Which IDW comics are the best runs? I've read Lost Light and I really liked it. Are there any 80s/90s TF comics that are good reads?
Marvel US and UK
Supposedly the UK Marvel series is great and I think it reprints the US stuff
>>152998579What, the whole run is stellar?
>>152998451>I've read Lost LightIf you liked that crap you'll like anything.
>>152998749the US run is kind of shitty at times, the UK run has low-hanging-fruit stuff that doesn't really make any sense but is internally consistent (like Earthforce) and ball-to-the-wall stuff like Magnus vs, where Ultra Magnus gets to be the big tuff guy his toy bio suggested and fights everything from a city of undead zombies to volcano-lair Galvatron and oh boy, does he SUFFER for itthere's a very strange moment where the UK continuity actually made GI Joe (which was branded as Action Force in the UK but otherwise pretty much the same thing) into a readable crossover that makes the (also not the worst GI Joe/TF crossover) US GI Joe vs Transformers miniseries look like a promise to assfuck you again and againof the US run there's some very "comics for young readers" issues early on, including a surprisingly intelligent Megatron story (pic related) that can be neat as stand-alones, there's an attempt to develop their own cast of audience surrogates/human protagonists (GB Blackrock lol Tony Stark, Josie Beller, Jessie, Buster, mental-breakdown-Sparkplug, RAAT, and so on) that actually works, but then there's also retarded stuff like Micromasters working as gangsters in trenchcoats (I guess if it was good enough for TMNT...)the Megatron/Ratchet rivalry that runs from like issue 5 or something right up until the end is pretty fun, there's some decent enough diversions like the Meccanibals (if you like comedy villains more in the tone of the G1 show) and then towards the end it becomes the franchise-defining post-movie stories>>152998451the original -ations minis are mostly neat, the last like six issues of All Hail Megatron and I'll say it, the title too are kind of fun, actually doing new thingsbut people hated Megatrons new big purple Tron body and that era marks the start of needlessly bloated returning casts in IDW (as opposed to dying off, completing a story arc satisfactorily, whatever)
>>152998749I am about 40% into it. Mostly good, but there have been some duds. The UK stuff has a time traveling Galvatron arc that's longer than Watchmen. Death's Head is the MVP of the book. As for as I can tell, that glorious motherfucker is the only one to ever 1v1 fucking Unicron and live.
>>152999403>Death's HeadI'm a TFfan but I've never heard of him before. He looks like some kind of parody between Lobo, The Punisher, Deadpool, and Nemesis the Warlock. Wild.
>>152999275Thanks for the rundown, anon, this is very helpful.
>>152999275>the US run is kind of shitty at times,That's because at first it was a 4 issue mini where they had to infodump 20+ characters AND have a story. After that it found its way rather fast, bar the occasional guest writer story. Some of the stories were downright great though, like Return to Cybertron, the Megatron mafioso one, the Underbase saga (for its sheer carnage and turning Starscream into a cosmic horror), etc.Bob Budiansky's run ended up with a few silly stories like Mecannibals or Rock & Roll Car Wash of Doom, but that's due to him being burnt out from having to rotate casts constantly to make way for the newest toys.After that it Simon Furman takes over, and turns the story into a cosmic opera featuring his favourite characters and repetitive lines. I mean, it worked, but he kept repeating the same crap over and over for decades afterwards, so looking back it's a bit stale. Still had probably the best Unicron fight ever though.IDW was okay-ish up to, say, the middle of Robots in Disguise (before Combiner Wars?) and 1st season of Lost Light. It then turned into this disjointed crap where they try catering to Hasbros new toys, the tumblr fanbase who wanted more gay bots, and attempting to make a shared universe between other properties. It turned into garbage extremely fast at that point, but there were already plenty of signs prior that like how they tried worldbuilding old era Cybertron into this racist society where Decepticons rose simply from an underclass trying to hit back the corrupt elite; typical communist garbage. Plus the writers OC Mary Sue everywhere, later revealed to be Primus himself.
>>152999964Seriously? He's one of the best things to ever come out of TF.
>>152999275>franchise defining post-movie storiesWhat are these? Should I ask if I haven't read this stuff?
Is there an "essential reading" collage for Transformers, like there is for other comic characters/groups?
>>152999964He's a Transfromers/Dr Who villain that Marvel somehow has full control over. Easily the best thing to ever come out of Marvel UK.
>>153001397Marvel saw him in Transformers and snatched up the rights. Well, more specifically Simon Furman saw potential and worked with Marvel so Hasbro couldn't have him.
>>152999964>>153001032>>153001397>>153001433>Death's Head x Doctor WhoGod-damn, this is not the rabbit hole I expected from a Transformers thread.
>>153001073mostly the Furman stuff, which becomes this extension of the creation matrix lore as established by the movie (the matrix before then was very different - it was just a computer program at one point early in the run); the establishment of Unicron as a literal god rather than just a big robot, that kind of thing
>>153001433>>153001397oh, no, they knew from the start they wanted him at Marvel and by 1987 fully expected TF to end (they were really surprised that it continue for 3 more years), and Marvel UK still published a lot of original titles at the time, so it was easy to make him appear in a Marvel UK title first - per the contract with Hasbro, original characters who appeared in Marvel's The Transformers first were considered to be Hasbro's properties, so by putting him into another title in print before his TF appearance, they established the clear ownership by Marvel>>153002568Doctor Who is the reason Death's Head is human-sized
>>152998451>IDW best runsLast Stand of the Wreckers is one of the best transformer stories in general
>>153002649>so it was easy to make him appear in a Marvel UK title firstBut everything lists his first appearance as Transformers UK 113.
>>153003261According to Furman in the intro to the Death's Head Vol 1 collection:>Characters, even peripheral ones, who appeared in Transformers, were prone to be absorbed into that title's catchall copyright. So, we decided to take a leaf out of Marvel US's book (they had a character called Circuit Breaker, who was made a guest star elsewhere in the Marvel Universe before she graced the pages of their monthly Transformers comic)(this was in Secret Wars 2 #3)>and copyright the character before Transformers #113 (the first part of "Wanted: Galvatron - Dead or Alive") hit the stands.So the thing about Marvel UK is there was a lot of it, I don't even know how many titles in 1987, and it was a real publisher but it isn't very well known or catalogued by collectors in the US because it mostly wasn't sold or reprinted there, and it isn't very well known or catalogued in the UK because a) people grew up and didn't think about comic books the same way and b) it stopped operating in 1993 without ever becoming part of the collector bubble, which didn't really happen in the UK market but did destroy Marvel UK in the end.Anyway, any title in the Marvel UK stable would have counted for copyright, so even if it appeared in a weekly Avengers reprint title which trust me, nobody would fucking remember now, or in something memorable like Spider-Man and Zoids, it would still count for Marvel.Even Albion British Comics Database wiki doesn't know, so I have no fucking clue which title it was Woman's Weekly. I would suggest it probably wasn't Doctor Who Magazine (which is quite well remembered) but maybe a full-on reprint title that very few people would have been reading. You would really first need a complete list of Marvel UK titles in 1987 and secondly either good scans or more likely a trip to a copyright library to check them all. And then you would find it was something fucking obscure published it first.
>>153006999>>153003261I mean look this is the kind of shit Marvel UK used to find time and space for
>>153007036Secret Wars #25 (yes really), by none other than Jim Shooter, literally the last person I would expect to know who Timmy Mallett is
>>153007040final pageI wonder if this Spidey is retroactively the same Spidey who met the cast of SNL when Chevy Chase was still on it
>>153007046Other than straight reprint, there would be titles like Zoids Monthly (Spider-Man and Zoids) which would certainly count because of different licensing; titles like Thundercats (most of the relevant issues have been scanned but I'm not reading 30 issues of Thundercats) might count if it was in an ad spot; whatever was taking up the spot that eventually vacated for The Real Ghostbusters in 1988, or even Action Force (the GI Joe reprint) might have counted if the strip was unrelated to the rest of the title.They also did this thing where they'd reprint various titles quarterly, so you'd get the shorter UK material presented as a collected floppy, and I don't think most of those are even on Albion in any form. At this point it would be quicker to email Furman or whoever and ask which title carried the first printing of High Noon Tex.
>>153003261>>153006999I believe what anon is referring to is that, officially, we were told Death’s Head was Marvel copyright because they made a one page comic featuring him “ before” appearing in transformers. However, around the late 2000s, fans started challenging this narrative as no one could find a published version of this page before his Transformers debut. This was sort of an obscure fact until the 2020s when it gained more traction with YouTube fact videos and the TF online community. It seems likely that Marvel UK /Furman either got mixed up and didn’t get to publishing it until later, or they lied and just produced the comic after his TF appearance knowing record keeping was more lackadaisical and fans would be unlikely to notice at the time. But the latter is the more conspiracy driven view; considering they even did the first appearance thing for circuit breaker, I think the comic was indeed made to be published ahead of his first appearance and just not published since some mix up probably happened and it wasn’t seen until much later. Furman probably wasn’t aware of the production side of things and may have assumed the plan proceeded as intended, with the page in the intended month’s publications.But this wasn’t really challenged for decades and at this point Hasbro likely doesn’t care about fighting to get Deaths Head. It’d be jeopardizing their good relationship with marvel which makes them way more money than DH alone
>>153007125The likelihood is that it was in one of many weekly comics that simply don't exist outside of copyright libraries any more, or were maybe printed as ashcan editions specifically for the copyright assignment but never sold. Even if it were true that Marvel UK had pulled a fast one on Hasbro, you're correct in that Hasbro is 40 years out of time to even try to challenge ownership of the copyright should they be insane enough to want to. It would cost half a million just to get to see a judge telling them they had no case and couldn't sue Marvel.The absence of scans from that era isn't particularly shocking, as most scanners aren't UK-based and there's no real secondary market for Marvel UK titles, even the big ones. There's no conspiracy here, just the absence of evidence - if people really cared, they'd go look for the copyright editions in the British Library and/or contact someone who worked at Marvel UK in 1987 and ask for a direct citation. But nobody cares that much when it's easier to shitpost about their feelings and get paid YT pennies for the privilege.
>>153007168Comic collectors everywhere are obsessive as hell. Even if the online database online for Marvel UK is weak, doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be copies floating around, and TF fans are another breed of obsessive. Considering this is something that’s been noted since at least the 2000s, I wouldn’t be surprised if there haven’t been attempts to find every 87 Marvel UK comic to find an example of the page. I really doubt all those comics just don’t exist in the wild, sure many were thrown out, but the 80s wasn’t the 40s, comics weren’t tossed as readily by then. Even in the UK. Furman himself does vintage comic vending on the side.
>>153007218Great, go look for them. At this stage you're trying to argue that the complete run of all Marvel UK titles proving the page in question wasn't pre-published exists, and that nobody's actually looked at it all. That sounds like a job for you, the guy who cares.When you discover it in early 1987 in the back pages of Zoids Collected #3 or Thundercats #31 or whatever, find somebody else who cares and let them know.I mean what even is it you think you're peddling here? A conspiracy theory? That 40 years ago some guys who've consistently said for 40 years "it happened this way" were all lying and/or mistaken? That Marvel doesn't own a character they've published I don't know, a hundred issues of since then without ever being challenged by the only other possible party to a claim on that character?It's nonsense. It's stupid nonsense, not even the smart kind of nonsense. Listen, I lived through this period. I was literally alive when Death's Head appeared in TF113 and I recall feeling at the time that I'd already seen High Noon Tex in another title. Maybe that's wrong, but it's my feelings against yours at this point. Does that sound stupid to you? It should. I lived through the 90s when conspiracy theories were popular because of the fucking X-Files, a filmlook soap opera with occasional monsters. I lived through the 2000s when conspiracy theories were popular because of a terror attack. I lived through the 2010s when conspiracy theories, including your own here, were popular because of social media giving loud voices to mouthbreathing dogmen you would normally cross the street to avoid.The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you haven't found the proof that it wasn't published when they say it was doesn't mean you're being lied to. It means you're a lazy conspiracy theorist. And what a thing! What a hill to die on, anon! A fucking page from a comic book! Please, go, your time is clearly too important to waste on me.
>>152998451best fem-bot?tossup between blackarachnia, slipstream and shadow striker for me
>>153007766StarscreamBuilt for ryona
>>153007607Honestly anon I think people just find it funny that the whole thing could either be a fuckup or a lie and think it’s a minor footnote worth noting. Like I said, I doubt it’s conspiracy and at worst case possibly just a mistake, if true. No one is trying to get Hasbro to fight for this grave injustice or anything. It’s just funny that they either pulled a fast one on Hasbro( who could, as we both know, care less about that by now) or they completely forgot and never properly did what they set out to do and no one pointed this out until years later. You’ve probably wasted more time on that post than I have in mentioning this for a few posts , as well as likely been more passionate about it typing it. Ultimately you’re correct in saying it’s not something anyone should take too seriously.
This is some historian-level autism here.
I hope the Enegeron universe brings in Tidal Wave, Lugnut, and Strika
>>153007607Why are you so sensitive? Considering that possibility is funny, it's harmless. You act like if that anon is about to do terrorism. There's a furfag drama queen that types just like you, he knows a lot of shit and has interesting and smart takes, but he's unnecessarily pompous and sometimes a jackass. Please don't be like that
