Andrew Wildman

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog in two parts here and here.

"[Double] Deal of the Century!" / "Prime's Rib!"
Here we have two small standalone tales. "[Double] Deal of the Century!" introduces Double-Dealer, the Transformer who plays both sides; to be honest, I was thoroughly confused by it because I'm often bad at recognizing Transformers, and that's even harder when they're in black-and-white. "Prime's Rib!" is a random future story, set in 1995 (so about show more halfway between the 1980s "present" and the 2005+ "future") explaining how there can be a girl Transformer in Arcee if Transformers don't have gender. Optimus Prime had her built to appease angry feminists on Earth! Hilarious if you can take it ironically, I guess. But also pretty stupid.

"Starting Over!" / "Two Steps Back!" / "Break-Away!" / "Desert Island Risks!" / "Once upon a Time..." / "Life in the Slow Lane" / "Snow Fun!"
This is a fun set of strips that moves us into the Earthforce format, but also demonstrates its power. First we get a fun adventure where the characters revived in ...Perchance to Dream have to stop Megatron from destroying Earth's atmosphere. Why? I don't know, but it doesn't bother me, nor does the fact that according to the US strip at this time, Megatron can't even be here doing this. It's all worth it for the bits where the characters themselves complain about how gimmicky Transformers has gotten. "Probably some Microheadtargetmaster with a Pretender shell!" And then a fun ending where everyone just charges Megatron. Then we get a fun story about Grimlock versus Shockwave and his minions and then the whole premise is put into place: Optimus delegates Grimlock to run things on Earth.

I know some people love Grimlock, but for me a little bit of Grimlock goes a long way... there's only so much I can read about how he's "different" from the other Autobots. But Earthforce, it turns out, is the exact right amount of Grimlock. Like many loose cannon characters, he's best with a straight man, and here he's essentially got a whole team of them. Some of the stories here are bad silly (e.g., "Desert Island Risks" is improbably contrived) but many of them are good silly; any Transformers story where Grimlock's own Dinobots trick him by building a snowman of Shockwave is my kind of Transformers story. I like the serious, epic, angsty Transformers all right, but I also like the silly stuff that leavens it, and here we get a deliciously concentrated dose of it.

"Mystery!"
An Autobot arrives at the Earthforce base and discovers something terrible has happened to Wheeljack... only to realize it's all an incredibly complicated misunderstanding. Goofy fun.

"The Living Nightlights!"
Dumb, contrived story about Decepticon-made evil toys. Okay, not every "goofy fun" story is a winner... but you know, it's only five pages long at worst!

"The House That Wheeljack Built!" / "Divide and Conquer!" / "The 4,000,000 Year Itch!" / "Makin' Tracks!"
More goofy fun in "The House That Wheeljack Built": Wheeljack shows off the new Earthbase's automated defense systems... only everyone is outside the base, and you can only deactivate them from the inside, meaning everyone has to battle their way in! I also enjoyed "The 4,000,000 Year Itch!", where Optimus comes on an inspection tour at the same time Slag develops one of his periodic compulsions to murder everyone he knows(!), so Grimlock has to distract Optimus in the foreground while the other Dinobots keep subduing Slag in the background. Low farce, surely.

On the other hand, "Makin' Tracks" is similar but didn't work for me. In this case, the dead Tracks is being revived... but Grimlock hates Tracks so much he tries to kill him off again. I feel like this one went a bit too far... also, who the hell is Tracks? I don't even remember this guy or his beef with Grimlock. Plus the small art of these Titan digests made it hard to understand what was going on at the climax.

Transformers and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

An Autobot-Decepticon alliance is always a fragile thing. Somehow, having completely different aims, intergenerational trauma, and a highly militarised culture, it never seems to work for them.

In Furman and Wildman's hands the Transformers went from this cynical toy tie-in to characters you could identify with and root for, even while somehow still off-puttingly stodgy and sexless (I mean, you don't want them to be sexy either, so I guess sexless is fine). This takes us through the search for the Matrix, Unicron, the unexpected return of the series 20 years later to tie up the loose ends that didn't get tied before, and then builds into a perfectly timed "Marvel big event"-style show more epic conflag, with everyone getting their moments and the perfect timing and sense of consequence and careful calibration to avoid brutalizing you that those stories have when they are good. This one is surprisingly great. show less

Now, I don't know what Simon Furman's run on the original Transformers comic was like, but this feels much more like a comic of the 2010s than one of the 1980s, with its bloated, decompressed storyline, and unrelenting grimness. Peace has been declared, Optimus Prime has grown old and depressed, and the Decepticons are plotting their return to power. Say what you will about Marvel's Transformers comics (and I have), but under Bob Budianksy, at least, they were always fun. This story here-- show more where we learn, among other things, that the population of Earth is dead, including most of the human cast of the 1980s comic-- doesn't really capture the spirit of the tales it's supposedly a follow-up to. I'm not opposed to darkness in Transformers; some of the IDW stuff I've read so far gets quite dark, but this is darkness without nuance or interest, the sort of adolescent grimness you get if you watch the first two seasons of Torchwood.

I admit that I'm probably not the target audience for this (I've never read a Simon Furman Transformers comic before, though on the other hand, I do love Kup), but I didn't find much to enjoy here. show less