Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

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 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.

The Transformers and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »