Some thoughts on the Marvel TF comics
Posted: Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:41 pm
Apologies in advance...this is probably going to get wordy. I just felt like writing all of this down after all the reading I did.
Inspired by our friend dalek's frankly amazing retrospective on the UK book, I set myself the task of reading the entire Marvel run in one go. About a quarter of the way through I realized why I'd never done it before, and overall it took me about a year, but I'm glad I did! This is the first time I've ever considered the book as a solid whole instead of in bite-sized chunks, and I'm really surprised by how much it changed my perspective on...well, almost all of it.
First of all, I appreciate Bob Budiansky a lot more now than I did before. The man catches a lot of flak in the fandom, and in my opinion most of it is undeserved. I think that people tend to look back on his stories retrospectively, sneer down their noses and say "that's not what Transformers stories are supposed to be". There's a bit less of that now than there was a decade and a half ago, when the fandom was more or less split between cartoon fans and Furmanites, but the narrative still lingers.
But that's silly. First of all, it's entirely unfair to look at work from the early years of the franchise and judge it against a standard that didn't exist yet. And second of all, as the IDW universe showed us...Transformers can be so much more than identikit Saturday morning cartoon fare or po-faced space opera. And I think that's something that Budiansky was showing people right from the beginning. Because when he wrote the Transformers for Marvel, he wasn't writing "proper Transformers comics". He was writing 80s Marvel comics that happened to have Transformers in them. The sometimes downright bizarre adventures that he created are things that wouldn't have been out of place in most of Marvel's superhero fare in that decade, and after having read a lot of 80s superhero books recently I found myself enjoying the Budiansky issues a lot more than I'd expected.
That isn't to say there wasn't some dreck. Prime committing suicide over a video game will never not be dumb, and by the time the Pretenders came around it was pretty clear that he was done with the whole thing. But on the whole...honestly, there was a good stretch of time where I was enjoying the US books far more than the contemporary UK stuff.
And speaking of segues, how about that UK stuff, huh? Well, for one thing, Simon Furman seems to view his first year or so's output as something of an old shame. And I, honestly, can't imagine why. I loved the early (pre-Galvatron) UK stuff. It was weird and wonderful, and it really fleshed out the early-years characters in a way what the US book simply didn't have the pages for. Soundwave in particular was a gem here, compared to the total non-entity he was in the US (if I hadn't recently read Out of Time and seen him chatting away after Mindwipe brainwashed him, you probably coiuld have convinced me that he'd never spoken in the US books at all). And of course the Dinobots were fantastic too.
I was surprised to find that I adored the late-run black and white stuff too. Now, I completely understand why the UK crowd don't -- these strips represent the slow death of homegrown content, and of the book as a whole. And the format of the book in the days when these were being published was just idiotic. The US stories were basically unreadable broken up into five-page chunks, and even this stuff got hard to follow...I quickly gave up trying to hop between the two and just read all the black-and-whites together, then went back and read all the US issues properly after that. But taken on their own merits, there is a ton to like here. In a way, it represented the comics (and Furman) going back to their roots, telling smaller-scale stories that served to shed light on a ton of characters that hadn't gotten much love in the US book. Including more great work with Soundwave, some attention for the totally-overlooked Sunstreaker and Tracks...and of course, my guy Spinister. The fact that it's impossible to fit into the main timeline honestly matters a lot less to me now that I've seen much worse nonsense happening in much more carefully-edited comics.
What I didn't like so much was the Galvatron/future stuff. It started off poorly (Target:2006 had piles of ridiculous plot holes), continued poorly (becoming a thinly-veiled backdoor pilot for Death's Head for about a year, guest-starring the Transformers in their own book) and ended poorly (Time Wars is obviously a mess and the less said about Space Pirates the better) without ever coming close to paying off the narrative arc of any of it's main protagonists. Death's Head obviously falls right out of the universe, Ultra Magnus never appears again after beating up some gladiators in an unrelated side-quest (both of these felt like an RPG campaign having to be hastily rewritten by the GM after two of the players dropped out half way through), and Rodimus never proves to himself that he's a worthy Prime. There were definitely a lot of good moments along the way, so I understand why the folks who grew up with these stories have such good memories of them. But taken as a whole, it's hard for me to call the overarching storyline anything but a failure.
Furman's step into the US book started off a bit shakily too. A part of the problem is that he was dropped in smack dab in the middle of the Micromaster-shilling, right at the tail end of Hasbro giving a shit about the comic as a toy-selling vehicle. So he was forced to build his plot around a bunch of characters that he clearly couldn't give two shits about. Acting like people should care about Megatron (who's never been much more than a joke in the US book) was probably a questionable choice too. Things did get better once the Classics Pretenders joined the fold though, since he clearly actually wanted to be writing about those four.
Things carried on in much the same way for most of the first year. Matrix Quest was very hot and cold, coinciding with whether each individual issue starred Furman's favourites or not. Nightbeat or Grimlock? You're golden. Longtooth or Dogfight? Run for the hills! Rhythms of Darkness was an enjoyable alt-future cliche-storm, at least, but the book doesn't actually get reliably good until the Megatron/Ratchet fusion pops out of Unspace. The last year was pretty golden, though.
And, of course, G2. It's insane and ridiculous and so deliriously 90s that you'd almost have to think that the creative team were leaning into the XTREEM to have a laugh at the trends that were going on in the industry at the time. Though with the way Furman treats this series as an old shame nowadays, maybe he actually did think this was what all the young, hip 90s kids wanted to read?
Of course, while G2 manages to be a really good story about Prime, Megatron (finally making him genuinely cool in the Marvel TF-verse), Starscream and Grimlock, it was also quite possibly the worst toy-advertising comic ever made. Almost no one (Sideswipe and Prime are the only ones that readily come to mind...I certainly didn't spy a purple Ramjet or technicolour Combaticons) had their G2 colours, and most of the characters in the G2 toyline were pushed to the background in favour of guys like Hot Rod, Kup, Soundwave or the like. Which, again, I loved...but Hasbro probably didn't, and it probably contributed to the book getting axed after 12 issues.
Which brings me to my last thought about Furman. These days, you'll hear people say that his greatest weakness as a writer is that he can't end a story properly. I don't think that's true. He's certainly had some big failures in that department (Time Wars, Revelations), but also some big successes (On The Edge of Extinction, A Rage in Heaven). No, his greatest weakness is, and has always been, a complete and utter inability (or unwillingness) to put any thought into how he writes any characters bar his handful of stars.
When Budiansky created the characters for the franchise, he did it knowing full well that he'd never be able to give most of them the attention they'd need to become fully fleshed-out characters. So he made sure that they would be memorable for kids even if all he ever did with them were a few lines as they stood in the background. A lot of the time they sounded silly, sure, but he did a really good job of making sure that even scrubs like Weirdwolf or Sinnertwin or Hardhead often had their own unique "voice" when they briefly got to do something.
Compared to that standard, it's hard not to find Furman wanting. His main characters have a lot of depth, but everyone else just sounds like...well, like an identikit Furman backgrounder. No one sounds unique (Weirdwolf talks like Yoda no longer does ) So Needlenose or a Battlecharger or Ruckus or one of the dumb Firecons will spout off with long-winded eloquent speeches when the plot requires, or someone like Spinister will temporarily become a quippy goon when Furman wants to include some snappy combat banter. That sort of thing wasn't anywhere near as noticeable when I read his stuff piecemeal, but taken all in one dose it really stands out. I never cared about the background cast in Furman's books the way I did in Budiansky's, even though objectively they gave them about the same amount of stuff to do. It's hard to get upset when background characters get Furmanated because I know I won't miss them -- another flat spearcarrier will be spouting identical lines next issue.
But overall, I definitely really enjoyed reading it all! Aside from a few of the black-and-white UK issues I don't think any of it was new to me, but it had been a long time since I'd read most of it. I think that let me look on it with new eyes, a bit, and I was surprised by what I found. Surprised by how much I enjoyed the stuff I wasn't expecting to, and also I guess surprised by how I enjoyed some other stuff less than I'd expected. But overall, I think it compares favourably to most of the other 80s books I've read extensively.
Inspired by our friend dalek's frankly amazing retrospective on the UK book, I set myself the task of reading the entire Marvel run in one go. About a quarter of the way through I realized why I'd never done it before, and overall it took me about a year, but I'm glad I did! This is the first time I've ever considered the book as a solid whole instead of in bite-sized chunks, and I'm really surprised by how much it changed my perspective on...well, almost all of it.
First of all, I appreciate Bob Budiansky a lot more now than I did before. The man catches a lot of flak in the fandom, and in my opinion most of it is undeserved. I think that people tend to look back on his stories retrospectively, sneer down their noses and say "that's not what Transformers stories are supposed to be". There's a bit less of that now than there was a decade and a half ago, when the fandom was more or less split between cartoon fans and Furmanites, but the narrative still lingers.
But that's silly. First of all, it's entirely unfair to look at work from the early years of the franchise and judge it against a standard that didn't exist yet. And second of all, as the IDW universe showed us...Transformers can be so much more than identikit Saturday morning cartoon fare or po-faced space opera. And I think that's something that Budiansky was showing people right from the beginning. Because when he wrote the Transformers for Marvel, he wasn't writing "proper Transformers comics". He was writing 80s Marvel comics that happened to have Transformers in them. The sometimes downright bizarre adventures that he created are things that wouldn't have been out of place in most of Marvel's superhero fare in that decade, and after having read a lot of 80s superhero books recently I found myself enjoying the Budiansky issues a lot more than I'd expected.
That isn't to say there wasn't some dreck. Prime committing suicide over a video game will never not be dumb, and by the time the Pretenders came around it was pretty clear that he was done with the whole thing. But on the whole...honestly, there was a good stretch of time where I was enjoying the US books far more than the contemporary UK stuff.
And speaking of segues, how about that UK stuff, huh? Well, for one thing, Simon Furman seems to view his first year or so's output as something of an old shame. And I, honestly, can't imagine why. I loved the early (pre-Galvatron) UK stuff. It was weird and wonderful, and it really fleshed out the early-years characters in a way what the US book simply didn't have the pages for. Soundwave in particular was a gem here, compared to the total non-entity he was in the US (if I hadn't recently read Out of Time and seen him chatting away after Mindwipe brainwashed him, you probably coiuld have convinced me that he'd never spoken in the US books at all). And of course the Dinobots were fantastic too.
I was surprised to find that I adored the late-run black and white stuff too. Now, I completely understand why the UK crowd don't -- these strips represent the slow death of homegrown content, and of the book as a whole. And the format of the book in the days when these were being published was just idiotic. The US stories were basically unreadable broken up into five-page chunks, and even this stuff got hard to follow...I quickly gave up trying to hop between the two and just read all the black-and-whites together, then went back and read all the US issues properly after that. But taken on their own merits, there is a ton to like here. In a way, it represented the comics (and Furman) going back to their roots, telling smaller-scale stories that served to shed light on a ton of characters that hadn't gotten much love in the US book. Including more great work with Soundwave, some attention for the totally-overlooked Sunstreaker and Tracks...and of course, my guy Spinister. The fact that it's impossible to fit into the main timeline honestly matters a lot less to me now that I've seen much worse nonsense happening in much more carefully-edited comics.
What I didn't like so much was the Galvatron/future stuff. It started off poorly (Target:2006 had piles of ridiculous plot holes), continued poorly (becoming a thinly-veiled backdoor pilot for Death's Head for about a year, guest-starring the Transformers in their own book) and ended poorly (Time Wars is obviously a mess and the less said about Space Pirates the better) without ever coming close to paying off the narrative arc of any of it's main protagonists. Death's Head obviously falls right out of the universe, Ultra Magnus never appears again after beating up some gladiators in an unrelated side-quest (both of these felt like an RPG campaign having to be hastily rewritten by the GM after two of the players dropped out half way through), and Rodimus never proves to himself that he's a worthy Prime. There were definitely a lot of good moments along the way, so I understand why the folks who grew up with these stories have such good memories of them. But taken as a whole, it's hard for me to call the overarching storyline anything but a failure.
Furman's step into the US book started off a bit shakily too. A part of the problem is that he was dropped in smack dab in the middle of the Micromaster-shilling, right at the tail end of Hasbro giving a shit about the comic as a toy-selling vehicle. So he was forced to build his plot around a bunch of characters that he clearly couldn't give two shits about. Acting like people should care about Megatron (who's never been much more than a joke in the US book) was probably a questionable choice too. Things did get better once the Classics Pretenders joined the fold though, since he clearly actually wanted to be writing about those four.
Things carried on in much the same way for most of the first year. Matrix Quest was very hot and cold, coinciding with whether each individual issue starred Furman's favourites or not. Nightbeat or Grimlock? You're golden. Longtooth or Dogfight? Run for the hills! Rhythms of Darkness was an enjoyable alt-future cliche-storm, at least, but the book doesn't actually get reliably good until the Megatron/Ratchet fusion pops out of Unspace. The last year was pretty golden, though.
And, of course, G2. It's insane and ridiculous and so deliriously 90s that you'd almost have to think that the creative team were leaning into the XTREEM to have a laugh at the trends that were going on in the industry at the time. Though with the way Furman treats this series as an old shame nowadays, maybe he actually did think this was what all the young, hip 90s kids wanted to read?
Of course, while G2 manages to be a really good story about Prime, Megatron (finally making him genuinely cool in the Marvel TF-verse), Starscream and Grimlock, it was also quite possibly the worst toy-advertising comic ever made. Almost no one (Sideswipe and Prime are the only ones that readily come to mind...I certainly didn't spy a purple Ramjet or technicolour Combaticons) had their G2 colours, and most of the characters in the G2 toyline were pushed to the background in favour of guys like Hot Rod, Kup, Soundwave or the like. Which, again, I loved...but Hasbro probably didn't, and it probably contributed to the book getting axed after 12 issues.
Which brings me to my last thought about Furman. These days, you'll hear people say that his greatest weakness as a writer is that he can't end a story properly. I don't think that's true. He's certainly had some big failures in that department (Time Wars, Revelations), but also some big successes (On The Edge of Extinction, A Rage in Heaven). No, his greatest weakness is, and has always been, a complete and utter inability (or unwillingness) to put any thought into how he writes any characters bar his handful of stars.
When Budiansky created the characters for the franchise, he did it knowing full well that he'd never be able to give most of them the attention they'd need to become fully fleshed-out characters. So he made sure that they would be memorable for kids even if all he ever did with them were a few lines as they stood in the background. A lot of the time they sounded silly, sure, but he did a really good job of making sure that even scrubs like Weirdwolf or Sinnertwin or Hardhead often had their own unique "voice" when they briefly got to do something.
Compared to that standard, it's hard not to find Furman wanting. His main characters have a lot of depth, but everyone else just sounds like...well, like an identikit Furman backgrounder. No one sounds unique (Weirdwolf talks like Yoda no longer does ) So Needlenose or a Battlecharger or Ruckus or one of the dumb Firecons will spout off with long-winded eloquent speeches when the plot requires, or someone like Spinister will temporarily become a quippy goon when Furman wants to include some snappy combat banter. That sort of thing wasn't anywhere near as noticeable when I read his stuff piecemeal, but taken all in one dose it really stands out. I never cared about the background cast in Furman's books the way I did in Budiansky's, even though objectively they gave them about the same amount of stuff to do. It's hard to get upset when background characters get Furmanated because I know I won't miss them -- another flat spearcarrier will be spouting identical lines next issue.
But overall, I definitely really enjoyed reading it all! Aside from a few of the black-and-white UK issues I don't think any of it was new to me, but it had been a long time since I'd read most of it. I think that let me look on it with new eyes, a bit, and I was surprised by what I found. Surprised by how much I enjoyed the stuff I wasn't expecting to, and also I guess surprised by how I enjoyed some other stuff less than I'd expected. But overall, I think it compares favourably to most of the other 80s books I've read extensively.