Comic Review - Batman: The Killing Joke

A Prestige format book originally published in 1986, The Killing Joke has fast become a favourite primer for Batman comics for several reasons. It's short and sharp, captures the darkness that's now built into Batman on a base level, has consequences, features the Bates undisputed number one villain on top form and has some seriously heavyweight creators. It's a little more Brian Bolland's baby and while he's grizzled about the colour job it's unarguably a brilliant piece of work, with several frames genuine touchstones of Batman history. The face to face between Dark Knight and archenemy  (though few remember the latter is actually a dummy in the original) and the concept behind it has been knobbed by everything going, for instance.

Alan Moore has been somewhat disparaging about the book in years since too, though to be honest he is about everything these days anyway, old misery that he is. But it stand up brilliantly and never feels thirty years old. The 'possible' origin tying the Joker into the Golden Age Red Hood has also been widely accepted as canon insofar as anything else DC is canon, precisely because it's so well written, and the interpretation-laden last page still pulls things off - the joke is actually pretty funny, even after many readings, avoiding that whole King of Comedy thing.

In the years since the crippling of Barbara Gordon has copped a lot of flack but this is mainly through 21st century glasses. In the context of a period of comics where status quo was king (Crisis merely establishing a new status quo) the sudden, brutal and casual nature of the Joker just turning up on a hero's doorstep and shooting her through the spine both ramps the danger up and creates a jarring effect. Both the incident and its' aftermath - where Barbara's critically injured body is photographed and possibly abused - serve to show how dangerous the Joker is. It's a deliberately crass attempt to undermine Jim Gordon's belief in civilised society and if it triggers you into repulsion well done, it's meant to. Plus it's a change that gave the huge positive response of the paraplegic Oracle. Meanwhile Jim's complete refusal to be dragged down to the Joker's level despite the callous targeted bad day (compared to the Joker's collision of bad luck and his own extant weakness) is uplifting and makes him on the quiet the real star of the story.

Overall The Killing Joke deserves its exalted status. It's not a perfect comic but it is concise and memorable, a perfect introduction to modern Batman comics in that it leaves somewhere to go while functioning as a compact story based on a dynamic ramped up to legendary status.

Film Review - Biggles

As a plane-mad boy growing up with no History Channel Biggles was a staple of my childhood, thanks to my parents taping the movie from ITV one Bank Holiday - a recording I ran to death. Biggles was created as a series of aerial adventure books by W. E. Johns, a World War I pilot himself, for younger readers in 1932. The books were a staple for boys from then until 1970, the series having enough of a loyal following to only end when the author died. Biggles' in-fiction career started off in 1916 but did move forwards through time, taking in post-war time in a charter plane foiling various plots against Britain and then reactivation for World War II, followed by a period as part of a special flying unit. This seems to have been possible by James "Biggles" Bigglesworth and his chums having some sort of sliding lifespan; initially his callow age was a feature but it froze when he hit about 30. The book's attitudes towards race and nationalism congealed at about the same point and by the sixties were firmly out of swing with much around it; one suspects by this point the readership was mainly made up of those who had been reading the books for decades.

Comic Review: Robo Machine featuring the Gobots Annual 1987

By 1986 Gobots was winding down in America, with the TV series moving to syndication and the toyline running out of new toys and getting squeezed out by Transformers in a shrinking market after the 1985 boom. In the UK the market was slightly less cut-throat as the simple difficulty of transatlantic business at the time meant fewer of the fly-by-night lines which had boomed briefly had made it across to Britain. Robo Machine had never been a gigantic seller in the UK and thus had less distance to fall, continuing to chug along happily in the #2 spot a long way behind Transformers; the line would only really stop when it ran out of figures, even managing to get Fossilsaurus and Dancougar roped in towards the end. Meanwhile at Egmont House World Distributors had paid for a licence as they were going to use it; for their second Gobots annual in 1986 World Distributors had a challenge; they'd set the bar very low the first time around - could even they go lower?

Comic Review: The Avengers - Under Siege

PUBLISHER: MARVEL (1986-1987)
WRITER: ROGER STERN
ARTIST: JOHN BUSCEMA

Marvel in the mid-1980s was not an innovative place, especially in the main titles where the status quo tended to be maintained. The Avengers had a constantly shifting roster but nothing ever really happened to the team exactly; against this backdrop the group of issues that make up the Under Siege TPB are quite innovative, dealing with a concerted attempt to destroy the team.

Comic Review: Longshot

PUBLISHER: MARVEL (1985-86)

WRITER: ANN NOCENTI

ARTIST: ART ADAMS

One of my favourite runs of X-Men was the stint in the eighties where Chris Claremont relocated the team to a ranch in Australia. Not only did this give it a fresh feel but there was also a great roster - peak Storm with her mohawk fresh from knocking the crap out of Cyclops, Wolverine and Rogue before overexposure, the original non-tarty version of Psylocke, Colossus, Havok, Dazzler and Longshot. It was all very eighties, best epitomised by Longshot, who was brilliant and likable but remains very much a product of his time. 

His genesis came shortly before he joined up with the team. Marvel were going through one of their periodic pushes for fresh talent and characters (this being the era of the ill-fated New Universe) in the mid-eighties and this unearthed Ann Nocenti, a kind of talented version of Cat Yronwoode who had already attracted attention for offing Jessica Drew on a brief run on the closing issues of the already doomed Spider-Woman and would later go on to a bleak, responsible but rather good residency on Daredevil. Between that she devised a character for the eighties to help update Marvel and then-novice Art Adams was paired up to create the alien Longshot. The resulting character was striking for his Bowie influenced mullet and actual proper utility storage, including a near omnipresent satchel and grappling hook not to mention a bandoleer of throwing knives at a time when comic characters generally produced such accouterments from thin air. Definitely a character for the eighties and his look would go on to influence the likes of Cable and everything else terrible in the early nineties.

The actual introductory story for the character drops the reader in the deep end, the character arriving in our world with amnesia (which would be something of a motif for the guy), unaware of his name, powers or even physiology. In typical Nocenti style the alien-ness of it all is doubled by Earth being a pretty weird place, full of survivalist nuts, crazed film directors and suicidal husbands. Things gradually unfold over the six issues, which also introduce Mojo, Spiral (whose design takes some time to settle down), Ma'gog and Gog, not to mention Ricochet Rita, a human stunt-woman who serves as a love interest at this stage. Nocenti's script varies between richly detailed (with a great many allusions outside the usual purview of the era) to flowery and overcooked; her ever-present social commentary is just as variable, sometimes wry and witty and others overbearing and clumsy. The brilliance of Art Adams blends perfectly with this strange world, though sadly one of the few occasions the man was able to actually draw an entire series suffers from lots of ugly block colouring.

Most of the characters are vividly drawn, notably the conspiracy theorist Eliot who initially allies with Longshot, Rita and urban failure Theo; fun cameos from both She-Hulk and Spider-Man also hit the spot as does a more substantial appearance by Doctor Strange. The long game approach does mean by the final issue the reader has a fairly good handle on the amiable title character too while both Mojo and Spiral flesh out nicely, though some of the rest of the supporting cast are neither here nor there and there's a stomach-turning bunch of kids lobbed in.

Really though the big problem is a treacle pace and the six issues really do drag in places; when I found out the final one was double length (having previously only read a couple of odd parts) my heart genuinely sank. It is an unusual complaint from the era to go with the unusual character but really with so little information about basically anyone in the comic it's more frustrating than anything. A planned sequel series never happened and Longshot would next pop up in the X-Men a few months later, once again without his memory. 

After a few years the team went through the Siege Perilous for a massive shake-up; Storm would be regressed to a child, Psylocke would turn up as an Asian ninja while Havok and Dazzler lost their memories. Longshot came off worse still by disappearing entirely and would only come back for the occasional Mojoverse crossover as it became harder to fit him into the modern books, the ultimate legacy of designing a character for the eighties being that once they were over he looked rather silly.

Comic Review - Transformers: The Movie

When Transformers The Movie was released at the end of 1986 Marvel were in a bit of a bind. Monthly comic writer Bob Budiansky was still pottering away with stories set in the present day, but Marvel naturally wanted some trickle down from the film's expected gigantic box office (ahem) and also to stave off requests from readers asking when the new characters would be showing up in the comic.

The obvious answer was a limited series adaptation. These were often good for the coffers anyway - home entertainment was still in its' infancy, so a comic or novel version was often the best way for most kids to relive a film once it had disappeared from the cinema. With Budiansky busy on the monthly and other duties the task of adapting Ron Freidman's script fell to Ralph Macchio, an experienced Marvel staffer who isn't the same guy who played The Karate Kid. He was given three 22-page issues to tell the story and a fairly advanced but not final copy of the script to work with. 

It's difficult to tell what's down to the different demands and abilities, what was from the draft script and what was just changed on a whim by Macchio, but notable differences in the comic version of events include:

• Unicron shrouding his targets in corrosive mist before devouring them, while Kranix actually transforms while fleeing Lithone.
• Ironhide's sacrificial lamb crew of first year stalwarts are given slight dignity due to the entire Decepticon army only sneaking up on them due to an asteroid storm obscuring the shuttle's radar.
• Megatron beats Optimus Prime in the fight without Hot Rod's help, though he still uses a discarded handgun after begging for mercy.
• The Matrix is passed to Ultra Magnus without being caught by Hot Rod first.
• Ultra Magnus is drawn and quartered by the Sweeps; a few delusional lunatics still claim this made it into the theatrical cut but was swiftly withdrawn and replaced by Magnus getting blown up. While that's idiotic (how would the final death be animated so quickly as to not break the film's brief cinema run?) it does seem to have still been in there for the cast recording sessions as it fits better with Robert Stack's drawn out reading than being shot.

There are myriad design changes too - not only is everyone in their 'comic' colour schemes (so grey Galvatron, black helmeted Megatron, all red Ironhide and so on) but some of the designs are different - the Matrix is a green angled cube thing with no handles.

The comic's most fatal flaw is built in, however. All of the things that turn TF:TM from a noisy violent toy commercial - the slick animation, the Vince diCola score, Peter Cullen's vocal performance - into a nostalgic piece of light show wallpaper - are impossible to replicate in a comic. Don Perlin's work is adequate if rushed in places but it's on a hiding to nothing in trying to reproduce the film's moments of visual splendour. 

Really these days with myriad DVD releases available for pence on ebay it's only really a curio for fans who want to see a few ideas that didn't make the script and laugh at some of the clumsier moments - there's an expository paragraph of dialogue handed to Sludge of all characters that has to be read to be believed. 

The storyline was all but ignored by the rest of Marvel's American output. Budiansky has admitted he has little affection for the movie cast (something that can be seen in their unusually poor Universe profiles) and neither they nor the future would feature in the monthly for some time. At Hasbro's behest Optimus Prime and Megatron were written out but their replacements were Grimlock and Ratbat while the stories stayed set in the present; presumably the adaptation was enough to keep Hasbro happy in terms . 

Hot Rod, Kup, Blurr, Cyclonus and Scourge would eventually show up as Targetmasters a year down the line but Ultra Magnus, Rodimus Prime, Wreck-Gar, Galvatron and the Quintessons would have to wait until the monthly comic fell behind schedule and cartoon episode "The Big Broadcast of 2006" was adapted, again by Macchio and again terribly - even allowing for how poor the actual episode was. A second fill-in adapting "Dweller in the Depths" was thankfully not needed, but Galvatron would eventually resurface as a major supporting character soon after Simon Furman took over from Budiansky. 

Furman liked the film as soon as he saw it and soon realised the relative freedom the future offered him for the Marvel UK comic. Thus, via the ambitious epic "Target: 2006" (the title giving away that, like Macchio, he was working from an early draft), the events of the film were incorporated into the British continuity as a springboard for seminal stories that eventually fleshed out things like the Matrix, the Quintessons and Unicron, culminating in Furman penning the first attempt at a Transformers origin story.

However, the limited series itself wasn't part of the main run. While the US material was reprinted as a key component of the UK weekly, the Movie mini-series was instead repackaged as the 1986 Winter Special, featuring good quality paper with card covers, retaining the large page format of the weekly. This was probably to get the same lucrative Christmas gift appeal of the British annuals,  though it might be that Marvel UK weren't overly impressed with it. There was a token attempt at editing all references to 2005 into 2006 but they missed one. Another Marvel attempt to cash in on the film came in the former of the obscure Transformers Poster Magazine, a large fold out of the superior British theatrical poster with a few miscellaneous facts on the back. Stuart Webb has covered this odd little trinket nicely on his Transformation blog. Despite the attention, TF:TM tanked on this side of the pond too.

By the end of the eighties VHS was more accessible and the tape was reissued a couple of times before the format was overtaken by DVD. Even the Movie was out on disc before the eighties nostalgia boom took off, meaning there was no demand for a reprint from Titan. IDW then decided to do their own adaptation of the film for no apparent reason, managing to come up with an even more pointless end result. 

As such, the 1986 mini is one of the few Transformers comics not to have been reprinted in recent times - and with good reason. However, for the morbidly curious here's a compendium containing 1/ scans of the US mini-series  (not by me and somewhat dated as I downloaded them somewhere around the turn of the century ) 2/ the UK Winter Special  (good resolution scans I did myself a couple of years ago) and 3/ the Poster Magazine (part of the same scanning project but less successful due to the physical size of the thing). 

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TRANSFORMERS THE MOVIE #1-3, TRANSFORMERS WINTER SPECIAL 1986,  TRANSFORMERS POSTER MAGAZINE

TOTAL FILE SIZE:  87.7MB

Comic Review - The Official Gobots Magazine

PUBLISHER: TELEPICTURES PUBLISHING, 1986-1987
WRITER: P.E. KING, JAY ITZKOWITZ, PAUL KIRCHNER
ARTISTS: RALPH REESE, PAUL KIRCHNER

Gobots was always seen as the poor cousin to Transformers and to some extent that was fair. If anyone wants to slander the overall quality of the toyline they can step outside and be administered a hiding courtesy of my man Perkins but as a franchise it was all over the place. The problem was that while Hasbro spent time working with Marvel on a set of character bios and a mythos for Transformers, Tonka - in their rush to get toys on shelves - just threw pun-based names on the figures and basically left it at that. Seriously, the first batch didn't even gave faction names, but were delineated as "Friendly Robot " or "Enemy Robot".

By the time Tonka got their cat together and linked up with Hanna Barbera to make the terrible but Stockholm Syndrome-inducing Challenge of the Gobots cartoon Transformers had overtaken it with barely a look back. The other half of Hasbro's media pincer was of course the exclamation mark-riddled monthly comic, and to that Gobots had no real equivalent. With Marvel working on Transformers and DC not doing that sort of thing comic rights were just another thing for Tonka to sell off to some hapless goober rather than part of the company's promotional arsenal.

The first attempt at a Gobots comic wasn't even really a Gobots comic, but is worth a brief mention anyway. Bandai retained European rights to the figures and sold the line there as Robo Machine; after seeing Tonka's initial success they inked a deal to copy the names and factions over and decided to promote the brand with help.from Fleetway. They put out a serial in the weekly Eagle comic written by veteran Tom Tully with a grittier tone than Transformers material of the time that still stands up well despite a hurried, inconclusive ending. 

In America however the licence fell to Telepictures. Don Welsh's company mainly handled television syndication packages but also had a small publishing arm which put out titles for other programmes they owned the rights to, such as The Muppet Show. When Challenge of the Gobots came under the former they decided to put out a title based on the show - The Official Gobots Magazine.

And it's certainly a magazine rather than an outright comic; the large format quarterly generally averaged five or six pages of actual Gobots content. As well as a five-page strip set in the Challenge of the Gobots continuity (if that isn't an oxymoron) the title was padded out with the same sort of stuff Sheila Cranna used to fill pages in the early days of the British Transformers comics - anything on file about sci-fi, robotics, computers and home electronics.

The first issue was put out for Winter '86 (probably an off-sale date), with - as for all the published issues - a painted cover by Paul Mangiat. Inside was the strip "The Blast of Doom", written by P. E. King (a quick Google seems to line up with a moderately successful children's book author of the period) and illustrated by one R. Reese - most likely Ralph Reese, who drew for Flash Gordon and National Lampoon but seems to have had an eclectic career. It's a trite little trip with Dr. Braxis coming up with a gun to kill Leader-1, who is lured into a trap when Pincher is able to kidnap Scooter and Nick (a.k.a. Team Fail) while popping out for ingredients to make a birthday cake for A.J; it makes the cartoon itself look like Evangelion or something.

Dated Spring 1986, the second issue's strip is called "Scooter's Mighty Magnet" and you can pretty much guess it all from there. The writer is Jay Itzkowitz, a staff writer at Telepictures (also working on their Muppets and Robo Force titles) and the art is by Paul Kirchner, another one with an unusual CV that included surrealist strip the bus for Heavy Metal and covers for Al Goldstein's porn tabloid Screw with He-Man and Thundercats. About the only thing of interest is a rare appearance from Creepy in with the Renegades.

Issue 3 (Summer 1986) had a cover falsely promising an appearance by Mr. Moto, but the strip ("The Wrath of the Mountain", written by King and illustrated by Kirchner) features the usual cartoon crowd of Leader-1/Turbo/Scooter versus Cy-Kill/Cop-Tur/Crasher, with the Renegades mining an energy source called Ultium from a sentient mountain (they even put a sign up). See if you can work out how that goes. The issue also featured the first of the "Ask Leader-1" pages, where readers (or staffers) quizzed the Guardian leader with a mixture of Gobot-related and general science questions; it's actually quite a sweet feature - I doubt anyone at Telepictures was aware of the UK Transformers comic's use of a character as letter answerer.

Tonka of course were also behind the Rock Lords toyline, which was part of Machine Robo in Japan but was pitched as a separate line in the West. However, their only well-known media appearance was a crossover with the Gobots for the flop Battle of the Rock Lords feature film. Accordingly, the strip in the fourth issue - both written and drawn by Kirchner - also has both groups in. Sadly it's not any good, being a lightweight take on the old Trojan horse thing, with the Rock Lords largely incidental muscle for both sides. 

The Winter 1987 edition proved to be the last - not surprisingly, as the cartoon had ended and the toyline itself was winding down. News was broken to subscribers with a paper cover around the magazine itself, cheerfully informing those who had paid for the sixth issue that they would be receiving a copy of The Kids' Official Statue of Liberty Magazine instead. Brutal. 

The main strip is again entirely by Kirchner and while it's the same simplistic story (named "A Spy Among Us") it's worthy of note for one reason - it's the only Gobots media to feature Super Couper and Clutch, not to mention the only thing to have Night Fright with the right name and colour scheme (his design was used for a green Renegade referred to as Blades in one episode of the cartoon). While Clutch doesn't do anything the lightweight plot focuses on Coups (as everyone calls him) and Night Fright gets to do a couple of bits. The issue also contains a one-page all-Kirchner strip named "Update from Quartex" which focuses entirely on the Rock Lords - and shows the other stories up by cramming a plot just as pat into a single page.

So there we are, The Official Gobots Magazine - largely rubbish, noticed by few and remembered by less. I scanned all the comic strips back when I owned them; part of me wishes I'd done the magazines cover to cover despite the rest of it being terrible but there we go, the indecent amount of money I sold the things on for took the sting out of it.

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OFFICIAL GOBOTS MAGAZINE #1 - 5 - STRIPS, COVERS & ASK LEADER-1 ONLY

Total File Size: 14.0MB

Custom DVD Cover: Transformers - The Movie

One of my guilty pleasure films; I love Transformers and even though the original animated film is objectively tripe it's a big part of my childhood. As was the original UK movie poster, a version of which cut from a comic adorned my bedroom door. Merging that (already used for the cheapo Sony Wonder release) with the contents of Metrodome's two-disc Ultimate Edition with some cleaner rear cover artwork was simple but satisfying.

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Custom DVD Cover: 8 Million Ways to Die

Why would you put out a film as eighties as this and give it a dull modern cover? I have no idea, but that's what Second Sight did. A simple restoration of the great contemporary poster did the job, with a European one providing a great piece for the back as well.

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Custom DVD Cover: Blue Velvet

One of my favourite films - and one that's been repeatedly saddled with cheap-looking UK releases, usually dominated by Frank Booth (the sleeve is for Secular Entertainment's two-disc special edition). Whereas America and much of Europe got one of MGM's better efforts, a smart wrap-around featuring the classic Kyle-and-Isabella on blue velvet background. So this one was pretty simple, adding UK bells and whistles to the German release.

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TV Review - Thunderbirds 2086

Thunderbirds 2086 was one of my favourite childhood cartoons mainly because being a little bit like Thunderbirds meant Dad tended to watch it with me (though he's more of a Supercar man). I've long been intending to do something on the site about the show but faced with some resources consisting of the 1983 Grandreams annual and about half of the episodes I've never felt particularly confident doing much.