Before we head back to Denny Clay’s junkyard, we’re checking in on Frankie Greene’s VA Diamond White and her starring role in a new Marvel Disney+ cartoon, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur! The cosmic entity known as the Beyonder picks Lunella to convince him that humanity is worth keeping around, but she just wants to win the science fair! Can she learn to work with her annoying classmate Eduardo, win the fair, AND save the Earth? And is this show genuinely great or what? Join us this week for “The Beyonder”!
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Stasis Pod Episode #341: Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Beyonder
Comic Book Resources just dropped the news that an upcoming Deadpool special will feature the little-know Marvel characters Brute Force! Why am I posting this on a Transformers site? Because Brute Force, a book that got a whopping four issues out of its initial 4-issue limited series, a toy comic with no actual toy to tie in to, was created (at least in part) by Bob Budiansky, written by Simon Furman, and drawn by Jose Delbo.
In the last days of the 80s, with Transformers and G.I. Joe winding down, Marvel decided they wanted to put some of that talent they’d used to create characters and storylines for Hasbro into making their own “toyetic” IP that they could then license to a toy company. Brute Force was the result.
This is the second in a series of articles re-visiting Marvel’s version of Transformers, covering the 80 issues released in America and the 4-issue miniseries “The Headmasters.” Images are scanned from my personal copies of each comic.
…close enough.
Over the course of the rest of the original 4-issue miniseries, plot points similar to the cartoon’s “More Than Meets the Eye” are carried out: The Autobots establish a human-Cybertronian relationship with Earth in general and the Witwickies in particular; the Decepticons try to get energy; Starscream plots against Megatron; there are a few big battles; the general status quo is set.
But a couple things differ strongly throughout the arc.
This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of articles re-visiting Marvel’s version of Transformers, covering the 80 issues released in America and the 4-issue miniseries “The Headmasters.” Images are scanned from my personal copies of each comic.
Here we go again for the first time…
It was a world transformed.
In 1984, Marvel comics began a series of comics that would be the very first representation of Transformers in fiction, edited – and soon written – by Bob Budiansky, the same man who named most of the early characters and wrote the bios printed on the toy packaging.
Though I feel the animated cartoon that soon followed became, for most folks, the definitive version of the G1 story, the comic rumbled along far longer than the ‘toon lasted and morphed into its own totally unique version of the mythos.
I was a kid in the early 1990s, when Transformers was in decline, and my first introduction to the property was by way of an old Marvel comic I found at my local library. I spent much of my childhood scavenging yard sales, book stores, and flea markets for signs that Transformers once existed, and it oftentimes paid off in the odd issue of the Marvel comic, usually far distant in the chronology from any other that I owned. So I pieced this story together in my mind and it became just as cherished as the cartoon that I also adored.
Penciler Manny Galan may not have been a very polished artist when he worked on the Transformers: Generation 2 comic, but the man knew how to have fun with his generics. However, we must face the fact that his work only exposes the distinct lack of rockabilly throughout the rest of the Transformers multiverse.
