maybe there are story reasons why everyone acts the way they act that completely redeems this issue. maybe next issue we find out they are intoxicated or it is just a dream. because how else can we go from the best issue in a long time last month to this
I think part of the problem is looking for very specific rank equivalencies... which really is only decipherable if you are military, or for some reason, have internalized all those arcane ranking convolutions, maybe from reading too many 80s GI Joe comics. Whenever I look stuff like that up, I always end up being more confused than when I started... and then you run into ranks that actually have vastly different meanings, across not only just national lines, but even between different branches of the same nation's military. So I would take two approaches to looking at Transformer rank: 1) be general... after all, we're talking about a system where (as you point out) alt-mode, rank and function all seem to be at times interchangeable. There are no pay grades, no careerists, no civilians even. So without looking at the formalities, what would a "lieutenant commander" be? Some kind of adjunct commander? Assistant to the commander? Does Skylynx have this rank just for the sake of hearing him pronounce it "LEFTenant"? And "Sgt. Kup?" I wouldn't read too much into that. They were just looking for some honorific to make it easier to secure the rights to the name "Kup", and "Sarge" comes with all those folksy, crusty associations.* On a trivial note, "Sarge" was also Hound's nickname, at least in that brief pre-production phase when characters were given nicknames in addition to their code names (y'know... just to confuse kids further). *Personally, I never liked the tough-guy militarization of Kup in IDW. It makes him too close to Ironhide (or what Ironhide should be). For me Kup was always more of a wiley old coot, with a million stories that nobody took seriously. I feel like this is reflected in his modified 1987 Tech Specs (which tend to correct the stats inflation from the movie year), where his Rank is just 5. 2) remember the G1 context... instead of looking at the Autobots like a nation, look at what they were in 1984-86. It was a bunch of guys stuck on Earth, numbering under a hundred. They are less a nation than a crew. There was rarely any mention of a galaxy-spanning super-structure. If Starscream was the Air Commander, that means he's simply in charge of the aerial assault division of the Con forces on Earth (and he flies at their head, not behind a desk). This could be completely separate from his role as Megatron's protege... but he does have a Rank 9 on his graph (tied with Shockwave, and higher than Soundwave's 8), so he must have some standing. Likewise, Red Alert is just the security chief for that Earth-bound group... of the Ark essentially. Of course, that creates a certain ambiguity between him and Ironhide due to the overlap of their functions and ranks. Also, their Tech Specs graph puts them both at Rank 7. The Rank numbers are... obscure at times, but I think they can still give us indications. There are very few Rank 9 bots... Prowl, Grimlock, Skylynx... Magnus is an 8, along with Roadbuster, Jazz, Wheeljack, Goldbug, and most of the sub-group commanders. It doesn't help that Transformer military structure is basically a warband of individuals who all tend to lead from the front lines. And then there's Jetfire, and his anomalous Rank 10... but I think that's a carry over from the brief period when Jetfire was being groomed to be the leader toy for 1985. zmog
Yeah every time they introduce military terminology (cough 113th Battalion) things tend to get more confused. However, I actually am a particular fan of Sky Lynx's introduction issue in Marvel. You can read his backstory in that issue as him being the last survivor of a shattered unit, who only gets pulled back into the fray due to a pre-war friendship with Wheeljack. So his rank might have once had a more literal meaning, but now is ceremonial. Note that Budiansky-Marvel was the only time that G1 ever paid more than lip-service to the idea that the first wave of toys had been out of commission for four million years. The impression I got was that Blaster et al hadn't even been BORN yet when the Ark launched. And no, I never read Joe. I picked up the naval ranks from Star Trek and everything else from my interest in WWII.
I always took the "rank" to be, more or less, security clearance rather than an actual standing in military rank. So Optimus and Megatron with 10+ would be similar to Nick Fury, and bots with rank 9 would be like Maria Hill, 8 would be Tony Stark level, etc... It would also explain why some of the 'bots have a higher rank than their title would suggest, and some have lower.
The fact that Sky-Lynx had a previous relation with another character at all strikes me as unique. I think the Skids and Getaway relation is a pretty good estimate as to what it was like to introduce him they way they did. It's the strangest thing too when in Marvel the whole 4-million year war was mostly due to the 4-million year long sleep. Otherwise things made the most sense in terms of how long the robots lived.
True... though your reading of it seems more interesting than I actually remember that exchange being. At the time, it felt like a very quick easy way to add yet another toy placement into the series... "Oh hey, let me call in an old friend... and here's Skylynx!" Admittedly still preferable to yet another tiresome "look we built new robots just because" origin issue. Yeah, I felt that way too. I never liked how, in some of the other fictions, that 4 million year gap was just sort of brushed off. I suppose Dreamwave had their "big shutdown" which was one way to get around it... I think that was more of a private joke. Those old GIJOE filecards were always written from the perspective of a military aficionado (or, in fact, a veteran), with in-jokes and technical terms that were completely arcane to kids. For example, no Joe ever had their rank spelled out in simple terms (except for "General Hawk")... they only had their pay grades listed. When you're 9 years old, you have NO idea what "E-4" means. (honestly, I still don't ) zmog
Ah, ok. Seems like they inspired a lot of interest though! I love the feeling of reading an authoritative voice from a world I do not know.
That was definitely part of the appeal of those old Larry Hama G.I.Joe comics (Hama wrote all the original Joe bios, so his role was similar to Budiansky's on Transformers). They were beautiful blends of good old-fashioned military action comics, ostentatious macho banter, and rank-and-file cynical humour, all injected with an insider's meticulous attention to procedural and technical detail. Lots of fun. zmog
I kinda liked that they introduced military ranks, makes them organized instead of a rag tag militia. On a sidenote..People read those cards on the back of the toys?
For which? Joes or TFs? Well, back when those cards were actually GOOD, they did. If they were TRUE fans. zmog
OBSESSIVELY. I was a big reader as a child. I kept hundreds of cardbacks for years, and would pull them out and page through them.
I eventually gave up reading the cardbacks, because there was no way I could own ALL THE TRANSFORMERS. This was before there was an internet for everything to be found on, so the next best thing was the Marvel Transformers Universe miniseries. A few years later, I bought the trade paperback edition. It is one of my prize possessions. I tried to get into the Dreamwave More Than Meets the Eye guidebooks, but they were just never quite as coherent or fun to read, for some reason. For GI Joe, I've gone back and looked over some of the old file cards... they're interesting, especially when one considers that the versions we got in Canada were never complete (they had to make space for both french and english versions, so they tended to cut down the text). There's a lot of subtle humour hidden in those things. zmog
The Autobots and the Cons for that matter. I never read the specs. Usually the box was the first thing to go.
I used to cut them out (after all, they did say "clip and save!"). For me, that was your record of who the character actually was... at least until the Transformers Universe guide came out. Otherwise you miss out on those cool little details... like Gears' booster rockets, or Bumblebee's underwater adaptability, or knowing that Mirage's main weapon is a Cybertronian hunting rifle, or the fact that Ratbat actually has two bat modes. zmog
It's one of those odd little idiosyncratic details. It seems like most of the later cassettes have some tape mode quirks. In Ratbat's case, he has an unusual degree of control over his mass-shifting... from Ratbat's G1 bio: Ramhorn can vibrate his tape mode so forcefully, he can destroy any device he's inserted into. Steeljaw can magnetize himself in tape mode to attach to larger vehicles, allowing him to travel long distances discreetly and without using up fuel. Overkill has a mass-shifting glitch that sometimes results in him transforming into (and getting stuck as) a tiny little T-rex. Fun stuff. zmog
