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.

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?

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)

Robot Archie

Robot Archie was one of the trademark characters from Lion, one of IPC/Fleetway's longest running weeklies. An invention of Ted Cowan and Ted Kearnon (who would remain on the strip for most of its' duration), Archie appeared in the very first issue as 'The Jungle Robot'. In 1957 he would return in a self-titled strip which would run until 1974, lasting as long as Lion itself, and even after this he would continue to feature in annuals until 1983 (again, as long as the publication, though by the last years he was represented through text stories and reprints of old strips).

The mechanical man was always accompanied on his adventures by Ted Ritchie (nephew of the robot's inventor, Professor C. R. Ritchie) and Ken Dale. Formative years were spent causing massive property damage in various colonial backwaters in the search for lost treasures (where native tribes invariably mistook Archie for a god), before in 1968 Ritchie invented a time-machine, incongruously disguised as a giant chess knight, and the two 'pals' and 'Ol' tinribs' got to cause massive property damage throughout history. Initially, Archie couldn't speak, and was reliant on Ted for directions, but soon a voicebox was added (giving him a wonderfully boastful personality), and with time he was basically independent. He also received upgrades physically, gaining telescopic arms and flame-throwing fingers, amongst other additions. Archie tended to carry a sword as well.

Archie was also a considerable success in Holland, and artist Bert Bus redrew many Archie strips, even adding some of his own. Despite the fact this material recoloured Archie (making him silver; as the flagship character, Lion always had him red when he appeared in colour) and morphed Ted and Ken into Color Climax-era pornstars, these stories were used to represent the character in Vulcan's formidable roster (no doubt due to being in colour), with the Dutch dialogue switched back to English.

The character's iconic nature means he usually gets chunky roles in anything reviving the old Fleetway inventory, and thus he appeared as Acid Archie in Zenith, and getting turned into a killing machine by Bad Penny in Albion. While the latter is something of a perversion, it made for a nice T-shirt transfer... Thankfully 2000AD avoided him for their notorious Action Special, meaning we were robbed of an army of Archies artificially inseminating the Queen, or somesuch shit.

I'd love to have a full-blown section on Archie as the stories I've read have nearly always been fun (especially from about 1967 onwards, where his personality really starts to come to the fore), but the material's so hard to get hold of I couldn't hope to do justice to his two-plus decade career. 

However, here are a few Archie adventures for you to enjoy (nearly all from the annuals, as they're easier to find).

STRIP STORIES: "THE METAL MONSTER", "THE STEEL GIANT", "THE WEIRD WORLD OF X", 1974, 1975 & 1976 LION ANNUALS,
"...AND THE INCA GOLD", "...AND THE INVADERS", "...AND THE POWER CRYSTAL", "...AND THE SHARK MONSTER OF ARUNDA BAY",
"...AND THE Z-RAY", "VOLCANO ISLAND", "ROBOT ARCHIE'S INVENTION".
TEXT STORIES: "OPERATION ARCHIE", "THE MAD MILLIONAIRE", "THE VANISHING PLANES, 1974, 1975 & 1976 LION ANNUALS,
"...AND THE GLOB", "...ON THE ISLAND OF TREACHERY", "THE AMAZING ROBOT ARCHIE"

Total File Size: 67.5MB

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.