What is the greatness of Transformers UK?

[STL]

Imagine it's 1986, you're Australian and you're nine years old.

I was like two then at most.

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.

I think some of the stuff stands up some of it doesn't. The art definitely does not but having read issue #2 of Time Wars, it was rock solid. Art aside, it was very well written and the dialogue was very good. Perhaps as Paulbot poiinted out those were simply the filler issues that weren't pertinent to the story line. Space Pirates was very cool too. Target 2006 I couldn't get into as the art just ruined it for me. Not very robotic.

I think that with any thing thats written, its whether it can withstand the test of time. Some things stand up in their context and some don't. I think the better TF stories will withstand the test of time while the others will be frowned upon. it's the same for most comics really. Unlike fiction, comics has never withstood the test of time as well. A lot has to do w/ technological advances I'd imagine but yeah, some of the UK stuff has been excellent but some of it is cringeworthy.

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.

Really? Even as a Transformer collector, I'd totally shrug and roll my eyes if this was considered riveting conversation. Unless of course it was a soliloquy.