Wicked, mon! And I say this as someone who hated Marvel Shockwave (yes, I know he was more faithful to his techspec characterization, but I preferred the loyal to Megatron cartoon version).

 

Now that is just excellent

 

No, sir. I don't like it.

I absolute love it     Freaking awesome !!!!

I'm going to be watching this over and over again. It's absolute amazing how you take unmoving art from the comic and bring it to life by making it move.

As I said earlier, impressive as the recreation of the cartoon is, it's replacing moving pictures by moving pictures with toys. Doing the same with a comic, static pictures now moving, is a completely different level of greatness.


(Although Windcharger is indeed in that final frame of the comic, it was another art error. Optimus, Ironhide, Bluestreak, Huffer and Mirage were the five defenders. However, the art was so inconsistent that others kept being included. I think Sideswipe was also in one or two panels, as was Brawn and Sunstreaker. Springer's art may have been lively, but it was inconsistent and a bit of a mess.)

 

TREMENDOUS!

 

You actually took the cover to The Next Level. GREAT JOB! Always a treat seeing your work.

 

I'm reminded by your animations how great the comics were. Great job bringing life to the drawings.

 

WOW

 

I think we allow ourselves to be misled by that "Fear not Megatron" salute in episode 1 into thinking he was just a lackey. But the toon does sometimes show Shockwave more intimidating, as in Ultimate Doom or Desertion of the Dinobots. That's the dude I picture when I read the comics.

 

Yeah it's a bit sketchy, there definitely seem to be more then just the five of them running around.

One thing I've tried to do in a subtle way is indicate their deactivation (both there and in the hanging from the rafters scene) by desaturating the colours to take the life out of them. Hope that comes across, if just subliminally.

Thanks folks!

 

Between this, Ultra Marcus' fantastic adaption of Ladybird's Megatron's Fight for Power and Kingdom starting on Thursday, it's a fantastic week for Transformers media.

Primus himself couldn't breathe life into the Transformers the way you have. You are truly one of the gems in this sometimes rough franchise.

 

I need to ask Trapjaw where to get an iron lower mouth...

Cause I just lost my jaw  

 

Oh wow that's a lovely thing to say, I kind of just do the things I think I'd like to see done myself, as a fan. I happen to have a modest spark of creative talent to be able to turn an idea in my head into an actual finished piece I can share with you all, and I guess I must be doing something right because in the many comments I've had about this particular sequence (on twitter and reddit, which are about the only other places I post) there haven't been any negative ones at all. I'm aware there can be a darker side to this fandom sometimes, but somehow I manage to steer clear of that side of things.

Btw I've not seen this Ladybird adaptation, have you got a link?

It's quite bizarre looking back, that Bob decided to bring in Shockwave as basically the new leader of the Earthbound Decepticons. All the more out there for us in the UK who couldn't buy the toy (I did manage to get the grey Astro Magnum, which you could find if you looked hard enough, as stand-in). Dramatically it makes that first year or two of the comics very different to the cartoon, with more of an ongoing narrative, which was great at the time. However when I look back I do miss that the comic never really got to tell the classic Season One type stories of Megatron and his bunch of dudes battling Optimus and the Ark crew in the American midwest. Instead we spend so long with the Autobots deactivated and Prime decapitated, Megatron beaten and then lost under some snow, that by the time those plots are resolved we're already into combiners/characters from Cybertron and the time to tell those type of stories is gone. Then of course Prime and Megs get blown up and time marches on.

In short, we got a fantastic take on Shockwave for sure, but it was at the expense of properly seeing that basic S1 era of Megatron vs Prime (one of my favourite eras) in the comic.

  

 

The fact that he bothers with proper punctuation in the last one kills me. And the smoking barrel is a nice touch. Great work as always!

 

Here's the link for Ultra Marcus' Ladybird adaption:

 

You couldn't? Weird, in the Netherlands I never saw him or several other figures, but they were in the promotional material and I have spoken with people who did find most of those figures. Not sure if Shockwave amongst those.

Don't agree with that. Actually, the few times Bob Budiansky did do this like that story with the Decepticons taking over the dam that brought the Coneheads to Earth, I really disliked. It just was such an incredible step down in quality compared to the rest. I also disliked cartoon Megatron especially because of his plan of the week (which he also had in that comic) and far preferred Budiansky's Megatron who wasn't much of planner and instead relied purely on his brute strength (which resulted in him getting beat up by Shockwave, falling down a cliff thanks to Ratchet and a lot more of indignity).

 

Thanks! Had to add a little extra laser blast just for that full stop  

Hah, great!

Yeah the UK didn't get quite a few toys unfortunately: Shockwave, Swoop, Constructicons, Blaster, Perceptor, Roadbuster, Whirl, Trypticon, Omega Supreme, Fort Max to name a few. They weren't even in our catalogue inserts, although a couple of times I was lucky enough to get European inserts that had somehow slipped through, and would marvel at photos of what we were missing.

Did you get the UK comics where you were? The US stories may not have quite captured what I describe as the Season One vibe (and I agree with the sentiment of your objections, but for me they apply much more to Season 2) but the UK comic actually did cover some of that ground, and did it proud. Enemy Within, the Guardian stories, Crisis of Command; these all sum up what made that era so iconic to me. Heck, we actually got to see Megatron and Prime battling it out with energy weapons atop the dam, a rare case of toon inspiring comic! The two small opposing groups stranded on Earth is just so basic to the TF premise (even in the Ladybird books as seen above, and other media of the time) I can't help but feel nostalgia for it. The Space Bridge/Return to Cybertron marks the end of the opportunity to tell those enclosed stories. Not that what came later wasn't as good (indeed I was excited to see newer toys making appearances), just that the US comic didn't get as much of yer basic Prime v Megatron as it deserved.

 

Same in the Netherlands, with some differences. The Constructicons were easily available and for a long time, we dit get Roadbuster and Whirl, Blaster and Shockwave supposedly were available, but I never saw them (got a shackwave second hand and the kid who owned it had applied both a Decepticon sticker and a rubsign fooling me in it being the original), but Perceptor, Swoop et al. were also absent. Actually, intiially we didn't even get Optimus Prime and Jetfire was made leader, while the translated comics called Optimus Jetfire. (With Jetfire and Megatron being leader, Optimus Autobot Commander and Jetfire looking different from Skyfire, I thought Optimus was no more than ship commander and the real leader was Jetfire who was still on Cybertron. Thus whenever they went to Cybertron in the cartoon, like in the Ultrimate Doon, I expected Jetfire to show, with Roadbuster and Whirls as his lieutenants.)

Like you I sometimes also was confronted with different inserts, but in my case it was USA inserts. One day I found an Ironhide toy in the store and had never seen that (or since) and he was in an American box. I bought it and to my surprise there was this very different insert with Transformers I knew from the cartoon and comic. I cherished it and still have it.

Very, very few. Local release, translated, was once per two months and thus two issues in one go. In very rare instances like with issue #50, they only used one US issue and filled the remaining pages with a UK comic -- which I didn't know existed so I had no idea of context. All I can remember was an issue in which Powermaster Optimus Prime ponders why he cared so much about Earth, but I think there was another one.

There's definitely a lot to be sad about short, simple(?) stories about the two factions duking it out. I definitely see the appeal. But I got this from the Sunbow cartoon on a weekly basis and thus I loved that Marvel did it differently.

But in comparison, truth be told, I just disliked this whole typical 80's concept Sunbow gave us: bad guy has plan, good guys stops him and great hero beats big bad. I was so thankful the comic didn't go that route. As a result I considered the Decepticons and Megatron in Marvel to be much bigger threat, the threat they really should be, because unlike the cartoonthe good guys didn't win every week and you didn't have the weekly leader fight with the hero beaten the bad guy. Optimus and Megatron only fought twice in the US run, with Optimus collapsing from exhaustion after the first fight, and defeated after the second. This also results in Marvel US Megatron coming accross as far more formidable, because he only lost because he was too convinced of his physical strength to acknowledge ways in which he could loose: being poisoned, still being too weak and too badly damaged to fight for leadership, the cliff not holding, etc...

And as analysed recently by people much smarter than me in TransFormers Marvel Read Along topic in the comics section, this actually resulted in a very nice development. Megatron considers Optimus his big enemy, his nemesis, but it's actually Ratchet that's the true enemy of Megatron. Optimus is just the leader, but it's Ratchet who's Megatron's opposite, the healer vs the destroyer, the thinker vs the brawn, and it's Ratchet and not Optimus who stops Megatron when it's needed.

 

Ha, yeah I had a ton of identical UK toy inserts and the one very worn Euro one which I'd handled a million times   I think my other odd insert may have been USA actually, because it was in English but it had Fort Max, all the Pretenders, Clones etc.

What was really strange was that Roadbuster and Whirl, who we didn't have as toys, were used as characters in the UK comic and crop up in the likes of Target: 2006!

I had no idea the comics were ever reprinted that way. Wonder if those are rare?

Yeah it was a great twist of Bob's to have Ratchet be the one to overthrow Megatron, and Furman really ran with that (a bit too much ultimately IMO, but at least the All the Familiar Faces stuff was a nice nod).

It's always interesting to read other fans views and compare notes, and our experiences obviously differ and have created these fascinating divergencies in our appreciation. Did you actually literally get the cartoon on a weekly basis? For us in the UK we got the comic weekly, but there was no set time for the toon. It popped up in irregular slots on early morning shows, usually stripped over a week (so cut into 5 minute parts) during school holidays. Plus they only ever showed the dozen or so Season 1 episodes, which probably explains my favouritism towards them. Seasons 2 and 3 had odd episodes released on VHS, but I didn't get to see the whole lot until the DVDs came out post-millennium. Certainly the formulaic evil-plot-of-the-week made for some terrible stories in the later seasons and I didn't much care for the 'new' episodes I watched for the first time on disc. Yet I still to this day enjoy almost every S1 ep!

 

Outstanding work as always! Just amazing! Especially your version of the Issue 5 cover. I was just showing my 9 year old son some of your videos and he said, "Wow! That guy is REALLY good!". High praise!  

 

Tell him I said Thanks very much