Comic: Blake's 7 - A Marvel Monthly

Jesus I'd forgotten all about this. Basically, Marvel had - after an initial boom and bust - managed to produce a magazine based on Doctor Who; it had initially been more of a comic before they cottoned on that there was a lot of cheap mileage in articles about the show's history and the like, meaning only a handful of pages of comic strip needed to be commissioned each month. The decision to do the same thing for B7 from the start was therefore a no-brainer and the title debuted in autumn 1981 just as the new-look Season 4 hit screens. Brilliance, apart from the fact within a few issues the the cast were wiped out in a bloodbath and the series was cancelled, with the monthly presumably selling enough to amble on regardless. Same thing would happen with Doctor Who Magazine, which bridged a 17-year gap between the show being cancelled and that CBeebies shit with farting aliens arriving on the screen by surviving on a TV Movie and lots of interviews with minor guest stars. The difference was Who had a 26-year history to draw on, not to mention ongoing official fiction like the novel and audio series. Blake's 7 had four years, seemingly no rights to anything from the first three, and an official ending that saw everyone die.

Comic: Mobile Suit vs. Giant God - Gigantis' Counterattack

What with the devastation of 'Be Invoked', which may have included the destruction of the entire universe, but at a minimum killed every single regular character and destroyed pretty much every trace of the Earth Empire, the Buff Clan and the Solo Colonists you'd think Ideon would be sequel proof, as per Yoshiyuki Tomino's intention. However, in 1992 something along those lines appeared in the manga publication named MS Saga, written and drawn by Yuichi Hasegawa. Serialised in four parts, Mobile Suit vs Giant God - Gigantis' Counterattack was ostensibly based on Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, but crossed over with Ideon by attempting to link the two universes together. 

Digital Archive: Robo Machine featuring the Challenge of the Gobots Mini World series

Past posts have touched upon the unsatisfying history of Gobots in print even at the height of their commercial success - rather than a licence with Marvel or even someone terrible like Malibu there was a token mail order magazine from Telepictures while in the UK a run in IPC Fleetway's Eagle was superb but soon followed by a switch to the infamous World International Publishing, most often known as World Distributors. They didn't actually publish comics but instead licenced annuals (two Gobots examples were issued in 1986 and 1987; both were terrible, the first being a possible nadir for Western creative writing) and storybooks based on extant properties with some appeal to kids - most notably their savaging of the likes of Doctor Who and Blake's 7 under approval of the BBC.

Comic Digital Archive - The Spider

Devised to cash in on the encroaching Silver Age dazzle bleeding across the Atlantic, The Spider is still the crown jewel in IPC Fleetway's pantheon of very British heroes. His antics, printed in the weekly Lion, took place in America (primarily the fictional Croy) but there the similarity with the likes of Spider-Man ended. Of uncertain origin (he just appears, even his species is never really confirmed or denied) the character even started off as a villain, a common theme for strips of the period - The Steel Claw started the same way. Immediately he picked up the services of crooked scientist Professor Pelham and dumb safecracker Roy Ordini, who would be the faces of the army of crime he recruited to help carry out his schemes from a castle overlooking the city.

Comic Digital Archive - Robot Archie

The old British weeklies have always had their totems, their mascots, their ever-presents - 2000AD has Tharg, The Beano had Dennis the Menace, Valiant had Captain Hurricane, Eagle had Dan Dare and so on. For Lion, it was Robot Archie. Created by George Cowan and artist Ted Kearnon as the Jungle Robot the character lasted the first six months of Lion before disappearing for five years but from 1957 to the end of the title in 1974 he was always there.

Comic Digital Archive: The Robo Machines

PUBLISHER: IPC/FLEETWAY (1984-1985)
WRITER: TOM TULLY
ARTISTS: MARIO CAPALDI, KIM RAYMOND, GEOFF SENIOR

As anyone who's a long-term reader will know this has long been my little pet love. The Robo Machines comic ran for two arcs in the 1980s version of Eagle and remained pretty obscure until only a few years ago. I certainly hadn't found much information until I hunted down the old issues and found it to be not all that bad at all and scanned it to inflict on other people. Since then someone's done better scans, which is all good. What would be lovely would be a proper TPB reprint as the original comics were on newsprint but sadly with a fragmented rights situation  - the Gobots trademarks co-opted for Robo Machine are possessed by Hasbro, the likenesses for the Robo Machines by Bandai and the actual comics by IPC/Fleetway - this seems unlikely. While the latter have shown a willingness to work with fans on reprints, such as for Doomlord and Leopard of Lime Street, the involvement of two rival toy giants would be a stumbling block.

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?

Comics: Vulcan

The format of Vulcan gives it a fair claim to the title of the the greatest British comic of all time, despite being a reprint book. Throughout the sixties especially IPC Fleetway had experimented with fantastical stories more in line with the American industry, albeit the majority employing a peculiarly British slant to the concept. However they never really muscled aside the war and football stories which made up the backbone if the weeklies and gradually moved out of print, defiant innings from 'Robot Archie' (effectively a mascot for Lion) and the Steel Claw (who got a sequel strip, 'Return of the Claw' in Valiant) notwithstanding. It took until the seventies for superheroes to take much of a grip in the UK, when Marvel set up a British division and launched the Mighty World of Marvel, soon followed by Spider-Man Weekly Comics, The Superheroes, The Titans and The Mighty Avengers as the industry briefly boomed. Fleetway took note and responded, merging their library of existing strips into a single fantasy/superhero title - the original Magnificent Seven being 'The Steel Claw', 'The Spider', 'The Trigan Empire', 'Kelly's Eye', 'Mytek the Mighty', 'Saber - King of the Jungle' and 'Robot Archie' - made up the arsenal of Vulcan, edited by Geoff Kemp.

Comics: Machine Men Mini-Comics

In Australia the Machine Robo line was imported as Machine Men, distributed by Bandai Australia. Like the European version and unlike the American Machine Men line the toys sold well enough that Bandai opted to keep the original branding, even after Gobots took off. Indeed, uniquely the cartoon was even retitled Challenge of the Machine Men to fit in with the toys. To help promote the figures, Bandai Australia did provide catalogues that included short comic strips.

Comic Review: Robo Machine featuring the Gobots Annual 1986

PUBLISHER: WORLD DISTRIBUTORS (1985)

As touched upon elsewhere the various licences associated with the Gobots line were a mess and this was evident in few places that got the line more than the UK. In Britain the Machine Robo toys had been launched as Robo Machine around the same time as the short-lived American Machine Men line was on the shelves and by Bandai's European unit. When Tonka bought up the rights for the United States they didn't want them elsewhere and Bandai continued to distribute Robo Machine in Europe with moderate success. However, as Transformers arrived and Tonka's Gobots took off Bandai quickly realised that in the West being transforming vehicles wasn't as good as transforming vehicles that also had names and abilities and began applying the Gobots names to the figures (with the occasional change) while retaining the Robo Machine branding. Still with me?

Magazine - Lee's Guide to the Gobots

In the days before the internet had everything on it print magazines were still covering things like toys and comics with some considerable authority. Lee's Magazine was one of the bastions of the former, sort-of a Wizard for toys with things like collecting and pricing guides in it as well as focus on new stuff. Numerous issues would have a pull-out section in the middle functioning as a sort of checklist covering various popular lines like Transformers and Star Wars, often composed at a time when a lot of information out there was still contradictory or rudimentary. They covered Gobots in one issue; the result hasn't aged well with a potted biography riddled with errors and a style which is more interested in packaging than the actual figures but the result is still a worthy primer for just seeing what was actually put out, even if the focus is entirely on the North American figures.

Comic - The Incredible Adventures of Janus Stark

Throughout the sixties and seventies British comics were never really at ease with superheroes, the big weeklies still all being about plucky fighter pilots and aristocratic footballers with an emphasis on some mooring in the real world. When they did try the strain resulted in some of the oddest heroes and villains seen in comic form, not to mention a great number of anti-heroes - the British Invasion of the eighties was as odd as it was because guys like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison had grown up with strangeness like The Spider and the House of Dolmann along with their issues of Batman.

One of the more popular curios was Janus Stark. Inhabiting the penny dreadful Victorian England, Janus was a near-inexplicably (there was some vague hand-waving about him having a flexible bone structure - British comics certainly didn't do origins, you read what was on the page and were happy with it) rubber-limbed escapologist who found fame in the music halls. Naturally he wasn't just a performing turn but a champion of the underdog who used his abilities to right wrongs and redress cruelty against fellow weirdos.

Created by Tom Tully, long-time writer for The Steel Claw and Kelly's Eye and later for The Robo Machines, with art from Argentine maestro Francisco Solano López, at that point in his career on the run from the Junta for his part in some satirical works, Janus started out having adventures in Smash!, where he had taken over from reprints of Fantastic Four (and was thus seen as something of a nod to Mr Fantastic) and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Cursitor Doom and His Sporting Lordship until the title folded in 1971. Janus was popular enough to actually survive the dreaded amalgamation that followed however, and continued in the pages of flagship book Valiant.

This strip comes from the 1977 Valiant Annual (though it was likely a reprint by then, the weekly had folded shortly before and Fleetway's M.O. was to use backlogs for the strip sections of the annuals by this stage) and features Stark going up against some not especially PC pirates during a trip to provide "our lads" in the Crimea with some much-needed amusement.

 

 

Comic Review: The Official Transformers: Generation 2 Annual

PUBLISHER: Grandreams, 1994

The shortlist for worst Transformers comic ever wouldn't be particularly short, what with Marvel's dire movie adaptation, Josh Blaylock's G.I.Joe crossover, Dreamwave's first G1 mini, Devastation and that whole Mike Costa thing. But really there's only one winner - The Official Transformers: Generation 2 Annual.

Annuals were the backbone of the British Christmas industry, especially in the eighties. If a TV show, comic, cartoon, pop star or sports personality didn't have between 48 and 64 pages of strips, pinups and text articles of questionabble relevance sandwiched between two A4 slabs of cardboard on sale in smiths WH Smiths every December then the British public hated it. Getting a slim parcel off Grandma  with the price clipped out is a shared cultural memory for a couple of generations.

Many of them were notoriously shit, produced largely by uncaring third parties who would try to make the basic promotional material they were sent by the property's owner go as far as possible. Grandreams were one such company and ended up with the Transformers licence. However they also ended up with the usual crowd from the Marvel comic working on it and aside from a few continuity flubs Simon Furman made good use of the format, regularly annoying weekly readers by bunging a crucial story in the yearly book.

When Generation 2 started up in the UK, the comic licence went to Fleetway (as talked about here) and for whatever reason the annual one ended up back with Grandreams.Great, right? Just hook back up with Marvel. Nope; not only had the Marvel UK Transformers team long since broken up (at the time Furman was managing the impressive feat of getting mutant title Alpha Flight cancelled in the mutant-crazy mid-nineries while Andy "Andrew" Wildman, his Reek, was carrying out the serious work of drawing the comic adaptations of Fox Kids' popular X-Men cartoon) but the company itself was pinwheeling to destruction after misinterpreting the popularity of the likes of Alan Moore, Brian Bolland and Grant Morrison as a sign to oversaturate the market with a glut of dreadful British-originated superhero books. As a side note the annual is referred to as the 1995 edition; industry standard was for them to appear the previous autumn, usually around September, so there's a chance this actually beat the Fleetway title to UK shelves.

So it was up to Grandreams. The talent available to them is best illustrated by the way no-one is credited (though the overall design is acknowledged as the input of something called Arkadia), though that might have been to protect the innocent, and right from the cover you know you're in trouble - a gigantic full-length animation cel of Optimus Prime framed by graphics like those used in the dodgy re-edited cartoon with simplistic drawings of Starscream and Sizzle leaping towards the reader to really emphasise how badly these differing styles gel.

The best bit in any annual, the bit everyone read first, were always the comic strips but this example provides just one eight-page effort. This is probably for the best, though, considering how much of a mess this is. Grandreams go for a fresh continuity for their stories grabbing a few bits from the established universe and making up other bits and "The Dinobots" concerns Grimlock and Snarl awakening with both factions setting out to investigate them. The Autobot team consists of Optimus Prime, Jazz (in his G2 deco) and Blaze (with Sizzle's alt mode and colour scheme); the Decepticons of Megatron (in his tank body), Starscream (in his G1 colours) and Soundwave (also in his G1 colours, the character's sole G2 toy to his retail - that eye-scorching Go-Bot - having yet to be released). 

After a brief scuffle the Dinobots - incorrectly repaired by the Ark and released into prehistoric times where they went feral and then got knocked out when the dinosaurs went extinct - have their personalities resurface. They help defeat the Decepticons, make friends with the Autobots and then just go off again to look for the other team members, making it a real nothing of a story. The art is clearly drawn by someone, shall we say, not used to drawing Transformers, mostly consisting of slightly blocky bipeds with minimal alt mode features on their robot forms. Some of the other frames - notably the establishing shot of the Ark and the frame of Starscream getting beaned in the back of the head - are obviously traced from extant Geoff Senior work ("Crisis of Command" and "Victory" if I don't miss my guess) which only shows up how limp the newer art is while the lettering is among the worst I've ever seen in a professional comic.

The bad news is the strip probably is the best bit. There are two text stories - "Day of the Decepticons" and "Moving Day Planet Earth" - which more or less tie in with each other. The first consists of the Autobots tricking the Decepticons into a fake ship so they can fire them into orbit (oh, spoiler warning), the second with them foiling a standard energy-gleaning plan. Both are poorly written, low on characterisation and have a weird grab-bag cast of the big names being padded out by random choices as Jetfire (again yet to have his official G2 figure released and thus most likely referring to the big white and red jet) and Shockwave (who, apart from a brief flashback in the American Marvel comic, took G2 off to rest up ahead of being overexposed in Dreamwave's material) and Euro exclusive Deftwing. Like the strip having the only fictional appearance of Blaze (unless he's turned up as a funny pizza delivery guy or something on the Lost Light since I binned the IDW titles off) these little titbits have the deceptive effect of making the story sound like some oddball curio worthy of interest; it isn't. 

Not really meeting the criteria of a story is "From Cybertron to Earth the War Continues", which is the equivalent of the Robot War recaps that the Marvel/Grandreams annuals used to run bringing new readers up to speed, only here it's clearly based on a knackered Tempo "Arrival from Cybertron" VHS tape which some unfortunate work experience kid had to watch with a notepad and pen to cobble together a bland adjustment of the Hasbro-designated origin of the time. 

All of which fills just over half of the 48 pages. The rest consists of scant profiles obviously drawn from the toy's tech specs with a couple of randoms thrown in (Rumble?) and simple quizzes. Most of this (and the text stories) are illustrated by toy box art; while it has its' fans I've never found most of the Transformers boxart to be particularly strong, especially divorced from the backaging. A decade older and it looks even worse; it doesn't help that some pieces are repeated.

For the suicidally curious only.

THE OFFICIAL TRANSFORMERS: GENERATION 2 ANNUAL

TOTAL FILE SIZE: 29.2MB(I genuinely cannot recall if these were my scans or not, credit to whoever)

Comic Review - Transformers: Generation 2 - the UK series

Grammar.

PUBLISHER: FLEETWAY, 1994-1995WRITER: SIMON FURMAN
ARTISTS: ROBIN SMITH, MANNY GALAN, DEREK YANIGER

1994 and Transformers was back for Generation 2. Except in the UK, where it had never gone away. While the last of the various Micromasters and Actionmasters that made up the final underwhelming American series of what is now known as Generation 1 was being clearanced across the Atlantic European toystores were stiĺl receiving fresh product, ranging from new moulds to botched Japanese imports to unused prototypes, most of which have cropped up in James Roberts' work since. It was an odd period with Europe getting cool stuff like Overlord, the Turbomasters and two thirds of Breastforce without Breastmasters or even names.

The 1994 Marvel Transformers
Winter Special, which probably
came out right before G2 #1.

It meant when G2 did roll around Hasbro's British wing was at a bit of a loss as to what to do with it, the first batch of figures initially coming out as simply the latest wave of the original line. However once it became clear their American cohorts were putting money into relaunching the line with media support in the former of a new comic and obnoxiously edited episodes of the eighties they decided to switch to the new branding. The cartoon was effectively lost in the British television system of the time (little space on the four terrestrial channels and satellite having a tiny penetration) so it was down to the comic. The local branch of Marvel had handled it in the eighties until cancellation in 1992 after 332 issues, largely due to running out of material to run when the American book was axed. Since then they'd slung out a few low profile specials, right up until 1994. However the UK branch was by then hurtling towards destruction after overreaching themselves trying to convince people to like a stable of poor titles like Death's Head II and Motormouth & Killpower and had no time for the thing.

The first issue of Marvel
USA's G2 comic.

Hasbro looked elsewhere and threw in their lot with Fleetway, who had long ruled the British comic scene from King's Reach Tower alongside DC Thompson with their arsenal of weeklies like Eagle, Lion, Valiant, Battle and 2000AD. Many of these had gone - ironically as licenced titles like Transformers had eaten into the market - but Tharg was still overseeing things in 2000AD and The Beano remained a huge seller. Hasbro ensured they would have the rights to Marvel USA's new original material and with a monthly format chosen it all seemed simple.

Title just rolls off your tongue.

But it wasn't as a chunk of the early material was deemed unusable. This is occasionally blamed on the violent content but while Fleetway's eventual material showed they were pitching at a younger audience than the Marvel book across the ocean but as they later ran arguably the series' goriest moment (Red Alert getting shot down to his skeleton) it probably wasn't. More of a concern was that Hasbro had very sensibly asked Marvel to ease the Transformers back into print via a guest-spot in their still-running licenced G.I.Joe, to the distress of Joe fans who felt the appearance of the robots undermined the realism of their comic about ninjas and a terrorist organisation who were ignored by America's huge conventional military.

The end of Marvel UK's efforts to
push G.I.Joe - The Action Force.

Problem was that despite repeated efforts including three rebrands and a Marvel comic which included many of the same staff (and Grant Morrison) that had made Transformers such a success G.I.Joe had simply never caught on in the UK. Marvel tried a weekly then a monthly and then making the strip a back-up in Transformers itself, all to apathetic and occasionally hostile readers; it was dropped after G.I.Joe #74 was reprinted in Transformers #305, followed by a special which briefly tied up the Cobra civil war plot; the Transformers crossover ran through #133-142 and in the intervening sixty issues a mixture of Hasbro's demands and Larry Hama's dreary soap opera about how awesome Snake-Eyes is rendered it unrecognisable.

Hot Spot versus Cobra in the
American material.

It's actually debatable how much harm just ignoring the crossover issues and running the Transformers material would actually have been; G.I.Joe and Cobra's role in the actual Transformers issues is fairly minimal and a text box could probably have explained things briefly - that Megatron and Starscream had reappeared on Earth, destroyed the Autobot team sent to stop them and were now facing off against G.I.Joe would have handled things. That the first issue of the American title didn't actually include any references to the crossover would even have meant they wouldn't have had to launch with something fudged like that anyway.

Regardless, Fleetway decided to launch with some original material to lead into the reprints which were planned to make up the bulk of the title. The 24-page large format comic was priced at £1.50, with between half and two-thirds of the issue being strip and the rest made up of profiles, feature pages and the odd advert here and there, meaning that in theory there was the best part of two years' worth of material from the US book. However, to smooth the launch the first two issues contained new strips intended to dovetail into the reprints while working around the G.I.Joe crossover.

UK G2 #1 splash page.

Simon Furman was apparently the writer for these two strips but this is somewhat questionable. Furman was of course writing the American book and had done transatlantic double duty before and was a logical choice. However he claimed they weren't his work on the convention circuit in the late nineties before saying otherwise in a TPB reprint of the American material and can sometimes be a little disingenuous or at least eager to please; if the earlier denial was in a context of deriding the two UK stories an off-the-cuff disowning would have got a laugh from the room while the later reclamation might have been to claim any reprint money or simple poor memory.

Optimus moping.

A more compelling case for Furman not being the author is that they make a hugely complicated job of bringing things up to speed. The natural thing for the writer to do would be to trim the US scripts down - eliminate G.I.Joe or simply turn them into generic army troopers and simplify the thread about the destruction of the Ark while reintroducing Megatron in his old body. When you consider out of the first three American issues Derek Yanniger's workrate problems meant there had already been two fill-in issues largely unrelated to the main plot - promo comic reprint "Ghosts" and Manny Galan-drawn "Distant Thunder"-remake "Primal Fear" the most obvious thing to do would have been to trim down the script for the first issue and then provide a bridge tidying up the Earth material ahead of the arrival of Bludgeon and the Warworld. However, a lot of the dialogue - especially Optimus' guilt-ridden recap of Earth's place in the war - does ring pretty true.

Tornado displaying deep complex
Decepticon characterisation.

Instead the writer came up with a totally different script. One possible factor is the behest of Hasbro; the G2 comic is moderately famous for not actually featuring many G2 toys for various reasons. Aside from Megatron - the new line's centrepiece - and a few revised colour schemes (some of which, such as those for Optimus Prime, Starscream, Grimlock and Jazz, are easy to pass without particularly noticing) there was only an occasional attempt to showcase new wares in the US comic. The UK material however throws in the Skyscorchers, the Stormtroopers, Rotor Force and the Laser Rods plus has everyone involved overtly in their G2 schemes - notably the Dinobots, only released in brightly coloured variants in the UK whereas the American book got away with the grey versions. This might suggest that the plot problems came from this mandate but really if they were going to redraw it there was little harm in simply substuting some of these guys for any other Decepticon muscle.

Watch out Prime, he's
got a new toy!

Whoever the author the art was unmistakably the work of Robin Smith, a 2000AD stalwart who had a couple of short spells on the Transformers UK weekly to his credit. His blocky designs aren't to all tastes but combined with some bright colours from Gill Whelan it's not bad if a bit bright and cheerful, especially compared to the sinews and fluids the American material was providing. Dated October 1994 (and probably out then, the UK industry never having got into the silliness the American one did), the first issue's story was called "War Without End" (exactly the same as the first issue of the American book to keep things nice and simple...) and concerned Bludgeon's troops - entirely made up of new G2 toys without chaps like Octopunch and Stranglehold - attacking Earth (he's worked his way to London) as in the US book to draw out Optimus Prime and nick the Matrix (that he's already got the new troops he would use it to activate in the US book is something best not to think about). The ploy works - Prime arrives with Sideswipe, Jazz and Skram - hoping to also meet up with Grimlock - and battle is joined before being swiftly interrupted by the new and improved Megatron just after Bludgeon's been decked. As well as lots of new toys mentioning their names and showing their gimmicks (Sideswipe's drawn with his huge water blaster on his car roof) there's time to shoehorn in Optimus' apocalyptic visions foreshadowing the Swarm; so far so good if a bit weird.

G2 #2 splash page.

The second issue strip was called "War Zone", which might sound unimaginative but at least hadn't been used on the American comic. It's basically a fight issue - Optimus versus Megatron's shiny new toy, Megatron versus Bludgeon's shiny new toy army (skullface himself keeps a lot profile after Optimus smacked him down in three frames) and then the shiny new Dinobots versus the Decepticons, and ends with the bad guys running off their separate ways. Which is odd, because it basically resets the Decepticons - Bludgeon still has the main army and the Warworld, Megatron is still skulking around Earth with Starscream. The logical thing would have been to have Megatron kill Bludgeon here and take command of the army. Grimlock meanwhile gives Optimus the update on the Cybertronian Empire, more or less compacting the events of the first issue into a few frames. Again while weird and not especially good there's nothing outright wrong with the issue in itself.

G2 #3 poster.

Where the title got really weird was when it picked up the US reprints, starting with the third issue. This re-ran "Devices and Desires" from US #4; the main storyline of Grimlock setting out for satisfaction on the Cybertronian Empire is a fair follow-up to the flashback in the previous issue and works alright as an introduction to Jhiaxus for British readers but the strip starts off by covering the apocalyptic visions Prime mentioned in the first issue; not an error per se but certainly redundant. 

G2 #4 cover.

The fourth issue was there things started to really strain - reprinting the first two "Tales of Earth" back-ups from US #4 & 5 (the two-strip format being the eventual solution to Yaniger's tardiness for the American book). The story deals with Bludgeon attacking Earth to draw out Optimus Prime so he can steal the Matrix but instead riling Megatron and getting killed. With naturally absolutely no mention of why he's doing this when he did it an issue ago with broadly similar results, or why he's suddenly hanging with the gang of late-line figures from the tail end of the Marvel comics rather than his new minions seen in the first two British issues. Oh, my. There's not even any attempt to modify the dialogue or anything and to readers at the time without the benefit of knowing the US storyline it must have been baffling and once again renders a key element of the UK original material utterly redundant. It makes you wonder if Fleetway were planning to do more in-house strips and the money ran out or if they simply thought the US material was going to be more episodic than it ended up being and just decided to grasp the nettle.

Apart from it being the end.

Either way the title wasn't grabbing readers and the fifth issue was published with the knowledge it would be the last. The strip was "The Power and the Glory", featuring Optimus Prime's spiritual journey into Cybertron which laid out assexual budding as a means of Transformers reproduction and introduces the Swarm, which at least doesn't create any new continuity errors. The defiant "NEVER THE END!" scrawled on some poor artwork (lifted from the first issue's poster) on the back page wasn't really fooling anyone; a greater legacy was the generous plug for Matt Dallas' nascent Transmasters UK fanclub on the inside front cover - the group's material would continue the story (from the US book, more widely read in the UK than its' eighties counterpart due to the rising ease of importing comics via specialty stores that had sprang up after the success of the likes of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns); among the many talented fan writers and artists affiliated with the group would be James Roberts and Nick Roche.

Issue #1 freebie stickers.

Aside from the strip the format of the comic was a bit of a mess. It featured gatefold covers and centre pages that folded out into two huge posters, allowing it to proclaim itself a Transformer as well, something made more plausible in the aftermath of Action Master Elites while the thing was padded out with profiles and the like heavily drawn from Hasbro material - though whether this was due to the boys at Newport insisting or Fleetway just slapping in free page fillers is a matter of debate. Notable features for the first issue included some appropriately tacky stickers with that gelled perfectly with early G2's brattish aesthetic ("JAZZ BAD COMPANY") and a toy checklist using the local names for the figures (including Sureshot and Archforce, the hurriedly-created identities for Combat Hero Optimus Prime and Megatron as they were released simultaneously with the larger versions, characters being released at the same time at different price points still being some time away as Hasbro didn't yet believe kids would buy two toys of the same character in such a short space of time) and a few exclusives - including the Sparkabot and Firecon repaints only Europe got and the Lightformers Ironfist and Deftwing, still running from the pre-G2 line.

Sideswipe profile from #4.

The second issue featured more cover-mounted stickers, this time with a Dinobot theme to go  with them appearing prominently in "War Zone", a 'board' game in lieu of a poster in the middle and an admittedly very cool competition to win all 47 G2 figures then available in the UK. The third scales it back due to the reprinted strip being longer than the indigenous stuff but had space for a an unimpressive letters page where vague hints were dropped that the cartoon might be shown but more interestingly openly tackled a question on how the UK material would blend with the American reprints; the reply would rapidly be proven to be false but it showed how times had changed since the Marvel UK book had long kept up the fiction that they produced all the material. The fourth issue was less interesting again, with only a vague wink that someone who wasn't Fleetway might be producing an annual (they were; Grandreams' eventual version turning out to be an abomination that deserves a post of its' own). The final issue was so ropey there wasn't even a proper cover, just a frame of internal art which some staffer had taken to with crayons, a poster clearly traced from other internal art and some readers' pictures.

Naturally this doesn't lend itself to the book being much more than a curio for those whose interests in Transformers comics' history is as high as that in the stories themselves. The original issues are rare but not quite as expensive and collectible as you'd think as fans are largely unwilling to spend much on such slipshod material, though the first two issues are one of the few vintage Transformers strips not to be reprinted anywhere else.

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TRANSFORMERS: GENERATION 2 (UK) #1 - 5

TOTAL FILE SIZE: 92.5MB