Dec 19

Scrounging the Smelting Pool

One thing I kinda miss (not really, but Nostalgia Feels) from childhood Transformer collecting was the money gathering exploits to buy my plastic robots.  My family’s income…fluctuated throughout most of my childhood.  My dad worked the same job since I can remember until we move to Arkansas when I was 14, my mother flipped between trying to run her own business and going back to bookkeeping/accounting for different companies, usually in the restaurant business.

I got a 5 dollar allowance for pretty much my whole adolescence, so if I wanted toys, it was buy one or two small ones maybe on Saturday or supplement/find/scrounge up cash otherwise, cause Christmas was once a year and that was pretty much my parents’ rule for the only time they would just buy me stuff (until we spent that year REALLY on the high hog, but that’s another tale).  I got the occasional off-season toy purchase when my mom or dad were just feeling like it (comics were a free pass weekly from the drugstore, my parents had no issue with me reading, same for comic strip collections and regular books, just had to ask), but mostly, it was up to me. Continue reading

Dec 18

Wiki Wednesday 12/18/13

With the fifth installment of IDW’s Dark Cybertron storyline out today, a certain Autobot detective has returned from the dead and gone straight into the spotlight. But what makes Nightbeat so popular, so enduring that he’s being brought back from the dead and possibly joining up with the regular cast of one of the ongoing comics? Is it his Bogart-esque charm? His Holmes-esque habit of deducing everything from the smallest of details? Or is it because…

Generation 1 Nightbeat is often seen wearing a trenchcoat and fedora, due to their connection with detective fiction. He pulls it off pretty well, actually.

That’s right, this week’s featured article is Transformer Clothing!

Dec 11

Wiki Wednesday: Jesus

We here at Iacon Underground love the TF Wiki. Some of us write for it! (Others have been discouraged due to our strong but not necessarily canonical feelings on subjects such as the Aerialbots’ team dynamic and the origins of Mini-Cons.) So once a week, on the appropriately alliterative Wednesday, we’re going to highlight a page from the site.

For our inaugural post, we’ve picked someone you may be hearing a lot about this month. But just who is this character? And what is his history with the Transformers?

Jesus is presumably a human, but no facts are directly known about him or her, only other people’s claims. For example, Sam Witwicky and his teacher both agree that, if Jesus were in the teacher’s shoes, he would give the boy a dishonestly inflated grade to trick Sam’s father into buying Sam “a car.”

Click on over to the TF Wiki to find out more!

Dec 10

BMOG Kickstarter Almost Over – But It Still Needs Your Help!

Painted BMOGAt just just $3,000 shy of its production funding goal with 70 hours left, the Kickstarter campaign for Trent Troop’s “Bio-Mechanical Ordinance Gestalts” (BMOG) project still needs your help! Designed by longtime fan community members Troop, Alex Androski, and Greg Sepelak, BMOG is a series of animal companions for your action figures that separate into weapons and accessories for anything using a 5mm port – including modern Transformers. The Kickstarter will fund production of the first two in the series: Mantax, a manta ray, and Ursenal, a “bear made of guns” – the origin of BMOG.

The campaign welcomes pledges of any amount, but a mere $15 will get you Mantax, $20 will get you Ursenal, and $30 will get you both – but only if it gets funded! Let’s help some fellow fans make toys!

Dec 02

Do Transformers Stories NEED Humans?

It’s considered a given that Transformers stories will have a few Token Humans as part of the regular cast. Only the Beast series managed to avoid it. And in a lot of quarters it’s argued that, while they’re sometimes annoying and sometimes, like in the live action movies, take up WAY too much screen time, they’re absolutely necessary narrative devices to give audiences, especially audiences of children, someone to relate to.

But with a cast of alien robots who are psychologically nearly indistinguishable from humans, do we really need humans so we have someone to relate to?

Continue reading

Nov 11

Longtime Fandom Members Launch BMOG Toys Kickstarter

jazz-armed-for-bearThere’s been a lot of buzz about Transformers-inspired toys made by third parties over the last few years, but over on Kickstarter there’s a campaign to fund something more than just an updated Galvatron or Devestator: BMOG, or Bio-Mechanical Ordinance Gestalts, animal partners for your Transformers that break down into weapon sets!

Created by Trent Troop, Alex Androski, and Greg Sepelak, all of whom have both been active in the fandom and involved with official Transformers work for Hasbro, BMOG takes advantage of the 5mm peg size that’s lately become standard with many toy lines including Transformers. On their blog they’re keeping a running list of toy lines compatible with that size as they find them, and it currently includes mainstays like Lego and TMNT as well as some older and more obscure lines like Starriors and Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad.

The Kickstarter campaign offers the smaller Mantax toy for a $15 pledge, Ursenal at $20, or both at $30, with additional colors and options available at higher levels. And, of course, you can bid as little as $1 just to show your support.

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Nov 07

Portrait Of The Editor As A Young Nerd

MeBeingSmall

I present myself at age 10, on Christmas Day, being utterly inscrutable with my new Punch/Counterpunch and Race Car Patrol. Why was I lining the Micromasters up along the top of Punch’s box? The world may never know.

Oct 28

Fandom on the Other Side

MakotoItoEssayV2For an American, knowledge of the Transformers fandom outside of the United States in the ’90s was fairly limited; not so surprising when one considers how limited the information about the line itself outside the US was, mind you, but the twin barriers of language and fledgling global inter-connectivity made foreign communications rather dicey all around. In particular, Japan was a cornucopia of mysteries, with brief English episode synopses and thumb-sized pictures of the country’s various toy offerings being the norm.

There was, however, a contingent of Japanese fans who made regular sojourns to the North American BotCons of the era (among them Fumihiko Akiyama), and through a process I can only guess at, eventually a pair of Japanese Transformers fan comics – doujinshi – ended up for sale in English at BotCon 1998. One of these was “Epoch of the Cybertron” by Makoto Ito (who is not Makoto Ono), a fan whose art had previously made a trip across the Pacific for BotCon 1995. Included in this fan comic is an essay I’ve always found fascinating, describing Ito’s dissatisfaction with the domestic handling of the property circa the late 1990s. For your viewing enjoyment, I’ve reproduced the essay above.

Unfortunately, I did not scan Ito’s survey when I scanned the essay, and at this point I’m not entirely sure where my copy of “Epoch of the Cybertrons” is. Well, always something to dig up later, I guess…

Oct 15

Spoiler-Free Review: More Than Meets The Eye #22

TF_MTMTE_22_cvrAThis issue of More than Meets the Eye is a bit of an anomaly. It’s not a continuation of the issue before it and I am not quite sure if there is anything in it that relates to the Dark Cybertron story which will be the main storyline in both MTMTE and RiD until next spring. What it is though, is a light-hearted bit of relief from the darker plots and emotional shock therapy that we’ve had before. It’s been called “More than Meets the Eye – The Movie” for a good reason. Not only is it the last chance to see the core group from the Lost Light together for one last adventure, but it is also a fictional movie, as the premise of the issue is that at the beginning of their journey Rodimus asked Rewind to make a travelogue about their quest, giving him full access to all the cameras on board, so most of the issue is supposed to be this movie played back for us (or is it just us?).

Continue reading

Oct 10

IDW Announces Retro-Styled Transformers/G. I. Joe Crossover

ScioliTFJoeAt NYCC13, IDW announced a new Transformers/G. I. Joe crossover to be drawn and co-written (with John Barber) by Tom Scioli. There have been enough crossovers between Hasbro’s big 80s “boys” franchises that yet another one would really have to bring something new to the table, but Scioli, known for his heavily Jack Kirby-inspired art on Image’s Gødland and his own webcomic American Barbarian, looks like it definitely has something new to say.

You can check out the full story-so-far over on ComicsAlliance.