Philip Boyce, who runs the brilliant OiNK blog, devoted to one of Britain’s most anarchic comics of yesteryear, continues what we may make an annual celebration of British Christmas comics…
Merry Christmas, everyone! On my OiNK Blog, I’ve had fun rediscovering favourite classic comics in real time. I love the Christmas season and as a kid adored our festive issues, so downthetubes has invited me to count down my personal Top Five Classic Christmas Comics. Second place goes to… The Transformers Collected Comics #11, published by Marvel UK.
There’s very little I could say by way of an introduction to this particular comic series that you probably haven’t already read. This Christmas I’m finishing seven plus years of a real time read through of the whole series on the OiNK Blog’s Instagram account. However, back in the 1980s, I came to the comic rather late compared to my school friends. I’d watched the cartoon and rented some videos but never owned a Transformers comic until 19th November 1988, when I was off ill from school and my mum bought me a comic to cheer me up. This comic.
It may have been November but the Winter Special reprinted the three previous years’ Christmas stories and, as a huge fan of the season, I was immediately transported into a Transformers universe the likes of which the cartoon never portrayed. By the time I finished its 36 pages I was completely captivated and I too was transformed, from a passive viewer to a die hard fan, which I remain to be today, never missing a film in the cinema and loving what Image/Skybound are doing with their new comic so far.
Fellow Northern Ireland native Will Simpson and fantastic colourist Gina Hart were my introduction to how much better the art in the comic was over the animated series, and these strips showed me how much more character there was on the page. My first story also starred Circuit Breaker, aka Josie Beller who equipped her paralysed body with a powerful circuitry suit after nearly dying in the middle of an attack by Shockwave. Here, here blatant fascism towards any mechanical beings is turned against her by fellow humans, so instantly it was unlike anything I’d expected.
It also involved Optimus Prime in a giant Santa suit, which should be a stupid idea, but in reality it was a way of thanking their human friend, Buster Witwicky. It was also played seriously by a subdued Prime who was second-guessing his leadership, something the movies have done well but at the time was a revelation to me.
The second tale (pencils by Martin Griffiths, inks by Tim Perkins and colours by Steve White) involved Jetfire, the Autobot created by the Decepticons here on Earth, who ended up defecting to the other side after being activated by Prime and the Creation Matrix. The stories all have a bit of action (it wouldn’t be Transformers without it, after all) but each one concentrates on a lone character for the most part as they contemplate their existence at Christmas. Jetfire’s feelings of loneliness and solitude, when the rest of the Autobot army longs to return to Cybertron while he sees Earth as home, was quite profound to 11-year-old me and still reads beautifully today.
Surprisingly, the final character to have a quiet moment of reflection was the murderous Decepticon, Starscream. With a plot by Simon Furman and a script by Ian Rimmer, it was Jeff Anderson’s pencils and in particular Stephen Baskerville’s inks which had me falling in love with the comic as a whole more than anything else here. How Starscream ended up in this situation I wouldn’t discover until years later when a friend gave me his back issues. But that didn’t matter to me, we were getting a glimpse into the mind of a character portrayed as a two-dimensional incompetent second-in-command in the cartoon. (Although I’ll forever read his speech in Chris Latta’s voice.)
I love the moments here when he’s so down about his predicament that he can’t even muster the will to kill the human who was determined to teach him about Christmas. Starscream uses the festive season to turn the timetables on an Autobot for a quick battle mid-story, there’s some great comedy moments and a surprise happy ending! I remember reading the whole issue again from scratch the moment I’d finished it and it was upon this second reading that I noticed something.
There were lots of little hints at larger stories from previous issues and I came away with the feeling there was this whole world of stories I’d been missing out on, that it wasn’t the simple good-versus-evil and everything-is-reset-after-each-story of the TV show. This was something that had been building and expanding upon itself for nearly 200 issues already and I wanted to know more! I wanted to read it all! So a few days later we visited the newsagent’s to pick up the latest issue to keep me quiet on a bus journey we were taking.
The latest issue was #193, but an unsold copy of the previous week’s hadn’t been sent back to the distributor yet and so I found myself on that bus completely engrossed in a two-part tale about humans hunting down Autobots. I was also introduced to G.I. Joe and Lew Stringer’s “Combat Colin”. With OiNK being cancelled just the month before, this latter part of the comic was a particularly delightful discovery!
That Christmas I received a bunch of Hasbro’s latest toys (including Prime himself) and a lifelong obsession had officially begun.
That’s why Transformers Collected Comics #11 is my second favourite Christmas comic. You can see more images from it in my Instagram post from my read through here.
Philip Boyce
One of many guest posts for downthetubes.
Categories: British Comics, Comics, Features, Licensing, Reviews
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