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.
Join the checklists conversation here or on:
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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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I don’t think that’s how it worked lol. Just because new lines were released didn’t mean the older ones were no longer being bought. And these were popular characters, so to ignore them for each successive new series of toys is suicidal for a license comic. That’s why some characters were regulars from issue 1 right through to issue 332.
As for a continuity mess, nothing was being pre-empted, we were being treated to prequels and character-based stories before the US strips, making the American stories even more enjoyable for us. I’ve read so much about the Earthforce stories being contradictory and not making sense, as if Furman would do that. We had an alternative future US story that these carried on from, plus other UK stories followed on from the Time Wars when time healed itself by resetting Galvatron’s timeline so that he had never travelled back in time. The comic treated us as intelligent enough to follow stories told out of order, building mysteries before satisfying payoffs. One of the reasons I love the last 150 issues so much.
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A lot of the toys highlighted weren’t popular characters (the ones that did have longevity tended to be the ones who had new toys at the end of the line) but rather previously unseen ones whose toys were still around. The sheer glut – a fifteen issue run where all issues featured prominent roles for 1988 toys bar a two parter origin for the 1989 Micromasters plus a reprint special with a whole load more – really does feel like someone asked for a special push. It wouldn’t be the only example of a toy company making a push to “unclog the pegs”.
Regarding continuity, this story is set after the US strip in #251 and does mention it briefly. Other stories are clearly set after US strips that were printed after them – for example the Race Car Patrol being back with the Autobots in #228 before they’d even broken away in the first place, the Autobot Classic Pretenders fighting the demons just before their resurrection or Starscream reflecting on being taken back by Scorponok before his attack. And yes Earthforce is a mess with fan theories having multiple places for it.
In interviews Furman has since admitted to this mess, blaming the reprints for upsetting his plans and then not really trying to make Earthforce tie into the US stories (and not expecting to be asked about years later; he admitted even he couldn’t place it).
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They might not have been popular characters with you but that doesn’t mean they weren’t with others, and the stories being placed after US stories was often explained in the editorial, while others were set up as prologues etc and everything came together in the end (like I said, treating the audience as intelligent).
Do you have a source for Furman saying this? And not just someone else saying he said it? Because it’s inaccurate. Earthforce is set in the alternate universe created by his US story, and other strips were set in the present after time corrected itself (again, explained in one of his stories). Earthforce does not fit in the US stories at any point, even afterwards because there are characters who shouldn’t be alive etc., hence the alternate universe where he could play with a bunch of different characters. If the comic hadn’t been cancelled I’d loved to have seen these realities combined which, having read the whole run recently, I’d guess he would’ve done.
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Some of the 1988 toys were appearing for the first time at all – it’s a bit hard to be a popular character before one’s debut even if they do go on to be popular (e.g. Nightbeat).
The problem with out of sequence wasn’t so much expecting readers to accommodate the order (although Furman later conceded the order was making things confusing) but the giving away of endings and surprises, everything from showing the Race Car Patrol would return to the other Autobots even before they broke away through to Starscream being taken back in by Scorponok. And this was a factor at the time. Furman gave an interview in 2004 which did cover this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090914233035/http://transfans.co.uk/interviews_furman.php
“[Q] 3. Why do you feel continuity suffered more instead of less, between Marvel UK and US when you took over the US book?
[A] The problem was, we were badly out of synch with the US material reprints by the time I was also writing the US comic. I was trying my hardest to craft semi-crossover stories (like the Deathbringer two-parter with US #65) and then the UK comic would run a batch of old UK reprint material and completely throw it out. I realised I was making matters worse (and more confusing) and not better, and pretty much stopped trying to directly tie the two together. Looking back, as I try my hardest not to do, it’s very hard to tie the Earthforce stories into a specific time frame (in terms of the US continuity), because (if I’m brutally honest) I didn’t try too hard to make it work in the first place. By that point, I was just trying to tell a bunch of fun UK stories that didn’t necessarily impact on the larger (US) storyline. How was I to know 15 or so years later people would be trying to reconcile it all?”
Earthforce has never had one simple answer – I’ve seen fans place it around issue #310 or between the generations (Transmasters built their timeline around this, albeit with bridging stories, and it seemed to be the standard approach online in the late 1990s) or confine it to an alternate timeline – and this ultimately comes back to Furman not even trying at this stage.
As for what might have happened if the comic hadn’t ended, the same interview suggests he never developed plans:
“[Q] 4. The Marvel UK editorial originally promised a monthly comic as of issue 333, complete with a new 5 page story each issue written by yourself. Do you know why this never came to be, and what, if anything, had you planned story wise? Would we have seen a continuation of Earthforce for example?
[A] I confess I don’t know. I didn’t even, to the best of my somewhat unreliable memory, remember ever being approached with that possibility. They probably just assumed I’d do it… and they were probably right. Certainly, I’d have liked to do more, as I felt it all tailed off a bit. Those last few UK stories have ‘limited lifespan, why bother?’ written all over them. I’m not proud of that. But, like I say, who’d have thought anyone would even notice?”
I do think a revisit to the UK G1 continuity would be good, if only to sort out some of the confusions (the revelations coming up in #244 seem to be the most controversial and debated to this day; it definitely needs at least some clarification).
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This is very sad to read that he just gave up, it’s rather insulting as a young reader at the time. Although as an adult I do question the god-like status he’s held in by some fans. Don’t get me wrong, I loved his work as a kid and I still do, but he also ripped off the cartoon for Decepticon Dambusters, the final couple of years stole from the movie (and he even admitted this in the intro to a graphic novel collection from Titan) and the Matrix Quest I loved so much as a teen is basically rewriting four different movies with Transformers in them. All fun, of course.
The comic made a point of the two examples I used before, time resetting itself and the end of the US alternate future story, for regular UK stories and Earthforce respectively and they wouldn’t have without Simon saying so. Perhaps he forgot about these in the years since when questioned (it happens, I know as I’ve interviewed plenty of people who worked on 80s comics – it’s a long time ago and they’ve worked on so much since) but those are the facts from the pages of the comic itself.
As for the characters, I didn’t mean popular in the comic alone but popular in general, with the toys etc. It could also just be that Simon needed more characters and went looking for interesting ones he hadn’t used. Hasbro will have been concentrating on promoting new toys, not ones that shops might not be stocking anymore. Simon has even said that by this stage Hasbro were pretty much letting him do what he wanted.
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If I recall correctly from James Roberts’s research and interviews in the Classics UK series, Decepticon Dambusters originated with ediotr Ian Rimmer noting the expected arrival of the cartoon on television and explicitly wanting some identical scenes in the comic and on the cover that could lure more readers in. (Later on Crisis of Command, written by different authors, was explicitly written to be advertised on TV with clips from the cartoon but legal reasons nixed this usage.)
Furman was a great writer but like so many he was writing for the medium to hand and not expecting it to be analysed years later whereby continuity errors or reused plots and ideas stand out.
I don’t recall the comic actually setting out an alternate timeline for Earthforce. The UK book did establish that the future timeline changed after Time Wars and later there was a US story set in a dystopian future different from any of the UK future timelines, but nothing to my knowledge was ever said about the present day stories. Earthforce early on had a caption promising an “upcoming US story” would explain the return of the Dinobots and other characters (later a UK story did its own thing on this) then later on the Transformation page conceded there was a continuity mess but didn’t try to explain it.
The same interview did cover how Hasbro UK did from time to time come specifically asking for certain toys to be highlighted – the Special Teams and the Headmasters are specifically mentioned and it’s likely the Micromaster push in #232-233 also falls into this (previous Transformation pages indicate the UK stories were reordered to line up with this). And the Classics UK books confirmed Hasbro UK asked for Ultra Magnus and Galvatron to be promoted back in 1986. It’s possible they also asked for the Classic re-releases to be promoted. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of these have some awkward continuity steps taken, whether dream visions of the future, time travel, stories set in the past to sidestep matters or just plain awkward to fit into continuity (the UK Headmasters debut story just doesn’t clearly fit into any place the US miniseries reprinted as a back-up). But it’s entirely conceivable they also asked for pushes to help with the previous year’s stock.
My recollection is that a lot of the 1988 toys were still on sale in autumn 1989, in part because in those days toys stayed on the shelves for longer than now, but also perhaps because the TF demand was in decline from the heyday. Toy companies do sometimes take steps to encourage buying up the older product, whether it’s rerunning adverts (at least one of the 1988 adverts – for the Powermasters – was run again in the comic in mid 1989 and I can remember other toylines reusing TV adverts from at least the previous year) or asking for the tie-in content to give a little boost or even more direct tricks like “Buy X number of toys and send away for this bonus one” offers. Part of this is rooted in store stock control systems that can’t tell the difference between toys from different waves and so older product can risk clogging the shelves/pegs and preventing newer product from getting out of the stockroom or even being ordered at all. A number of toylines have stumbled because of the clogging effect so the companies step in to find ways – and sometimes generating demand is more effective than sending out memos that never reach the shop staff.
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It’s not about analysing him years later, it’s the disdain he had for the children he was writing for if that interview is accurate. That’s just awful. (And I thought the Arcee origin story from a wee while back in the Checklists series was bad enough!)
The comic did acknowledge that timings did get messed up but that doesn’t negate how the stories were written to fit together. It could’ve been neater, yes, that was their intention, but a lot were planned as prequels etc so my point still stands on them. It was great fun as a child to read stories set before and after others and piecing it together so that wasn’t an issue for me. Earlier examples of the same thing happening are Time Wars and Underbase for example, before that the time travelling UK stories and how they fitted around the US ones, it just wasn’t as profound.
And I agree Hasbro pushed for those ranges you mentioned because they were new, including the re-issues. They weren’t old lines the company randomly wanted to promote. To me it’s clear Furman just needed more characters and he wasn’t restricted with just new toys, or he liked the sound of certain characters he hadn’t heard yet and wrote stories for them. Unless we get to speak to him this is all assumptions for both of us of course, based on our mutual love of the comic, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree lol.
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