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?
Cool. Then in 1984-1985 they licenced the Robo Machine characters to Fleetway, who ran a strip in Eagle featuring the characters. This ended in the autumn of 1985, having mirrored the toyline by starting off with a few unusual ideas before gradually becoming more Gobots-influenced. When it ended World Distributors stepped in to pick up the licence; however, they had no real comics influence, instead specialising in storybooks and annuals. World are probably still best known for their Doctor Who Annuals, which were marked by poorly written stories (very few of those doing so seeming to have ever watched the series), art clearly traced from publicity materials and irrelevant factual pages about peripherally-related things like the solar system.
They managed to get a book together in time for the Christmas market in 1985 (all UK annuals carried the date of the following year so unsold stock left in January still looked current); by this time the Challenge of the Gobots cartoon was screening on ITV's Wacaday weekend strand and appearing in rental stores as the country began to go VHS crazy, so it made sense to tie into this popular currently airing cartoon instead of continuing the Fleetway strip and continuity even though I want to kill everyone involved in making that choice. The cartoon's exposure led to various weird and clumsy names on toys and other merchandise as Bandai tried to link their products to the cartoon without junking the established Robo Machine branding, the annuals ending up as Robo Machine featuring the Gobots; the toys meanwhile would labour under the even clunkier Robo Machine featuring the Challenge of the Gobots.
Even by World's standards the resulting product is shoddy; not a single comic strip with all the stories being illustrated text affairs; the art seems to be in-house rather than traced because I'm not aware of Tonka or Hanna-Barbera putting out anything this ugly, though plenty of it is recycled. The actual source of the stories is sketchy. World were never big on crediting their writers and five of the eight text stories were also released on audio cassette by Tempo as The Adventures of the Gobots; given the American narrator it's possible that the recordings were actually the original source and were transcribed to the page and just as possible that audio versions of the other three - "The Rumbling Jungle", "The Exploding Toads of Primus" and "Scooter Strides Out" - are out there somewhere on tapes I don't have.
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