Simon Furman

Rodimus Prime sees the value in capitalism. But here's a question - given that millions of years of civil war have clearly collapsed Cybertron's economy, where does Prime get the shanix from? Presumably the only commodity the Autobots have is bodies, so are Autobots selling their labour to other species in order to gain foreign currency and access to interplanetary markets. Maybe they rely on donations from sympathisers. Or perhaps there are other species whose governments channel funding to show more them because the Decepticons pose a threat to them too. We should be told. show less

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So far, Marvel UK's The Transformers has been on a nice upward trajectory: that comes to an end with this volume. It does get off to a nice start with the sequence of stories about Rodimus Prime of 2007 hiring a bounty hunter to kill Galvatron, who ends up tracking him to Earth of 1987 ("Wanted: Galvatron, Dead or Alive!"/"Burning Sky!"/"Hunters!"/"Fire on High!"/"Vicious Circle!"). The bounty hunter is Death's Head, who show more will be the character who connects Transformers to Doctor Who Magazine in the long run. You can see why Death's Head went on to get his own spin-off: he's a fun, expressive, dynamic character, and the four-way collision we get here between Death's Head, Galvatron, the Autobots of 1987, and the Autobots of 2007 is kind of explosive stuff Furman excels at. Big, fast-paced action, with enjoyable characters. I liked the IDW Ultra Magnus, and I am quickly coming to appreciate the Marvel UK Ultra Magnus as well, even though he's a very different character. (I am not sure why it is taking him months to locate the Ark, though!)

After that, though, it's a bit of a mix. There's "Ancient Relics!", a crossover with Action Force (the UK equivalent of G. I. Joe) that is mostly just tedious, uninteresting action sequences, with none of Furman's character flare. There's "Worlds Apart!", a really uninteresting tale of some Headmasters on Nebulos, apparently slotting in during an issue of the US Headmasters miniseries that hadn't even been reprinted in the UK mag yet at the time it came out. And there's the UK retelling of the Headmasters series, and what can I say about the Headmaster concept except that I just really really hate it, because it overloads an already overloaded series with uninteresting characters.

But there is some decent stuff here, even if it doesn't rise to the high points of volume three. "Kup's Story" (a flashback of how Kup met Rodimus) is fun, as is "Ark Duty" (a flashback of Kup and Rodimus in the period leading up to Transformers: The Movie). The return of the Dinobots in "Grudge Match" was kind of silly (I liked the Dinobots throwing down the Predacons, but I didn't buy that they would let them off so easy), though I did like the "What's in a Name?" lead-in story that revealed Swoop's secret shame over "losing" his name. The "Ladies' Night" story, uniting three female characters from across the UK run, might have been more successful if the artists here were more skilled at drawing humans, not robots, but it was fine.

I did have to love "Stargazing," where a human boy teaches Starscream-- Starscream!-- the true meaning of Christmas. He thinks he's succeeded, but Starscream just wants to get one up on an Autobot.

And Death's Head reappears in "Headhunt," which gives us our first glimpse of a 21st-century storyline not tied to the 20th-century one. I am curious to see how that is going forward, and how Furman pulls all the strands-- of which there are a lot at this point-- together. But this volume itself felt more like a chore than any previous one.

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This volume opens with its biggest story. "The Legacy of Unicron!" is an epic entirely set in the future timeline (though the future characters are battling over a time portal, so it is about a threat to the present day, even if we never actually go there. Like a lot of Furman's epics, it's a pile-up of conflicting factions and motivations: the Autobots, the Decepticons, Death's Head, and Unicron all have their own aims, show more and alliances shift throughout. It's a thing he's got quite good at by this point, and this is no exception. I don't think it's the best of these, but it is the kind of thing I enjoy-- and the kind of thing I wish I'd read when I was fourteen, because I would have enjoyed it even more then.

Notably, this story features my whole excuse for reading these Transformers stories as part of a Doctor Who Magazine comics marathon: at its climax, Death's Head falls into a time portal and disappears. He will never again appear in a Transformers story, but the next installment on my list will reveal where he went... (Cyclonus and Scourge are sent back in time, explaining how come in the UK stories they are created by Galvatron in the year 2006, but in the US stories they work for Scorponock in the 1980s. I'll be honest: I hadn't noticed. The way Furman handles it, it even makes sense that it hadn't previously come up that they were from the future.)

After that, we're back to the present day, with stories that do the usual Transformers UK thing of weaving in and out of US tales. A few focus on Galvatron manipulating the Decepticons; others let us know what is happening on Cybertron. I mostly enjoyed these. These are some of the better Galvatron stories-- when he has BIG PLANS you know they are going to fail because otherwise the universe is doomed, but when his plans are smaller scale, he can demonstrate his intelligence and cunning by outmaneuvering Shockwave.

We also have undead zombies on Cybertron, which is fun stuff, though alas, the Wrecker leader Springer is often improbably indecisive. But it's nice to see Ultra Magnus cut loose, even if he somehow wasn't able to find the Ark in two years(!) of traveling across America. And then he's back to Earth for a showdown with Galvatron, building up to something bigger. (That evidently never actually happened!)

We also have a couple stories from the 1989 Annual. I will admit I zoned out during "Prime Bomb!" (Ian Rimmer is not a great prose stylist, I guess), but I did enjoy Richard Starkings and Robin Smith's "Peace," set in the far future, when the Autobots have finally won... and are so used to war that peace only lasts a day before hostilities restart. It's mind-boggling to contemplate, but the Transformers have been at war for four million years. How could they ever adjust to peace after that? It's a theme that James Roberts and John Barber took up to good effect in their IDW runs, but it's nice to see a bleaker take on it here.

My big complaint about this volume is not really its fault per se: it's the last one! In his editorial notes, James Roberts often mentions the forthcoming volume six, but seven years later, it has never come to pass. I am sure there are valid financial reasons for this, but it's depressing; this was a high quality reprint series, and the UK stories are pretty tricky to access otherwise. Titan did collect many of them, and I will track those down eventually, but these were beautiful volumes and Roberts's interviews and commentary were amazing.

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Each volume of Transformers Classics UK is more confident and more distinct than the last; it's hard to believe that these stories overlap with what I think was one of the less interesting periods of the US title. Imagine going from battling Galvatron to save the timeline in "Target: 2006" to the Bob Budiansky story where the Decepticons' big threat is painting graffiti on the Washington Monument.

Mostly this volume contains show more two big epics. The first is "Target: 2006," where Galvatron and his minions travel back in time from 2006, during the events of The Transformers: The Movie. Galvatron, feeling stymied by Unicron's control, plans to build a giant gun and bury it, so that he can return to the future and defeat Unicron. Because of that, Optimus Prime vanishes (if you jump back in time, you dimensionally displace an equivalent amount of mass) and so Ultra Magnus makes a risky spacebridge jump from Cybertron to Earth to find out what happened to him. And because of that, a mission Magnus is supposed to go on with the Wreckers to unite the Autobot resistance on Cybertron is put in danger. So we follow these three parallel threads of Galvatron, Ultra Magnus, and the Wreckers. Furman has continued to grow as a writer, and here he weaves it all together expertly. The time travel stuff is kind of nonsense (like, wouldn't the Autobots have two decades to disable Galvatron's cannon once he returns to 2006?) but it's glorious all the same. I enjoyed this now, but I wish I'd read it back in high school when I was eating up Transformers temporal machinations on Beast Wars and Beast Machines; this is more of the same, and back then I would have found it the pinnacle of epic storytelling. The way Galvatron is portrayed as a fundamentally unbeatable bad guy is neat, and the way the Autobots ultimately foil his plan is a clever one.

Furman does have this one storytelling tic that is clever but I don't like. Each issue usually incorporates some recap of the previous, which makes sense, but reading them back to back, I usually skim those a little bit... except that so these recaps aren't pointless, he usually folds in new information, bridging the gap between the previous installment and the current one. So, if you are skimming the recaps, you quickly get confused when you miss the new information! No matter how often it happens, I keep skimming and having to jump back and reread the recap once I get confused about something.

I also really enjoyed the sequence of linked stories that finishes out the volume: "Prey!", "...The Harder They Die!", "Under Fire!", "Distant Thunder!", "Fallen Angel," and "Resurrection!" Through a series of convoluted machinations, Optimus and Megatron end up on Cybertron. Megatron has to answer to Lord Straxus, who has taken over the Decepticons in his long absence; Optimus has to go on the run from his own people when a Decepticon misinformation campaign convinces the Autobots he's an impostor. Seeing the two match wits is fun, and Optimus gets some of his best material of the whole UK run, as he teams up with Outback, the only Autobot who believes him, a pessimist who believes he's doomed. I really liked this guy, and am disappointed I haven't seen him elsewhere that I remember. The way Optimus ultimately proves himself to the Autobots is great, too.

Both of these stories have a broader canvas, with bigger gaps between US tales than earlier in the run, and they really use that to their advantage, weaving together a number of subplots into a coherent whole. They also pop a bit because they introduce original characters not being used in the US stories, such as Ultra Magnus and the Wreckers, which allows them to not be constrained in character development. I always liked Magnus in More than Meets the Eye and Lost Light, and his first comics incarnation here is almost as good, a determined but overly single-minded warrior; the Wreckers are always good fun.

The James Hill story might be out of order, but I did like the existential angst of Jetfire, who feels out of place as the first Earth-born Autobot.

Plus some comedy strips from Lew Stringer, who thirty-five years later is still working for Marvel UK's successor Panini, drawing strips for Doctor Who Magazine! What's not to love?

It's interesting, reading these in parallel with DWM prior to when they will converge in the seventh Doctor era. (I'm not reading them in publication sequence; I thought about it, but since Transformers UK put out so much content so quickly, I would have been reading two or three Transformers volumes in a row between Doctor Who ones, which didn't appeal.) There's not really a distinctive style: the approach of Voyager and "Target: 2006" is nothing alike. But what does shine through is that in both cases, the Marvel UK comics chart their own course, taking the ingredients of the parent series but remixing them to do something all their own. Voyager is nothing like Colin Baker's tv adventures; "Target: 2006" is nothing like Bob Budiansky's Transformers. But that's what makes these series sing.

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