In Review: Combat Colin #5 – Marvel-ous Mirth!

By downthetubes Guests on October 9, 2024

Review by Philip Boyce (crossposted from the Oink! blog with kind permission)

Fancy 32 very high quality pages containing 28 equally high quality and hilarious Lew Stringer comics? Surely for every reader of this site, the answer to that is a no-brainer. After a lengthy delay, Lew’s fifth collection of “Combat Colin” strips from Marvel UK’s Transformers comic arrives – and it’s a belter. Lew’s humour strip just got better and better during the last couple of years of that comic’s life, and now we’re deep into that part of the run.

Covering over half a year’s worth of misadventures from 1990 and 1991, Colin had been upgraded to a full page for a while and Lew really took advantage of the extra space. He included so many gags and background jokes per page his work was often a highlight for many readers of the Robots in Disguise. He also wrote more multi-issue stories which were among the best he produced.

“Combat Colin with Semi-Automatic Steve in The Secret of the Combat Trousers” is the first such tale in this collection and features baddies in disguise, multi-dimensional travel and even the honest-to-gosh “true origin of Combat Colin”. It’s a brilliant three-part tale that I remember well, not just from my recent real time read through of Transformers, but from the actual time of its first printing.

However, the yampiest tale here has got to be “Battlefield Wallytown”, which originally ran for a whopping six weeks. Returning villains, returning heroes, warping of realities, time travel… anything Lew could come up with seems to have been squeezed into this one and it all works. It’s been combined into one story like in previous collections, although the other multipart series here appear in their original forms.

Lew’s art is just as funny as his scriptwriting, such as Colin’s enigmatic face or that brilliant panel where he conveys the bright light of a hero’s downfall on a black and white page. Story wise, there’s also the return of a robotic foe that’s much more cumbersome than the original (perfectly spoofing RoboCop 2 in my eyes) in a strip with an ending that has us re-reading the previous chapters, to see the clue we all overlooked. Then there’s the perfect example of how a common everyday phrase can take on a whole new meaning here.

Every page includes details of the issue of Transformers they originally appeared in and its cover date (instead of release date, but this makes it easier to find the issue if you wanted to) and one of my very favourite Combat Colin pages finally makes its appearance. To see a preview of it just go and have a look at a special Christmas post from last year.

In Lew’s editorial he explains how some of the strips are printed in greyscale because they’ve been taken from the pages of the published comic after Marvel UK lost his original artwork and he hopes this doesn’t spoil our enjoyment too much. On the contrary, I think the greyscale pages are some of the best looking here, with a lovely retro feel like reading a classic Dandy or Beano annual, and the printing finish is smoother.

With an appearance by a certain Autobot, Lew’s token funny reference to The Prisoner and even a classic Airplane/Leslie Nielsen quote (you know which one) there’s so much to enjoy in here that I don’t have the room to include them all, nor would I want to! You should be surprised by them and enjoy them for yourself and you can do so by buying the comic directly from Lew.

Even the advert for Lew’s personal blog is funny with the cosiest looking Daleks you ever did see!

So how do you get a hold of #5 of Combat Colin for yourself? Just head to Lew’s eBay shop, where you can buy this hilarious comic, printed on extremely high quality paper with a card cover no less, for just £5.00 (plus £3.50 p+p). A bargain if ever there was one!

There’s just the one volume still to be published, which promises to include not only the remainder of the Transformers strips but also material I’ve never read before. Let’s hope we haven’t got as long to wait this time!

Philip Boyce

• Buy Combat Colin #5 here from Lew Stringer’s eBay shop

• Bookmark Philip’s brilliant OiNK blog now at oink.blog