What is the greatness of Transformers UK?

[kup]

lol, Soundwave with a mouth. That happened spontaneously for about 6 issues. I remember the first time I saw him, it just felt like 'wtf?!? is that Soundwave?!?'
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Buy glass bongs

[Paulbot]

It falls into the same category as Starscream's missing ear. Delbo based his drawings on the models in the Universe series (to the point of basically tracing them sometimes) in which Starscream's other ear can't be seen and Soundwave has a mouth-like squiggle on his face.

That Red Prime cover Gok has is simply a blown up close up of the Powermaster Optimus Prime model art. All up that cover must have taken all of five minutes to prepare. I wonder if there was a rejected original cover (as I believe Hasbro had to approve all the covers back then)?

[GoktimusPrime]

Yeah, Hasbro had to approve everything - I love that story about Simon Furman once writing this completely ridiculous story that completely threw the Transformers universe out of whack and killed off virtually every character just to see if Hasbro was paying attention... and yeah, they rejected the script.

[STL]

Getting back into reading the single comics that I've amassed in my room and got through Time Wars #1 and it was quite cringeworthy. I thought that after the previous set of UK reprints before Time Wars the stories would get better (b/c they were!) but this just continued the massive cringe factor for me that leaves me wondering how the UK comics are held in such high esteem.

Shockwave's shockingly s***tty lines spoiled a lot it for me. Just who speaks out loud in so many words when they're about to be killed? He's directing his every action verbally. Gah.

Then there's the Galvatron/Megatron fight which I was really eager to read thinking it'd be a classic but it was so poorly constructed you'd have thought a kid wrote it. I mean, at the mere mention of Starscream, the two decide to join forces? It's so abrupt and out of nowhere that you're pulled out of the story by its sheer stupidity.

The Scorponok one was pretty lame too. A lot of very lame dialogue. It felt, pun intended, very mechncal.

One of the saving graces I was thinking of was maybe it was a product of its time and as much as I've been a fan of silver age/older styles, the more cinematic/naturalistic modern storytelling is my thing now. Another reason is maybe IDW skipped a few issues inbetween?

[Paulbot]

None of what you've read is actually "Time Wars". It's just prelude stuff from the UK Annuals.

[roller]

the stories are a little better then the US ones

but remember, they both look like they were coloured and drawn by kids in kindy

[Sky Shadow]

So can anyone show me where the greatness is?

Imagine it's 1986, you're Australian and you're nine years old. This is just before the movie (and thus Season Three of the cartoon) has come out. You rock up at a newsagent and instead of the usual Transformers comics there's this new one with painted art that comes with free posters, stickers and sticker books. And - instead of the simplistic stories in the cartoon or the other comic's stories about subjects like a white guy with an afro who claims to control the Transformers - you're reading something completely new. For the first time in any medium we're reading stories about Ultra Magnus and Galvatron. The Autobots are led by Jetfire and Megatron against bad guys who include Scourge and Jazz. On Cybertron there are characters like Roadbuster, Octane and Twin Twist. And all these characters are wrapped in a complex epic story about time travel, Cybertron and Earth that's unlike anything that has *ever* happened in any genre of Transformers before. And in the UK comics it turns out that this sort of thing happens every week.

To this day, 'Target 2006' still ranks amongst the best Transformers stories ever told. (They even just released some toys that were a homage to it.) And then, for years after that first Australian storyline, we went back to the newsagents week after week and picked up yet another well-written chapter in the tapestry of a massive ongoing storyline. Try to find another single Transformers medium that lasted for three hundred or so stories. (I'm pretty sure there isn't one.)

The Wreckers; Transformers changing sides; time travel - that stuff all began here before other continuities. You're looking at this with a hindsight of an extra couple of decades of Transformers history, much of which is just ripping off the stuff Furman did for the franchise anyway. If you don't get it, maybe you had to be there. But it shouldn't be that way. Transformers UK is empirically awesome.

--

Edited due to me being chronologically challenged.

[GoktimusPrime]

Imagine it's 19961986,

Fix'd!
But yeah, I agree - in the context of the 1980s, compared with the Marvel US comics and G1 cartoon, the UK comics were awesomesauce. Transformers Animated by 2008 standards is mediocre at best.

[kup]

I think that they hold up extremely well now. My real exposure to the UK comics (It was US comics as a kid and even so I never got to read most of them) was as an adult I couldn't stop reading them until I had gone through all 300 or so issues.

[GoktimusPrime]

When I was in high school other kids often mocked me for still liking Transformers. For the few kids that cared to actually ask why I still liked Transformers (and actually wanted to know the answer instead of just mindless ridicule) I would tell them about the stories from the UK comics and it would immediately justify my Transfandom in the eyes of others. I remember during one English class I sat down and talked to some of my classmates about Transformers theology (Primus, Unicron* etc. - all spawned from the UK comics). They actually sat and listened intently and some admitted that they were quite fascinated by the story even though they had no personal interest in Transformers.

(*as a god)