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Comics Reading Club: Zob's Thoughts on Marvel Comics THE TRANSFORMERS #43
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Zobovor
Jan 15, 2024, 6:51:14 PM1/15/24
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THE TRANSFORMERS issue #43 is the first and last adaptation of a story from the Sunbow television series. It's entitled "The Big Broadcast of 2006," just like the 1986 third-season cartoon episode of the same name, and it was most likely a filler issue to allow Bob Budiansky to prepare for the planned second volume of TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE. That second collection never materialized as such, but Bob got to take a month off writing the monthly comic anyway! (Many of the issues he wrote would eventually appear in the back pages of the comic book, so his work didn't completely go to waste.)
The issue was printed on April 26, 1988, with a pull date of August 1988. As a frame of reference, the cartoon episode in question first aired on November 12, 1986, so the story was about seventeen months old by this point. Audiences had seen it on television a full year and a half prior to this issue being printed. Given that the third season of the show featured toys from 1985 and 1986, this issue was hardly a star vehicle for Hasbro's contemporary product line. Perhaps the nicest thing that can be said is that it did, at least, feature toys in the comic like Ultra Magnus and Wreck-Gar that Bob Budiansky steadfastly refused to incorporate into the regular comic book. Given that THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE already existed as a Marvel comic book adaptation, this issue works best as a sequel to that story, a follow-up to the "one possible future" exploits of the characters from the far-flung year 2005.
Almost our entire regular group of creators was supplanted for this issue. Ralpha Macchio, who previously did the Transformers: the Movie adaptation, wrote the adaptation for this story (it's based on a TV script by Michael Reaves, who didn't receive a credit in the comic adaptation). The pencils were by Alan Kupperberg (he had previously drawn TRANSFORMERS issues #5 and #6), and the inks were by Dave Elliott (not an especially prolific artist with very few other works to his name). Kurt Hathaway did the lettering (he had a long run on Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic Book for Marvel). Nel Yomtov is the only regular artist who remained on this issue, to color the artwork.
Herb Trimpe illustrated the front cover, but it's a fairly ugly rendition of Rodimus Prime and Galvatron fighting as rocks crumble all around them. Galvatron has disturbingly beady eyes, and he's missing the equipment on his back as well as his arm cannon. Rodimus is likewise missing the spoiler on his back, and for some reason he's wearing Princess Leia cinnamon buns on his head. I always thought that the cover art was supposed to entice potential readers and convince them to pick up the comic from the newsstands. But this is such a terrible piece of art.
What's especially strange is how this is not a strict retelling of the cartoon episode, but deviates from the original story in ways both minor and significant.
As the story opens, Sharkticons have been sent to planet Junkion to recover an artifact for the Quintessons. On Junkion, the group leader Wreck-Gar and his unnamed "lady friend" (she's called Nancy in the episode script) are watching television, as Junkions often do, when the Sharkticons manage to uncover a canister, which alerts the Junkions to their presence. "WRONK WRONK!" and "SNART SNART!" and "BNORT BNORT!" and "WRENK WRENK!" are the sounds the Sharkticons make, because why not. The Junkion retribution is swift and effective, forcing the Sharkticons to flee. Up in orbit are the five-faced Quintessons, who are described as the former rulers of Cybertron before being driven into exile. Obviously, this is a contention from the cartoon series that has NO place in Marvel Comics, and is completely irreconcilable with every other issue of the comic book. (In their TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE, the Quintessons are described as servants of Unicron, who hunted down anyone who escaped his wrath. While the cartoon revealed they were the creators of the Transformers, and therefore quite important to the mythos as a whole, the comic book largely ignored them, though they did appear in some of Simon Furman's issues written for UK audiences.)
The Quintessons dismiss the Junkions as a "herd of morons" who realize the Junkions fiercely defend their native planet, despite being made of worthless garbage. This is, at least, consistent with the reason why Wreck-Gar declared, "Stop, thief!" in THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE and attacked the Autobots after their shuttle crashed on Junkion and attempted to make repairs using the garbage on-hand. The Quintessons realize more subtlety will be required if they want to recover their lost canister. The Junkions are summoned by a signal from their television set-up. "Trust me, I know what I'm doing," one of them quips, the second such reference to Sledge Hammer! in this comic book. The Quintessons insert hypnotic commands into the broadcast signal, essentially making the Junkions their unwitting slaves. (It seems like there were a lot of stories in the 1980's about television enslaving the masses. I'm sure it was meant as a meta-commentary on the state of society. If this story had been written today, the Quintessons would have used TikTok.)
The Quintesson subliminal feed interrupts a movie called Crambo (a thinly-veiled Rambo satire, whose mission is to "protect Earth from the deadly slime molds of Beta Hydra II") and they instruct the Junkions to treat all other life forms as their enemies. In the cartoon version, Sky Lynx and Astrotrain get into a skirmish in space when they're bombarded by weaponsfire from Junkion. In this version, we just skip to Sky Lynx reporting to Rodimus Prime and Ultra Magnus that the Junkions have gone nutzoid. (The dialogue from the cartoon also wasn't transcribed accurately. Ultra Magnus says something about how "this new hypergenerator will restore power to the entire seventh grid power" which is utter nonsense. "Seventh grid sector" is what he was supposed to say.)
Elsewhere on planet Chaar, Astrotrain makes a similar report to Galvatron, but the Decepticon leader doesn't want to hear it. The cartoon had firmly established that Galvatron's mind had been damaged and that he was unstable and chaotic. If you take the comic book as a separate entity, then we have no idea why Galvatron is so dismissive of Astrotrain's report. The contention from the cartoon that Galvatron had his crazy moments, and that Cyclonus was occasionally required to take action on behalf of the Decepticons when Galvatron refused to do so—that story component is completely missing here.
The Junkions have been programmed to clean up Junkion, and while they're busy organizing, they come across the Quintesson journal. The Quintessons disguise their ship so that they can move in and reclaim their prize. When the Aerialbots arrive over Junkion, the Quintessons initiate an attack before their camouflage is discovered. The Aerialbots are described in narration as managing to form a "semi-Superion mode," but the artwork just shows Silverbolt's jet mode overlapping Air Raid's jet mode. After fully combining, Superion attempts and fails to disable the Quintesson ship, and Sky Lynx is required to carry his limp form away. The Quintessons realize the damage to their ship is causing them to send the wrong signal ("to care is to share... to share is to care") and the Junkions interpret this by redirecting a satellite receiver to retransmit the signal throughout the galaxy to all other life forms. It affects random dog-aliens, it affects humans. Even the Decepticons are not immune, as Galvatron's bubbling pool acts as a television and he, too, receives the message to travel to Junkion.
Soon, Junkion is surrounded by alien ships from all over the galaxy. (The joke from the cartoon where Wreck-Gar sings the "Star Wars" theme as performed by Bill Murray in Saturday Night Live, only he replaces the lyrics with "Laser Wars... nothing but Laser Wars!" for trademark reasons is corrected here. Marvel had the rights to publish Star Wars comics, so it was a nice bit of serendipity.)
I get that this is a filler issue, and was probably produced on a tight schedule, but there are so many sloppy artwork mistakes. When Omega Supreme arrives on Junkion, the dialogue balloon saying "The Autobots—here? This is indeed the promised land!" is attributed to Omega Supreme instead of Galvatron. When Rodimus Prime and Galvatron square off, and Rodimus quips, "A scrapyard... an appropriate place for you to meet your end, Galvatron!" it's Cyclonus who is drawn responding, "You're the one who will be junk, Rodimus Prime!" Also, a new line of Rodimus dialogue is added: "I've defeated you before, Galvatron, when we fought in the machineworld, Unicron! And I can do it again!" suggesting that this is literally the first time Rodimus and Galvatron have met since The Transformers: the Movie, evidently ignoring the other twenty-one other cartoon episodes that took place between the movie and this one that DIDN'T receive Marvel Comics adaptations.
The Quintessons have targeted their canister with a magnetic tractor beam, but as Rodimus and Galvatron fight, a stray blast hits the Quintesson ship and releases their grip on the Quintesson journal, and it goes tumbling into space. Ultra Magnus and Blaster realize they need to shut down the hypnotic signal. Blaster is drawn in his Sunbow animation model style, not the more Hasbro toy-based look that Marvel Comics tended to favor. (This also happened in the G.I. JOE AND THE TRANSFORMERS mini-series. Blaster is also speaking in verse, like rhyming song lyrics, a character trait from the cartoon that was never really part of the Marvel story.) One additional point of interest is that Magnus and Blaster spot Omega Supreme fighting one of the Sweeps, which is another oddity for Marvel since the Sweep troopers were largely ignored in the Marvel continuity. (This issue actually says Omega Supreme is "engaged in battle with Sweeps," suggesting Sweeps is the name of a single character.)
Omega Supreme flies overhead with Blaster in radio mode, and his music seems to undo the hypnotic effect. Galvatron recovers, but he takes the time to add, "However, that doesn't mean I don't really hate you, Rodimus. I do!" Well, actually, it's Kup wearing a Galvatron mask who says this. That's what the artwork seems to indicate, anyway. We see the other Decepticons standing nearby, and Galvatron is present among them, wearing his arm cannon on his back for some reason. Ugh, so many art mistakes.
In the aftermath, the Autobots have no idea what happened, and the Junkions are also clueless. The Quintessons realize their journal is still tumbling into space, and the information it contains could potentially ruin them if anyone learns what's inside it. It's an incredibly unsatisfying resolution to what was not originally intended as a one-part story. The contents of the canister were revealed in the episode "The Quintesson Journal," but that story was never adapted by Marvel Comics, making this story, essentially, a teaser that never goes anywhere. Within the context of the comic, we never actually find out what the canister is, or why it's so important. A fully self-contained story would have made a much better adaptation!
Also, speaking strictly from a marketing standpoint, all the characters featured in this issue were no longer being produced as toys. If the true purpose of the cartoon and comic book was to get kids to buy Transformers toys, then it made little sense to feature characters like Rodimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, the Sharkticons, etc. who were no longer in toy stores by 1988. Even if this issue made you really want to own Rodimus or Galvatron (for some reason), you were already out of luck.
Curiously, this wasn't the only cartoon episode planned for a Marvel Comics adaptation. Work was done, at one point, on adapting the cartoon story "The Dweller in the Depths" for a Marvel issue, but work on the issue was halted for some reason (perhaps due to the lackluster response to this issue!) and the issue was never completed. We didn't even know about this at all until Marvel inker Dave Hunt was selling off some completed pages in 2015.
The letters page for this issue includes the answers for the Bot Roster content from issue #41, identifying all the characters present in that group scene.
This is part two of a trilogy, of sorts, with the third and final story that takes place in the future being issue #67, "Rhythms of Darkness," under Simon Furman. That story's setting is in 2009, and shows us a rather grisly fate for Rodimus Prime and most of the Autobots!
This issue was fully rejected by the UK continuity, framed as a fictional story told by Wreck-Gar while being interrogated by the Quintessons. The Quintessons themselves balk at the story as being filled with "absurdities and contradictions" (accurate) and finally dismiss it as a "children's story" (also accurate). It's clearly a meta-commentary by Simon Furman, using the Quintesson character as a mouthpiece to express his distate for the cartoon adaptation. The way the story is framed in the United Kingdom reprinting is arguably the best thing about this issue!
Next month it's back to the normal Marvel continuity, with promises of the "Cosmic Carnival" (honestly not a favorite issue of mine, but we have to get through it to get to the good stuff).
Zob (seriously, I would have been fine without this issue entirely)
The issue was printed on April 26, 1988, with a pull date of August 1988. As a frame of reference, the cartoon episode in question first aired on November 12, 1986, so the story was about seventeen months old by this point. Audiences had seen it on television a full year and a half prior to this issue being printed. Given that the third season of the show featured toys from 1985 and 1986, this issue was hardly a star vehicle for Hasbro's contemporary product line. Perhaps the nicest thing that can be said is that it did, at least, feature toys in the comic like Ultra Magnus and Wreck-Gar that Bob Budiansky steadfastly refused to incorporate into the regular comic book. Given that THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE already existed as a Marvel comic book adaptation, this issue works best as a sequel to that story, a follow-up to the "one possible future" exploits of the characters from the far-flung year 2005.
Almost our entire regular group of creators was supplanted for this issue. Ralpha Macchio, who previously did the Transformers: the Movie adaptation, wrote the adaptation for this story (it's based on a TV script by Michael Reaves, who didn't receive a credit in the comic adaptation). The pencils were by Alan Kupperberg (he had previously drawn TRANSFORMERS issues #5 and #6), and the inks were by Dave Elliott (not an especially prolific artist with very few other works to his name). Kurt Hathaway did the lettering (he had a long run on Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic Book for Marvel). Nel Yomtov is the only regular artist who remained on this issue, to color the artwork.
Herb Trimpe illustrated the front cover, but it's a fairly ugly rendition of Rodimus Prime and Galvatron fighting as rocks crumble all around them. Galvatron has disturbingly beady eyes, and he's missing the equipment on his back as well as his arm cannon. Rodimus is likewise missing the spoiler on his back, and for some reason he's wearing Princess Leia cinnamon buns on his head. I always thought that the cover art was supposed to entice potential readers and convince them to pick up the comic from the newsstands. But this is such a terrible piece of art.
What's especially strange is how this is not a strict retelling of the cartoon episode, but deviates from the original story in ways both minor and significant.
As the story opens, Sharkticons have been sent to planet Junkion to recover an artifact for the Quintessons. On Junkion, the group leader Wreck-Gar and his unnamed "lady friend" (she's called Nancy in the episode script) are watching television, as Junkions often do, when the Sharkticons manage to uncover a canister, which alerts the Junkions to their presence. "WRONK WRONK!" and "SNART SNART!" and "BNORT BNORT!" and "WRENK WRENK!" are the sounds the Sharkticons make, because why not. The Junkion retribution is swift and effective, forcing the Sharkticons to flee. Up in orbit are the five-faced Quintessons, who are described as the former rulers of Cybertron before being driven into exile. Obviously, this is a contention from the cartoon series that has NO place in Marvel Comics, and is completely irreconcilable with every other issue of the comic book. (In their TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE, the Quintessons are described as servants of Unicron, who hunted down anyone who escaped his wrath. While the cartoon revealed they were the creators of the Transformers, and therefore quite important to the mythos as a whole, the comic book largely ignored them, though they did appear in some of Simon Furman's issues written for UK audiences.)
The Quintessons dismiss the Junkions as a "herd of morons" who realize the Junkions fiercely defend their native planet, despite being made of worthless garbage. This is, at least, consistent with the reason why Wreck-Gar declared, "Stop, thief!" in THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE and attacked the Autobots after their shuttle crashed on Junkion and attempted to make repairs using the garbage on-hand. The Quintessons realize more subtlety will be required if they want to recover their lost canister. The Junkions are summoned by a signal from their television set-up. "Trust me, I know what I'm doing," one of them quips, the second such reference to Sledge Hammer! in this comic book. The Quintessons insert hypnotic commands into the broadcast signal, essentially making the Junkions their unwitting slaves. (It seems like there were a lot of stories in the 1980's about television enslaving the masses. I'm sure it was meant as a meta-commentary on the state of society. If this story had been written today, the Quintessons would have used TikTok.)
The Quintesson subliminal feed interrupts a movie called Crambo (a thinly-veiled Rambo satire, whose mission is to "protect Earth from the deadly slime molds of Beta Hydra II") and they instruct the Junkions to treat all other life forms as their enemies. In the cartoon version, Sky Lynx and Astrotrain get into a skirmish in space when they're bombarded by weaponsfire from Junkion. In this version, we just skip to Sky Lynx reporting to Rodimus Prime and Ultra Magnus that the Junkions have gone nutzoid. (The dialogue from the cartoon also wasn't transcribed accurately. Ultra Magnus says something about how "this new hypergenerator will restore power to the entire seventh grid power" which is utter nonsense. "Seventh grid sector" is what he was supposed to say.)
Elsewhere on planet Chaar, Astrotrain makes a similar report to Galvatron, but the Decepticon leader doesn't want to hear it. The cartoon had firmly established that Galvatron's mind had been damaged and that he was unstable and chaotic. If you take the comic book as a separate entity, then we have no idea why Galvatron is so dismissive of Astrotrain's report. The contention from the cartoon that Galvatron had his crazy moments, and that Cyclonus was occasionally required to take action on behalf of the Decepticons when Galvatron refused to do so—that story component is completely missing here.
The Junkions have been programmed to clean up Junkion, and while they're busy organizing, they come across the Quintesson journal. The Quintessons disguise their ship so that they can move in and reclaim their prize. When the Aerialbots arrive over Junkion, the Quintessons initiate an attack before their camouflage is discovered. The Aerialbots are described in narration as managing to form a "semi-Superion mode," but the artwork just shows Silverbolt's jet mode overlapping Air Raid's jet mode. After fully combining, Superion attempts and fails to disable the Quintesson ship, and Sky Lynx is required to carry his limp form away. The Quintessons realize the damage to their ship is causing them to send the wrong signal ("to care is to share... to share is to care") and the Junkions interpret this by redirecting a satellite receiver to retransmit the signal throughout the galaxy to all other life forms. It affects random dog-aliens, it affects humans. Even the Decepticons are not immune, as Galvatron's bubbling pool acts as a television and he, too, receives the message to travel to Junkion.
Soon, Junkion is surrounded by alien ships from all over the galaxy. (The joke from the cartoon where Wreck-Gar sings the "Star Wars" theme as performed by Bill Murray in Saturday Night Live, only he replaces the lyrics with "Laser Wars... nothing but Laser Wars!" for trademark reasons is corrected here. Marvel had the rights to publish Star Wars comics, so it was a nice bit of serendipity.)
I get that this is a filler issue, and was probably produced on a tight schedule, but there are so many sloppy artwork mistakes. When Omega Supreme arrives on Junkion, the dialogue balloon saying "The Autobots—here? This is indeed the promised land!" is attributed to Omega Supreme instead of Galvatron. When Rodimus Prime and Galvatron square off, and Rodimus quips, "A scrapyard... an appropriate place for you to meet your end, Galvatron!" it's Cyclonus who is drawn responding, "You're the one who will be junk, Rodimus Prime!" Also, a new line of Rodimus dialogue is added: "I've defeated you before, Galvatron, when we fought in the machineworld, Unicron! And I can do it again!" suggesting that this is literally the first time Rodimus and Galvatron have met since The Transformers: the Movie, evidently ignoring the other twenty-one other cartoon episodes that took place between the movie and this one that DIDN'T receive Marvel Comics adaptations.
The Quintessons have targeted their canister with a magnetic tractor beam, but as Rodimus and Galvatron fight, a stray blast hits the Quintesson ship and releases their grip on the Quintesson journal, and it goes tumbling into space. Ultra Magnus and Blaster realize they need to shut down the hypnotic signal. Blaster is drawn in his Sunbow animation model style, not the more Hasbro toy-based look that Marvel Comics tended to favor. (This also happened in the G.I. JOE AND THE TRANSFORMERS mini-series. Blaster is also speaking in verse, like rhyming song lyrics, a character trait from the cartoon that was never really part of the Marvel story.) One additional point of interest is that Magnus and Blaster spot Omega Supreme fighting one of the Sweeps, which is another oddity for Marvel since the Sweep troopers were largely ignored in the Marvel continuity. (This issue actually says Omega Supreme is "engaged in battle with Sweeps," suggesting Sweeps is the name of a single character.)
Omega Supreme flies overhead with Blaster in radio mode, and his music seems to undo the hypnotic effect. Galvatron recovers, but he takes the time to add, "However, that doesn't mean I don't really hate you, Rodimus. I do!" Well, actually, it's Kup wearing a Galvatron mask who says this. That's what the artwork seems to indicate, anyway. We see the other Decepticons standing nearby, and Galvatron is present among them, wearing his arm cannon on his back for some reason. Ugh, so many art mistakes.
In the aftermath, the Autobots have no idea what happened, and the Junkions are also clueless. The Quintessons realize their journal is still tumbling into space, and the information it contains could potentially ruin them if anyone learns what's inside it. It's an incredibly unsatisfying resolution to what was not originally intended as a one-part story. The contents of the canister were revealed in the episode "The Quintesson Journal," but that story was never adapted by Marvel Comics, making this story, essentially, a teaser that never goes anywhere. Within the context of the comic, we never actually find out what the canister is, or why it's so important. A fully self-contained story would have made a much better adaptation!
Also, speaking strictly from a marketing standpoint, all the characters featured in this issue were no longer being produced as toys. If the true purpose of the cartoon and comic book was to get kids to buy Transformers toys, then it made little sense to feature characters like Rodimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, the Sharkticons, etc. who were no longer in toy stores by 1988. Even if this issue made you really want to own Rodimus or Galvatron (for some reason), you were already out of luck.
Curiously, this wasn't the only cartoon episode planned for a Marvel Comics adaptation. Work was done, at one point, on adapting the cartoon story "The Dweller in the Depths" for a Marvel issue, but work on the issue was halted for some reason (perhaps due to the lackluster response to this issue!) and the issue was never completed. We didn't even know about this at all until Marvel inker Dave Hunt was selling off some completed pages in 2015.
The letters page for this issue includes the answers for the Bot Roster content from issue #41, identifying all the characters present in that group scene.
This is part two of a trilogy, of sorts, with the third and final story that takes place in the future being issue #67, "Rhythms of Darkness," under Simon Furman. That story's setting is in 2009, and shows us a rather grisly fate for Rodimus Prime and most of the Autobots!
This issue was fully rejected by the UK continuity, framed as a fictional story told by Wreck-Gar while being interrogated by the Quintessons. The Quintessons themselves balk at the story as being filled with "absurdities and contradictions" (accurate) and finally dismiss it as a "children's story" (also accurate). It's clearly a meta-commentary by Simon Furman, using the Quintesson character as a mouthpiece to express his distate for the cartoon adaptation. The way the story is framed in the United Kingdom reprinting is arguably the best thing about this issue!
Next month it's back to the normal Marvel continuity, with promises of the "Cosmic Carnival" (honestly not a favorite issue of mine, but we have to get through it to get to the good stuff).
Zob (seriously, I would have been fine without this issue entirely)
Optim
Jan 22, 2024, 1:09:36 AM1/22/24
to
On Monday, January 15, 2024 at 6:51:14 p.m. UTC-5, Zobovor wrote:
> THE TRANSFORMERS issue #43 is the first and last adaptation of a story from the Sunbow television series. It's entitled "The Big Broadcast of 2006," just like the 1986 third-season cartoon episode of the same name, and it was most likely a filler issue to allow Bob Budiansky to prepare for the planned second volume of TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE. That second collection never materialized as such, but Bob got to take a month off writing the monthly comic anyway! (Many of the issues he wrote would eventually appear in the back pages of the comic book, so his work didn't completely go to waste.)
It is a shame that there was never a sequel to the Transformers Universe. I read and reread the Universe profiles so many times such that the comics fell apart. I read the Universe profiles more often than I read the Marvel comics or cartoon episodes. Those profiles slotted to the back pages of the comics were extremely inconvenient. Whoever wrote them was not as good as Budiansky. I'm surprised that, by 2024, no one still has not collected those back page profiles into a single book and filled in missing characters like Scorponok.
> THE TRANSFORMERS issue #43 is the first and last adaptation of a story from the Sunbow television series. It's entitled "The Big Broadcast of 2006," just like the 1986 third-season cartoon episode of the same name, and it was most likely a filler issue to allow Bob Budiansky to prepare for the planned second volume of TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE. That second collection never materialized as such, but Bob got to take a month off writing the monthly comic anyway! (Many of the issues he wrote would eventually appear in the back pages of the comic book, so his work didn't completely go to waste.)
> The issue was printed on April 26, 1988, with a pull date of August 1988. As a frame of reference, the cartoon episode in question first aired on November 12, 1986, so the story was about seventeen months old by this point. Audiences had seen it on television a full year and a half prior to this issue being printed. Given that the third season of the show featured toys from 1985 and 1986, this issue was hardly a star vehicle for Hasbro's contemporary product line. Perhaps the nicest thing that can be said is that it did, at least, feature toys in the comic like Ultra Magnus and Wreck-Gar that Bob Budiansky steadfastly refused to incorporate into the regular comic book. Given that THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE already existed as a Marvel comic book adaptation, this issue works best as a sequel to that story, a follow-up to the "one possible future" exploits of the characters from the far-flung year 2005.
> Herb Trimpe illustrated the front cover, but it's a fairly ugly rendition of Rodimus Prime and Galvatron fighting as rocks crumble all around them. Galvatron has disturbingly beady eyes, and he's missing the equipment on his back as well as his arm cannon. Rodimus is likewise missing the spoiler on his back, and for some reason he's wearing Princess Leia cinnamon buns on his head. I always thought that the cover art was supposed to entice potential readers and convince them to pick up the comic from the newsstands. But this is such a terrible piece of art.
> The Quintessons dismiss the Junkions as a "herd of morons" who realize the Junkions fiercely defend their native planet, despite being made of worthless garbage. This is, at least, consistent with the reason why Wreck-Gar declared, "Stop, thief!" in THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE and attacked the Autobots after their shuttle crashed on Junkion and attempted to make repairs using the garbage on-hand. The Quintessons realize more subtlety will be required if they want to recover their lost canister. The Junkions are summoned by a signal from their television set-up. "Trust me, I know what I'm doing," one of them quips, the second such reference to Sledge Hammer! in this comic book. The Quintessons insert hypnotic commands into the broadcast signal, essentially making the Junkions their unwitting slaves. (It seems like there were a lot of stories in the 1980's about television enslaving the masses. I'm sure it was meant as a meta-commentary on the state of society. If this story had been written today, the Quintessons would have used TikTok.)
> I get that this is a filler issue, and was probably produced on a tight schedule, but there are so many sloppy artwork mistakes. When Omega Supreme arrives on Junkion, the dialogue balloon saying "The Autobots—here? This is indeed the promised land!" is attributed to Omega Supreme instead of Galvatron. When Rodimus Prime and Galvatron square off, and Rodimus quips, "A scrapyard... an appropriate place for you to meet your end, Galvatron!" it's Cyclonus who is drawn responding, "You're the one who will be junk, Rodimus Prime!" Also, a new line of Rodimus dialogue is added: "I've defeated you before, Galvatron, when we fought in the machineworld, Unicron! And I can do it again!" suggesting that this is literally the first time Rodimus and Galvatron have met since The Transformers: the Movie, evidently ignoring the other twenty-one other cartoon episodes that took place between the movie and this one that DIDN'T receive Marvel Comics adaptations.
Maybe that's why the decision makers behind the Marvel Comics picked this episode to adapt: they wanted an episode in which they fought and it was only this episode.
> In the aftermath, the Autobots have no idea what happened, and the Junkions are also clueless. The Quintessons realize their journal is still tumbling into space, and the information it contains could potentially ruin them if anyone learns what's inside it. It's an incredibly unsatisfying resolution to what was not originally intended as a one-part story. The contents of the canister were revealed in the episode "The Quintesson Journal," but that story was never adapted by Marvel Comics, making this story, essentially, a teaser that never goes anywhere. Within the context of the comic, we never actually find out what the canister is, or why it's so important. A fully self-contained story would have made a much better adaptation!
> Also, speaking strictly from a marketing standpoint, all the characters featured in this issue were no longer being produced as toys. If the true purpose of the cartoon and comic book was to get kids to buy Transformers toys, then it made little sense to feature characters like Rodimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, the Sharkticons, etc. who were no longer in toy stores by 1988. Even if this issue made you really want to own Rodimus or Galvatron (for some reason), you were already out of luck.
Unlike the two UK filler issues, they went to the trouble of getting a writer and artist to do this filler. Why not just pick a current character to write about and call it a day like they did with Marvel TF #16? I would like to know why the decision-makers decided to adapt a year-old episode and why they picked this one.
> Curiously, this wasn't the only cartoon episode planned for a Marvel Comics adaptation. Work was done, at one point, on adapting the cartoon story "The Dweller in the Depths" for a Marvel issue, but work on the issue was halted for some reason (perhaps due to the lackluster response to this issue!) and the issue was never completed. We didn't even know about this at all until Marvel inker Dave Hunt was selling off some completed pages in 2015.
> Zob (seriously, I would have been fine without this issue entirely)
CodigoPostal
Jan 22, 2024, 10:17:12 AM1/22/24
to
This is a great point that never occurred to me; of all the S3 episodes, why did they choose this one to adapt? Rodimus vs Galvatron makes the most sense (see also, what was the thought process behind the selection of certain episodes for the G2 treatment).
Also, not knowing anything about the legal maneuvering behind-the-scenes, I wonder why they didn't just run pure adaptations of select cartoon episodes, with cartoon-style art, as comics in parallel with the main series? They did an adaptation of the Movie, after all, in addition to Big Broadcast. It would have been a great way to double down on their initial investments in the cartoon, and I'm sure they had all the rights to do so.
Also, not knowing anything about the legal maneuvering behind-the-scenes, I wonder why they didn't just run pure adaptations of select cartoon episodes, with cartoon-style art, as comics in parallel with the main series? They did an adaptation of the Movie, after all, in addition to Big Broadcast. It would have been a great way to double down on their initial investments in the cartoon, and I'm sure they had all the rights to do so.
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