind and Darkwing were responding to a number of setbacks including having just lost their job with [SPOILER]. Unfortunately, the Transformers comic was starting to get into a continuity mess because due to reprints substituting for US stories, a number of UK stories were being printed that sought to feed off events in the US strip and instead pre-empted them. A later introduction Transformation page explicitly stated that Out to Lunch! was set after the storyline in Back from the Dead!
This was also one of a number of issues in the period highlighting toys from the previous year’s releases. I remember many of them were still on sale in toy shops – how the market has changed. Given how many are highlighted in this run (plus the choice of issues for the next reprint Collected Comics), it feels like someone from Hasbro UK explicitly asked for them to be highlighted, perhaps to help clear the older product from the shelves.
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