Where Has Our Vision Gone?

As Independence Day came around, it was depressing to think how far America has fallen.  Instead of a Great Society or Camelot or New Deal what we have now is a "vision" of building a wall to keep people out and to scrap all environmental laws to let polluters run amok on the off-chance they might create a few dirty, dangerous mining jobs.  And where our ruling class threatens to take healthcare from the old, disabled, and even children to give themselves and their rich friends a tax cut.

What's been lacking really since the early 60s, is a real progressive vision.  A vision of a future where all people benefit, not just the lucky few.  We let assassinations, Watergate, Reagan, the Bushes, 9/11, the Tea Party, and now Trump drag us down into the muck.  Instead of envisioning a better tomorrow, we're all too busy scrambling for crumbs like a bunch of rats in a sewer.  It's probably why so many of our entertainments these days are dystopian in nature:  The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and so on.

As we've seen with their disastrous "health care bill," our ruling class is focused only on gutting social programs so they can have more crumbs than anyone else.  And those in their defense say, "What's mine is mine.  Why should I help anyone else?"  (And then go to church on Sunday to do their lip service to Jesus.)  Poor people are constantly demonized as lazy, stupid, criminals, and worse.  It's justified by saying these people are moochers dragging everyone else down.

This meme someone on Facebook posted epitomizes this:

#5 is why all of Europe is Communist now...

It's sad if anyone actually believes this silly canonizing of the 1%.  Like all rich people earned their money with hard work and honesty, like the "old money" types like Paris Hilton, or the con men like Bernie Madoff, or even someone brilliant like Mark Zuckerberg by all accounts screwed over a lot of people to build Facebook.  To some extent I'm responsible for my financial situation, but I didn't ask to be laid off from my job, just like hundreds of thousands of other people in the last decade.  I mean let's face it, people who post shit like this are just one pink slip or one stock market crash away from being with us poors.  But since that day hasn't come yet they can look down their noses at us to protect the sainted rich.

This is exactly the crux of the problem.  We're so busy turning on each other, giving lip service to Christianity instead of actually practicing it.  We don't need walls and tax cuts for the rich; we need to make our country truly great by ensuring that everyone has a roof overhead, clothes on their back, food in their belly, clean water to drink, and the freedom to live up to their potential.  Maybe at one point we believed in that, though I don't think really in my lifetime.

I'm not a believer in religion but one thing I do believe in since I heard about it in whatever science class is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  It's a pretty simple theory that says you can't have real spiritual fulfillment until your basic needs are met.  It's pretty common sense when you think about it.  In the simplest terms, imagine how hard it is to concentrate at work if you don't eat breakfast, because your tummy is rumbling, making it hard to focus on other stuff.  So if people don't have a home, clothes, food, clean water, or the other essentials, we can't really expect them to find real happiness.  This is also what drives people to take drugs, commit crimes, and engage in other poor behavior.  Thus it behooves all of us to create the sort of country that provides for the well-being of its citizens.  If for our own survival if nothing else.

Whoever wants my vote in 2018 and 2020 needs to articulate that vision and not just the same old bullshit about "jobs" that never really seem to materialize. 

Do You Get the Concept?

I had an idea for Transformed Into Twins Too that was based on that original Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk is split into two people:  one good and one evil.  So the idea would be there's a science experiment or whatever and this guy is split into two women:  one who's good and sweet and one who's an icy dominatrix.  So I went to Dreamstime (because Adobe took over Fotolia and got rid of ala carte purchases and I don't want to pay $29.99 a month when I need like one or two pictures every few months) and they have the option when you click on a picture to see all the other pictures a model has appeared in on the site.  So I looked up dominatrixes, which is fairly fascinating, and then found one who also had a normal picture.  Then I put both on the cover to represent that there are two people with opposing personalities.

I'm just not sure if it'll be clear that these are two different people and not just the same person in two outfits.  Which technically the latter is true, but it's called Transformed Into TWINS so maybe that will make it clear.  Plus maybe someone will actually read the description on Amazon or the website or whatever--that would be a first.

What do you think?

The Other Comics I've Read Recently

While I spent a lot of time binging on Transformers comics recently, there were some other superhero-type ones I finally got around to reading too.  In part it's because I got a new Fire tablet on Prime Day so I wanted to read the stuff I had downloaded to the old tablet instead of re-downloading it. And I had to get a tooth pulled so I wasn't doing much else.

The Vision, Volume 1:  After reading Tom King's brilliant Omega Men, I was interested in reading his Vision series for Marvel, which is kind of like American Beauty or a John Updike novel only with synthezoids.  Attempting to become more human the cybernetic Avenger the Vision makes himself a wife and twins Viv and Vin and moves them all into a home in Alexandria, Virginia.  Things don't go how he plans though when a bad guy named Grim Reaper tries to murder his family while he's away, which nearly kills his daughter and unleashes a psychotic side to his wife's personality.  It's not really a superhero comic, though superheroics are referenced, more a comic about what it means to be human.  At some point I hope to get volume 2, which I think was also the conclusion. (4/5)

The Vision, Volume 2:  Well "some point" turned out to be about a week later since it was on sale on Amazon.  This completes the arc as the Avengers send Vision's "half-brother" Victor to spy on him and the family.  But when Vision's son Vin stumbles upon Victor reporting to the Avengers, Victor kills him.  The Vision then takes on the Avengers and in one of those bad comic book fights defeats Iron Man, Thor (Jane Foster), Captain America (Sam Wilson), Scarlet Witch, and Medusa in the span of like five panels.  But before he can finish the job, his wife sacrifices herself to save him.  Like the first part it's a good exploration of humanity and family.  Another excellent limited series from King; I should get around to his Rebirth Batman to see how he does with an actual ongoing. (4/5) (Fun Fact:  I recently bought the first two volumes of Rebirth era Batman but I haven't had the chance to read them yet.)

Justice League 3001, Volume 2:  I mostly enjoyed the first volume of this series that deals with clones of familiar heroes Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman and also has gender swapped versions of Green Lantern (Guy Gardner version) and the Flash.  That volume ended with Supergirl arriving from the 21st Century and then some evil androids showing up and blowing Superman's head off.  This picks up with Batman sacrificing himself to get the rest of the team to relative safety as the androids and their leader "Lady Styx" are taking over the whole galaxy.  Interestingly at this point then is for this volume the League is entirely female--which is maybe why it was canceled after issue 12.  I mean you kill off Batman and you don't have Harley Quinn involved it's hard to sell a DC comic series like that.  The impending cancellation really fucked things up as there was a lot of stuff left hanging and threads not wrapped up.  I'm not sure if they ever solved any of that in other DC titles or not.  Really brought down what was otherwise a decent story. (2.5/5)

Superwoman, Vol 1:  This is one of the lesser-known Rebirth era titles.  It borrows from the recent Thor storyline where Thor's former girlfriend Jane Foster gains Thor's powers but that power was also killing her.  When New 52 Superman dies, some of his power is absorbed by Lois Lane and Lana Lang.  Lois gets Superman's strength while Lana is like the "Electric Blue" era Superman, more specifically when he was split into a blue and a red guy since she has all his electrical powers but is red.  They form a team, each being called Superwoman, but on their first real mission to stop a rogue aircraft carrier, Lois is killed. Now it's up to Lana to stop the killer...with the help of Steel.  And Steel's niece.  And Steel's niece's girlfriend, who's some kind of witch.  And Steel's niece's other friends.  And a bunch of random citizens.  And Lex Luthor, who has created a suit of armor and started calling himself Superman.  The story was OK but I think it needed to be smaller.  When you're trying to introduce a new character it's nice if you actually focus on that character and not a whole bunch of other people.  I mean it'd be like if Detective Comics #27 in 1939 had introduced Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Batwoman, Spoiler, Azrael, Bluebird, and all the other Bat allies.  Batman would get lost in the shuffle.  I just think a smaller threat for the first volume would have worked better and lead into a bigger threat once the character is more firmly established.  Maybe that's just me.  It would also help if you're well-versed in the recent Superman comics to know what all is going on. (2.5/5)

Teen Titans:  The Judas Contract:  This four-issue limited series was recently adapted into an animated movie I haven't gotten around to watching.  The gist is that when the mercenary Deathstroke's son dies, he takes up a contract to kill the Teen Titans.  To do this he plants a mole in their midst in the form of a girl named Terra who has the power to control the ground with earthquakes and mountains of dirt and crap like that.  Anyway, it's kind of lame how in the second issue we're shown in flashback how Deathstroke captures all of the Titans except Dick Grayson, who then adopts a godawful disco suit and starts calling himself Nightwing.  Since it's like 35 years later you can safely assume the Titans survive.  I guess in 1982 this was an important story but by itself it's really no big deal. I'm not sure how the movie compares, though I assume there are better costumes. (2.5/5)

Mother Panic, Volume 1:  The world needed another Batman-related comic book series like it needed another Spider-Man movie reboot franchise, but while it wasn't needed, Mother Panic is not bad. The slant on this is: what if Paris Hilton were a Caped Crusader at night? Violet Paige is a rich celebrity party girl whose father died mysteriously and whose mother suffers from early-onset Alzheimer's. (The latter is not an original concept; I did that with the aunt of my superhero Emma Earl in my Tales of the Scarlet Knight series back in 2009. Suck it Gerard Way.) She went to a boarding school that was a cover for a place that performed medical experiments on its children, sort of like the place Wade Wilson goes to in Deadpool. In this case it made Violet stronger than average. And then...somehow she got a white costume that made me think of a fox and a fancy glider thing and goes looking for revenge on people who put her in that position. In the first three comics she also inadvertently saves some children and encounters Batwoman, who like Violet is a lesbian, so maybe they can do something with that later. The second half of this first volume then has her fighting another student from the boarding school who had been given loads of plastic surgery. And she makes friends with this guy called Ratcatcher who talks to rats. (I had a guy like that in my Tales of the Scarlet Knight series too. Suck it again, Gerard Way.)  Really I can't say I liked this a lot but I also can't say I didn't like it. I guess I'd have to see more of it to decide. Maybe if I get a free review copy of that I will. (3/5)

Secret Wars:  For about 30 years Marvel mocked DC for rebooting their universe with Crisis on Infinite Earths back in 1985 and its two sequels in later decades.  But in 2015 Marvel pretty much does the same thing while referencing its 1984 series Secret Wars, despite that there really isn't so much a secret WAR so much as a secret destruction and rebuilding of the universe.  Not a lot of it makes much sense unless you're really well-versed on Marvel comics for the last 50 years (which I'm not) but basically when all the various parts of the "multiverse" were collapsing for...reasons, Dr. Doom uses god-like power to stitch together a planet called "Battleworld" with a bunch of different fiefdoms that like Disney World each have a different theme:  one is full of Marvel Zombies, another Old Man Logan, another the "Ultimate" Marvel comics universe, another for Age of Ultron, and so on.  A few heroes like Reed Richards, Star-Lord, and Spider-Man escaped all this and try to stop Doom.  It was all pretty lame and boring, because again I'm an outsider for the most part.  And it's the sort of series where like IDW's Revolution you really need to read all the side issues, which for this there were probably like 50 of them.  The volume I got from Amazon only had the main 9 issues, so I wasn't going to spend a bunch more money on this. (2/5)

Civil War II:  Following Secret Wars, this was the next big Marvel "event" series.  It shamelessly rips off Minority Report when a new Inhuman named Ulysses (who went to Ohio State so you know he just suuuuucks) who has visions of the future shows up.  Captain Marvel instantly wants to use these visions to try to prevent future disasters, even when her boyfriend James "War Machine" Rhodes is killed by Thanos and She-Hulk is potentially crippled.  (Is she?  We never really get back to that.)  Iron Man disagrees and kidnaps the kid to study his brain and reveal what the heroes are already finding out:  the predictions are not iron clad (pun intended).  When there's a vision of the Hulk killing everyone, they rush to confront Bruce Banner, who's then killed by Hawkeye before he can change into the Hulk.  Hawkeye walks free thanks to a video will Banner left that appointed Hawkeye to kill him if he should start Hulking out again.  And then there are fights for no good reason.  The original Civil War had something big at stake:  whether superheroes would be forced to register with the government, exposing their secret identities.  That would have had huge implications, whereas this really doesn't, especially since Ulysses is conveniently beamed up by the Watchers or Beyonders or some higher alien lifeform at the end.  This is just a philosophical question that isn't all that compelling for a story that's supposed to shake up the Marvel universe.  You might get more out of it if you read the side issues, but why bother?  Six months later they launched into the NEXT "event" series: Secret Empire.  Which will launch into the next event, and so on ad nauseum.  (2/5)

I think by now I've read just about every big Marvel event of this century.  The best of the lot are Civil War, House of M, and Age of Ultron.  Avengers vs X-Men, Secret Invasion and Original Sins were OK.  Fear Itself, Secret Wars, and Civil War II were pretty meh.  Siege was lame.  I don't even follow Marvel comics monthly and I have event fatigue.

Lost Light Leads the Way for Transformers Comics

A little over a week ago I talked about some of the old Transformers comics I read.  I also read a bunch of the newer ones.  The continuity of them all is a little confusing to me because I wasn't paying attention for the last 20 years really.  It would probably help if I read them all in chronological order, but oh well.

Stormbringer:  I'll admit I only bought this because Jetfire was on the cover of the first issue.  For whatever reason Jetfire doesn't get that much love in the comics, but this 4-issue limited series starts with Jetfire leading an expedition to the Transformers homeworld of Cybertron that was thought to be barren, but there's something still down there!  Soon there's an evil threatening the universe and the Autobots have to stop it.  (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  The Jetfire in this is the 2000s version that I have on my shelf next to the original.)

All Hail Megatron:  The Decepticons have triumphed!  Optimus Prime lies near death and the Autobots stranded on the barren Cybertron (see above), leaving the Decepticons on Earth.  They soon start to stomp the human race, which has almost no answer for the giant robots.  Of course New York is one of their primary targets.  Eventually Prime gets fixed and saves the day.  What's kind of annoying is the first 12 issues are the whole story but they have 4 additional issues that seemed to come along later and deal with some side issues and fill in some gaps.  They weren't really all that essential. (3/5)

Sins of the Wreckers:  This is a sequel to the miniseries Last Stand of the Wreckers where the Autobot special forces team (and a human girl) raided a Decepticon prison to steal some valuable intelligence and free the prisoners.  In the process several characters made heroic sacrifices.  Like many sequels, this disappoints in living up to the original.  There's more metaphysical bullshit and lots more moping this time around as the Wreckers are reunited to save everyone's least favorite Autobot--Prowl. (Sorry Chris.)  Prowl's run into someone as treacherous and brilliant as he is:  Tarantulus!  It was interesting how they used animal characters from the original series, Beast Wars, and some other series to form a sort of all animal faction, but otherwise it was not nearly as good.  (2/5) (Fun Fact:  The way Prowl and Tarantulus make a "son" is similar to what I did all the way back in 1997 in my fanfic novel Xenophobia.  Not the first time IDW has ripped me off.)

Titans Return:  There's a line of toys labeled Titans Return so I thought it would be a big deal but this volume doesn't make it seem that way.  Somehow the evil Sentinel Prime has returned to life after 4 million years and raises an army of giant Transformers known as Titans.  And he sends them to Cybertron.  That's all that's covered here.  I guess it picks up later in the new Til All Are One series, which made this a nonevent. (2/5)

Revolution:  This was the brainchild of Hasbro to connect a bunch of toy properties together:  Transformers, GI JOE, MASK, Micronauts, ROM Space Knight, and Action Man.  I only ever played with the first two.  I knew of MASK but the rest I hadn't really paid much attention to.  Anyway, the setup is that Optimus Prime has essentially made himself ruler of Earth to protect it from other alien races.  Humans don't take kindly to that and so GI JOE is brought out of mothballs and using a captured Transformer they also create the MASK vehicles.  Action Man is a British agent who works with the JOEs and Rom and the Micronauts show up later.  While at first it's humans vs. Cybertronians, soon a new threat rises.  It was OK but like I said I didn't really follow most of these properties so I didn't get some of what was going on.  It would probably help to have read all the side issues for the individual properties.  Anyway, I think Hasbro has their sights on doing something similar with the movies, or they were until the latest Transformers movie did kind of meh.  And the GI JOE movies sucked.  They really might want to reconsider things. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  MASK stands for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand; as a Robot Chicken song asked, Do they know Command isn't spelled with a K?)

More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light

A while back I read the first 4 or 5 volumes of the More Than Meets the Eye series.  The basic premise is that former Autobot leader Rodimus Prime goes looking for the mythical Knights of Cybertron and brings a bunch of wacky characters with him on a ship called the Lost Light.  The actual quest plays only a small role though as there's more of a Star Trek-type feel where they visit different planets and face some internal struggles and such.

In my A to Z Challenge I wrote about some of the characters in the series like Chromedome, Cyclonus, and Whirl; many of these characters were pretty useless in previous incarnations of Transformers comics and TV shows but they were given new life in this series because they're given actual personalities and histories.  The camaraderie between the characters is largely what propels this series.

Recently I picked up where I left off.  Following the Dark Cybertron miniseries, the evil Megatron has switched sides.  He manipulates events to get assigned to the Lost Light as they resume their quest.  Optimus Prime makes him co-captain with Rodimus so that Megatron will be so busy he'll stay out of trouble.

Instead of the megalomaniac we've come to know and love this Megatron started as a political writer battling against the "Functionalist" regime that decreed because you turned into a mining machine, mining was all you'd ever do.  Megatron's at first peaceful movement eventually turns violent and he basically got lost in the monster he created until Bumblebee's sacrifice in Dark Cybertron woke him up and now he's decided to try to make amends for murdering billions of beings across several planets.  It does make him a lot more three-dimensional than previous versions of the character.

Soon the ship runs into some trouble when they find another Lost Light, one that's destroyed and the crew dead--except for the diminutive Rewind, Chromedome's life partner; the original Rewind was killed a while back.  This is a quantum duplicate who also reveals that Autobot weapons engineer Brainstorm is actually a Decepticon agent.  At that point Brainstorm uses a time machine he built that looks like an ordinary briefcase to go back to the early days of Cybertron.  Rodimus, Megatron, and some of the crew follow using the quantum duplicate on the wrecked version of the ship.  They jump back through a few crucial events in the past until they reach the moment of Megatron's creation.  Brainstorm's aim is to kill Megatron and prevent the Great War from ever happening.  But with some cajoling he gets cold feet.

Later they visit a former Autobot leader Thunderclash who has some information to help their quest, except he's comatose.  Soon other bots start going offline too.  Eventually the cause is traced to personality ticks.  As in alien bugs that are attracted to personal magnetism, especially charisma.

Another fun issue has the bartender Swerve going into a coma of his own and projecting an Earth that's cobbled together out of old human sitcoms.  His comrades adopt human guise to search the imaginary planet for him.  Which part of the fun is seeing what form each character will take.  Some like Ultra Magnus, Cyclonus, and Bluestreak actually take on female forms while Megatron kind of looks like Magneto.

The final arc of More Than Meets the Eye has the crew visiting the "Necroworld" that's the home to the Transformers version of the Grim Reaper.  As they investigate the planet, a whole army of Decepticons show up to try to slaughter them.  Meanwhile, former Autobot spy Getaway (whose toy for some reason had its name changed to Breakaway) has commandeered the Lost Light, making it impossible for Rodimus and crew to escape the planet.  With a lot of trickeration they make their final stand and destroy the bad guys.

From there the series name changes to Lost Light, which really makes more sense.  It makes it easier to differentiate between that series and the series set on Cybertron, that used to be called Robots in Disguise, but is now Til All Are One...I think.  I haven't really gotten into it because it's a different dynamic.  It's more of a traditional series while More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light is a lot more fun with its focus on the ragtag band of misfits.  And like I mentioned there's a Star Trek feel that I like.

Another great thing about it:  no humans!  I mean except when the robots use their holographic human projections.  Otherwise there are no humans in the crew and they don't spend any time on Earth.  Which one thing I've never really liked is humans getting involved in Transformers stuff.  It's OK if they tag along like Spike in the old cartoon but when they fight Transformers directly like Circuit Breaker in the US comic or GI JOE in a miniseries (and Revolution above) it just annoys me because the idea of humans being able to stop giant fucking robots is laughable.  It's like fighting Godzilla or King Kong.  And really the focus of Transformers should be on the robots, not on humans, which is one of the many reasons I don't like the Bay movies.  Yes I know we need humans because some dopes won't go watch the movie otherwise, but the idea that human soldiers can blow up sophisticated alien robots with a rocket launcher is too fucking ridiculous for me to buy into.  So not having humans around keeps the focus solely on the Transformers, which is a good thing.  You don't have 5-foot squishy beings inexplicably blowing up 50-foot metal aliens.

(As an addendum to my rant in the last paragraph, what was so brilliant in Robotech is that humans built their own kind of Transformers so they could fighting giant alien invaders.  Now in the Bay movies if humans made their own Veritech-type machines that would be one thing, but just shooting a "sabot round" and blowing up a goddamned alien robot that's 5 million years old?  Not buying it.)

I suppose some readers wouldn't like the homoeroticism between some of the Transformers like Chromedome/Rewind and Tailgate/Cyclonus; even I find it a little annoying at times when they're bickering like old married couples.  But like Star Trek--or a sitcom as that one issue compares it to--it's the bond between the core group of characters that makes it worth reading.  I'd really love for this to become a TV series because it's just so damned much fun.

BTW, this has the unique distinction of being the only ongoing series I've read from start to its most current issue.  If I had the money to spend I'd subscribe to it; maybe I'll decide to pony up the $4 a month.

My Opposition to the New Doctor Who

Last Sunday they announced they were finally going to have a female Doctor Who and "the Internet went nuts" as a Mashable headline would say.  There were plenty of trolls whining and bitching and posting memes about it and people supporting it and many people who didn't give a shit.

My opposition has nothing to do with sexism or misogyny or "tradition" or any of that.  My opposition is that next year they'll do this and people will say how brilliant it is and I'll just be sitting there saying to myself, "Shit, dude, I've done this 300 fucking times already!"  I've written like 300 gender swap stories of men turning into women but when a mainstream-ish show does it, it's brilliant and genius and blah blah blah.  Bah humbug.

I'm being about 90% facetious here but it would kind of annoy me.  I'd be curious to watch the first episode or two just to see how they deal with it versus how I do.  Professional curiosity I guess you'd call it.  I don't have BBC but maybe I'd buy it from Amazon or something.

The whole Doctor Who situation reminds me of when back in 2006 or so the popular Pope John Paul II died and they had to pick a new one.  People were hoping they might pick someone young or a minority or something to shake things up but then they picked that old white guy no one really gave a shit about.  He was an OK placeholder for a few years and then when they had to pick another new pope they decided to be riskier and chose a more "radical" South American guy who's now Pope Francis.  Moffatt kind of did the same thing in when he had to replace a popular Doctor and people wanted something more radical he wussed out and picked some old white guy.  Then the next time he decides to swing for the fences.  So hopefully this lady is Pope Francis and not one of those lame ones no one gives a shit about.

A Happy Accident That Made for Good TV

A few weeks ago as part of my Transformers nostalgia kick I rewatched the Beast Wars TV series from 1996-99.  It was for the most part a good show, much better than the Bay movies or even the original cartoon series.  The reason is something that the writers and producers acknowledged in a making of featurette:  because the CGI animation limited the number of characters, it forced the writers to focus more on those characters and in the process make them more well-rounded than in the previous show.

It's really common sense:  fewer people means more time dedicated to them.  It's the same for any TV show, book, or movie.  It's why I like to keep casts as small as possible.  I don't give characters children or wives or parents if they're not going to be of use in the story.  Childless, orphaned bachelors are usually the best.

The funny thing is this isn't something the writers intended.  It was just the nature of the beast (pun intended) that because they only had 14 characters at a time for budget reasons, they couldn't just have other characters show up.  You couldn't have a Skids or Red Alert or Grapple show up for an episode or two and disappear because it wouldn't be cost effective.  The character used the least was Tigerhawk, a fusion of Tigatron and Airrazor who only appeared in the last three episodes.  Otherwise everyone else lasted at least 13 episodes.  But most of the characters went through a change or two during the series so that involved a little remodeling.  But that's not really the same and in a way it sometimes helped the characters grow.

The same thing pretty much happened with Transformers Prime, again because the CGI limited the number of characters.  They probably did have more than Beast Wars, but not too many more.  So again the fewer the characters, the more story time they could occupy, which made them better characters.

Of course each Bay movie only has a few robots in it but the problem is the movies are too focused on explosions and T&A shots to worry about characterizing the robots.  They just give each one a name and maybe a funny accent.  Isn't that all you need?

Like I said it's something you can use in writing as well.  The fewer characters you have, the more pages you can allocate to them.  That makes them better characters.  The worst are books with so many characters that the author has to include a list of them at the front of the book.  It's like even the author knows there are so many characters that you can't be expected to remember them.

So there you go, that's how a happy accident made for a better show.

On a side note, Beast Wars was probably one of the first shows that really harnessed the power of the Internet.  As the writers admitted, they didn't know a lot about Transformers when they took the gig.  Transformers newsgroups and websites helped them to learn about the property in its various forms.  That was especially useful at the end of Season 2 and into Season 3 when the Maximals find the Ark that houses all of the original Transformers like Optimus Prime who don't wake up until 1984 when the volcano they crashed into erupts.  The writers put a few Easter eggs into episodes for some of the fans.  My nemesis HooksX had his site referenced in a line of dialogue.  I think there was also a "Sector Hooks" in one episode.  At one point there was also an "Override Code ATT," ATT being the initials of the Transformers newsgroup.  There are probably some others but it's been almost 20 years so I don't really remember who all used to hang out there.  Sadly I never got an Easter egg but I did interview writer Larry DiTillio for a website.

Now you know...and knowing is half the battle! (That's GI JOE but still...)

Showrunning is Hard According to Showrunners

On the streaming service TubiTV I watched a documentary from 2013 or so called Showrunners about the people who manage TV shows, usually the creator and/or executive producer.  They talked to guys like JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon and lesser known names behind shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Boardwalk Empire, The Shield, House of Lies, Leverage, Spartacus, Rizzoli & Isles, and Men of a Certain Age.  Most of those shows are on cable, with many on pay channels, where there's a little bit of a different dynamic as you don't have network executives interfering so much because there's less commercial pressure given you don't have to sell ads.

The gist of the movie:  it's really, really hard to create a show and then to maintain it.  That's why showrunners often burn out after a few seasons.  According to the documentary there are very, very few showrunners who are over 55 because it just takes such a toll.

You might wonder why that is, well, it's because the showrunner is usually a writer, producer, and director who has to oversee every aspect of the operation.  It starts with a script but then there's dealing with the network, the actors, and the crew, putting out all the various fires along the way.  It's basically a 24/7 job for nearly the entire year as just when you're wrapping one season it's time to start planning another.

According to the documentary the writing is what comes first.  There's usually a "writer's room" where they go through various ideas and then work on a script.  While most scripts are credited to only one or two people, the showrunner is usually intimately involved along with other writers and producers to fine-tune the whole thing.

Then you've got to hire a director and actors and get the sets and props and all that other stuff ready.  During all of this the network will probably try to butt in, though more with a pilot than future episodes.  And then there's the filming, where any number of things can go wrong.  Finally there's promoting the show.  I guess it makes sense why so many series cut down to 10 episodes or even less; it gives the showrunner a chance to breathe.

Writing a novel is in some ways like being the showrunner.  You've got to obviously come up with the concept and then write the thing.  Then there's the editing and the promotion.  If you're a self-published author then all of this stuff you're doing on your own.  Or you could have a publisher that butts in like the network executives.

Like when showrunners have to deal with network execs, a novelist dealing with a publisher has to decide what's worth fighting for and what isn't.  Some changes are so minor that they're easy to make.  Others might be so massive that you have to stand your ground and risk cancellation--or being fired for TV showrunners.

Though I didn't necessarily know a lot about TV in 2002 I wrote a novel that covers a lot of this stuff in The Leading Men.  The showrunner of a superhero series called The Scarlet Knight (originally and then I changed it later I think) is an older guy named Gus who is looking to go out on top with one last big hit.  His parts of the book focus on dealing with all the stuff they talk about in the documentary:  network interference, shooting difficulties, temperamental actors, and the public all while juggling his family too.  So hey, I knew what I was talking about!  That didn't stop a UK reviewer from saying she HATED the prologue so much she couldn't read the rest of the book.  I haven't the faintest idea what would be so upsetting in the first 10 pages or so.

Anyway, the funny thing in 2017 is that most of the shows they talk about have either been cancelled or voluntarily left the airwaves.  All the ones I mentioned in the beginning except I think House of Lies and Rizzoli & Isles are gone now.  Men of a Certain Age got cancelled during the shooting of the documentary, so that allowed them to get kind of a before-and-after look.  Needless to say it's not all that fun when your show is axed, especially after the first episode of the second season.  Ouch.  Though some have already gone on to new things, like the showrunner of Spartacus was the showrunner for the first season of Daredevil on Netflix, but I guess because it's so hard he quit after one season.

Speaking of, though streaming shows were still relatively in their infancy in 2013 it would have been nice if they'd talked to someone from a Netflix or Hulu series of the time.  They did talk to someone from a show called Husbands on CW Seed, so that's kind of close.  I'm sure streaming shows are as much work as their counterparts on HBO or Showtime, but I'm sure there are different metrics for success and all that; it would have been nice to know how they compare and contrast.

The showrunner I wished they'd talked to was Seth MacFarlane.  Animated shows are still a lot of work, especially when you're doing multiple characters on at the time 3 series.  Have to wonder if he just doesn't sleep for weeks.  I suppose he was too busy with all those shows and movies and stuff to talk to a documentary crew, right?  Makes sense.  JJ Abrams is involved with multiple shows and movies but he doesn't really "run" any of the TV shows so that gives him time for the movies like The Force Awakens and to executive produce other movies.  That's kinda having your cake and eating it too because you get some creative control and a nice paycheck without all the work.  We should all be so lucky. 

Anyway, next time you're watching TV, take a look at the Created By credit and think of all the work that he/she put into it.

Because You (Didn't) Demand It: Stuff I Watched

I thought of not doing these entries anymore since hardly anyone seems to care, but I still get a kick out of them and it's my blog so fuck it.

The LEGO Batman Movie:  A spin-off of The LEGO Movie, this pits Will Arnett's boastful, blustering LEGO Batman against all his familiar foes like the Joker, Bane, Riddler, etc. and also against Voldemort, King Kong, Godzilla, and the Wicked Witch of the West.  This is after the Joker releases all the worst of the worst from the Phantom Zone.  Like its predecessor, the movie has plenty of fun bits with kid and adult-oriented jokes.  There are a few things I didn't like.  Most of the Batman villains don't do a whole lot, getting maybe a line or two.  Not just lame ones like Egghead but iconic ones like Penguin, Catwoman, and Mr. Freeze barely get any time at all.  Also not sure why they made Barbara Gordon the commissioner instead of commissioner's daughter; Batman lusting after her is just kind of weird when you think of the comics/TV shows.  Since it's a kid's movie they had to soften mentions of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson's parents dying; the latter they don't really say how they died.  A plot hole I wondered about:  the Phantom Zone is introduced with a news segment talking about Superman putting Zod in there...so why isn't Zod part of the bad guys who gets loose?  And why doesn't Superman go looking for his Phantom Zone Projector?  And why doesn't the Justice League show up when everything is going to hell in Gotham?  None of them have a smart phone or anything to alert them to a huge threat?  And if you cast Ralph Fiennes as Alfred, why have someone else do the voice for Voldemort, which was the character Fiennes portrayed in the live action movies?  I'm overthinking it I suppose. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Director Chris McKay cut his teeth on this sort of project for years on Adult Swim's Robot Chicken.  That show's co-creator Seth Green voices King Kong as well.)

American Pastoral:  This is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from Philip Roth.  After a clunky framing device at a class reunion with David Stathairn as the stand-in for Philip Roth, we begin the story of Seymour "Swede" Levov (Ewan McGregor), who seemed to have it all:  a beautiful former beauty queen wife (Jennifer Connelly) and a young daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning).  They live on a farm outside of Newark, New Jersey, where the Swede runs his father's glove factory.  Everything is pretty much going swimmingly (except Merry has a stutter) until the 60s come along.  There are race riots in Newark and Merry joins the anti-war movement.  When she blows up the local post office and goes on the lam, the Swede's idyllic life is destroyed.  Of course the Swede is a metaphor for American innocence, postwar.  The tragedy of the Swede is he's a guy who did all the things you were supposed to do after the war and it all went to hell on him.  He was a man betrayed by the times he lived in, promises made by the system that it couldn't keep.  As many of us have found out since then, the "American Dream" is just that--a Dream.  This was a well-made, well-acted movie so I'm not sure why this didn't seem to get any awards consideration last year. (4/5)  (Fun Fact:  There's a bit of irony in that it's American Pastoral and it's starring and directed by Ewan McGregor, a Scotsman.)

Captain Fantastic:  Viggo Mortensen stars as a dad who is raising his six kids in a remote compound.  They hunt and forage all their food, make their own clothes, and are taught literature, science, math, and so forth far beyond what kids their age know.  Then their mother kills herself in a hospital and her body is taken to New Mexico so road trip!  They pile into their converted school bus and get on the highway.  Naturally there's a lot of culture shock.  While the kids are book smart and have survival skills their social skills are fairly lacking.  The oldest boy meets a girl and proposes marriage like 2 hours later--awkward!  But while they might not have social skills, their way of life certainly has some advantages.  They're amazed by how fat people in the outside world are and the 8 year old kid knows more about history and politics than two normal teenagers.  Really it would be great if we could adapt some of that into raising all our children in America.  Maybe not the kids running around with knives and bows and eating the hearts of deer but the exercise and nutrition and book learning are far better than what most parents do for their kids, just feeding them processed slop and putting them in front of the TV.  There is I'm sure a happy middle ground.  The movie lags a little in the third act, but otherwise it was a great dramedy.  (4/5)

Spilt Milk:  This low budget indie comedy features no one you've ever heard of in the story of a grocery store manager who along with two other employees and a few customers is held up by his former best friend.  Since the safe won't open until  5am he keeps everyone captive and in the process they all start to bond, especially when some real hardcore thieves turn up.  It was a fun movie for the most part.  I had to wonder whether they filmed it in an actual grocery store if they like took over an abandoned space for the shoot.  Would have been annoying to have to stock all that stuff. (3/5)

Walter:  After his father dies, young Walter starts to believe he's the son of God with the ability to judge whether people will go to Heaven or Hell.  He works at a movie theater because clearly that's the best place, right?  But then he's haunted by a ghost who demands he be sent one way or the other.  The ghost also has a connection to Walter's past.  It was a fairly good dramedy for the most part. (2.5/5)

Nerve:  This was based on a novel I guess but really it's like an extra-long episode of Netflix's Black Mirror.  A girl's friend is in this online game called Nerve where people accept dares for money while "Watchers" pay to watch them.  The girl then starts to pplay to show up her friend and takes on increasingly dangerous dares with a strange boy.  Mayhem ensues.  It's OK but like I said you can just watch Black Mirror on Netflix and it's shorter. (2.5/5)

Popstar:  A boy band member goes solo and becomes an overly entitled ass until his career faces a downturn and he starts to wake up.  It's a fairly amusing look at the music industry. (2/5)

Doomed:  This documentary deals with the Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four from the early 90s.  In those days Marvel movies were crap and basically sold to the lowest bidder, in this case Corman and a German.  They set out to make the movie for under a million bucks.  As you might expect, this meant cutting a lot of corners:  no name actors, no name director, and cheap effects.  But when it was done filming, the producers basically went silent.  The director, editor, and others continued working to finish the film and the actors went to ComicCon and other places to promote it.  They were supposed to have a big screening at the Mall of America when the plug got pulled.  Why that is remains a mystery.  Some say it was never really going to be made to start with, that it was just to hold on to the rights.  Marvel chief Avi Arad claims he paid to keep it from seeing the light of day.  It would be nice if this documentary could get to the truth, but it doesn't.  They really needed to go Michael Moore on Corman, Arad, and Stan Lee, but they settle for just raising the questions without answering them.  Naturally the film has seen the light of day through bootlegs; it just never got a real release.  Had it been released it's unlikely it would have been a huge hit and really since the first big studio version wasn't until 2005 they could have easily released this and then released the big studio version and no one would have cared.  The movie has actually gotten a lot more notoriety than it ever would have thanks to not releasing it, because people always want what they can't have. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The director kept a sign in list for actors who auditioned.  One was Mark Ruffalo, who almost 20 years later would become Bruce Banner in The Avengers.)

The Goods:  Jeremy Piven is a car salesman who takes a freelance gig to sell an entire lot of cars over a 4th of July weekend.  They do this through a variety of sleazy means.  It's fun though fairly amusing.  The cast also includes Ving Rhames, Will Farrell, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong, and TJ Miller in a small role.  (2.5/5)

23 Palms:  Mashup of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino as in a weird small desert town a bunch of bad people are fighting over a McGuffin black bag.  I kind of tuned out of most of it. (2/5)

The Signal:  Three college kids try to track down a hacker and end up in the Nevada desert.  Then they wake up to find alien limbs and superpowers.  They're then hunted by government agents led by Laurence Fishburne, who basically reheats Morpheus from The Matrix.  The grim and gritty style reminded me of the 2015 Fantastic 4 reboot that came a year later.  That's not really good thing. (2/5)

A.C.O.D.:  Park & Recreation's Adam Scott stars as an Adult Child of Divorce whose parents made his life about as bad as it can be without actual physical abuse.  Now as his younger brother gets married, his parents are suddenly getting back together and he can't deal with it.  It has some funny moments but the end skips forward a year to a wedding for...someone.  All that happens is the father tells a rambling story about Portuguese whores.  So who was getting married? WTF, movie, throw me a fricking bone! (2/5) (Fun Fact:  I watched part of this in May 2015 when I went with my brother to Louisville, but until a couple weeks ago I hadn't watched the whole thing.)

Beyond Re-Animator:  This long-gestating sequel takes place in a prison (a prison in Spain IRL) about 15 years later.  The evil Dr. West is still futzing around with reanimating dead stuff and is helped by the prison's new doctor.  When a reporter who looked more like a cocktail waitress is killed in a riot, they reanimate her and a rat and some other people and it was all pretty boring.  (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  If Dr. West seems familiar (especially his voice) it's because Jeffrey Combs has played numerous characters in various Star Trek franchises like Weyoun the Vorta in DS9 and the Andorrian in Enterprise.)

Chopping Mall:  Imagine if Short Circuit happened in a mall and instead of being goofy "Johnny 5" went on a killing spree?  That's basically this movie, where security guard robots run amok after hours, murdering mall staff. The movie is only 76 minutes with credits and I think half of that is just screaming.  Pretty lame, forgettable horror movie.  Good thing we went back to just having pudgy losers or ghetto kids as our security guards. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  If this happened today there wouldn't be nearly as many places for the kids to draw weapons from as 60% of the stores in the mall would be empty.  The same for a Dawn of the Dead situation.)

Rampage: President Down:  From legendary schlock filmmaker Uwe Boll comes this movie about a guy who improbably kills the president, vice president, and secretary of defense with a sniper rifle from over a mile away.  But you don't actually see that so you have to take the word of some of the worst fake newscasts ever.  The killer is like a really militant Occupy Wall Street kind of guy living in a Unabomber-style shack.  As you'd expect from Boll, it's all pretty stupid, to the point he makes Michael Bay look like Woody Allen.  One of the lame reporters tries to interview an FBI agent with what looks like a duster.  It's like someone just went to the dollar store and bought a duster and painted it black and handed it to the actress for a microphone.  Couldn't they have found a toy one and spray painted it silver or something? The laziness doesn't stop there.  After the president and vice-president are killed the "nation affairs secretary" takes over.  What the fuck is "Nation Affairs?"  Apparently Boll couldn't use his phone to go on Wikipedia and look up the actual line of succession.  It was so stupid that I just quit. (0/5) (Fun Fact:  But I did agree with some of the things the killer guy was saying on his blog, like how parents naively hope their kids will have things better when most likely they won't.  Just the whole murdering people you don't agree with wasn't the best way to go about it.)

Bad Ass 2:  Bad Asses:  Danny Trejo and Danny Glover go on a rampage in LA to avenge...someone for...reasons.  Does it really matter?  It's just a dumb action movie in the Death Wish style only instead of Charles Brosnan you have Danny Trejo looking like Fidel Castro with a ponytail. (2/5)

Pod People:  This lame early 80s movie features a boy who finds an egg that hatches into a weird Alf-looking alien he names Trumpy (for Donald Trump?) whose identical twin meanwhile goes on a killing spree.  The awful effects and cringe-worthy acting are why it ended up on MST3K in 1991. (1/5)

Wizards of the Lost Kingdom:  This is part of the MST3K revival series on Netflix.  According to IMDB the lengthy intro to the movie uses footage from an entirely different movie, probably to save money.  The real movie is about a boy in a lavender leotard and tights who has magic powers and with the help of a drunken warrior and a Wampa-type thing that looks like it was made with white shag carpeting the kid takes on an evil wizard who looked like he could have been Oscar Isaac's father.  The fight scenes only needed the POW! and BLAM! cards to be on par with Batman '66.  It was pretty awful. (1/5)

What could be worse than that?  Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II!  Also on the MST3K revival series, there was a sequel of sorts.  None of the same characters are in it, though.  As the riffers suggest, they probably just took some lame fantasy movie and slapped a new title on it to take advantage of the first movie's massive popularity...sarcasm noted.  Anyway, an old Santa-looking guy has to train a bratty teen who's the most annoying Chosen One since Anakin in the Star Wars prequels.  Then there are some even worse choreographed fights against 3 wizards with the help of David Carradine.  The only good thing is this was so awful the series didn't become a trilogy. (1/5)

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf:  This was on the MeTV late night show Svengoolie, not MST3K or Rifftrax.  Anyway, it's a crappy werewolf movie where a guy gets bitten by a werewolf and then turns into one on a weekend up in the country with his kid and ex-wife.  Besides the acting and special effects, the worst part is there was this cult of annoying hippies and the fucking werewolf doesn't eat any of them!  Come on, it's not like they're real people; they're just obnoxious hippies!  No one will miss them!  In fact eating them is for the public good.  What kind of shitty horror movie wastes the opportunity to slaughter perfectly good hippies?  (0/5)

At the Earth's Core:  Another one from the MST3K revival.  Peter Cushing (Tarkin from Star Wars and zombie Tarkin in Rogue One) and a former student build a giant drill called the Iron Mole (I am Iron Mole duh duh duh duh duh...) and end up underground where there are people (who know English--maybe they had the same tutor as the Amazons in Wonder Woman) being enslaved by pig-like dudes who are controlled by rubber standing pteradon things and have to overthrow them.  Pretty cheesy effects and lame acting.  I really have no idea how faithful it is to the Edgar Rice Burroughs story it's based on.  Did that come before or after Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth?  It is I think largely the same premise.  Hurm. (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  This came out in 1976, the year before Star Wars.)

Future Force:  In the future of 1991, the police have been replaced with a bunch of slimy bounty hunters.  One of these is played by David Carradine, who despite also being a producer gives negative a trillion fucks about anything that's going on.  There's a hilarious moment during a low speed chase in LA when the bad guys go off a cliff.  A cliff in Los Angeles.  WTF?!  Also David Carradine has this Power Glove thing that runs on a remote...a remote with two buttons; despite that he keeps hitting the same button, the glove does different stuff.  Just awful all the way around. (1/5)

Megaforce:  Ironically (or not) this came out in 1982 at about the same time as Hasbro was releasing its new line of GI JOE toys.  Megaforce was basically a cut-rate GI JOE team with special vehicles and members from different nations with code names, though Megaforce has far more sparkling gold jumpsuits and a way lamer enemy who doesn't have a shiny facemask or even a cool name.  Basically the plot revolves around Megaforce trying to capture some general guy for...reasons so they invade his country by landing a bunch of armed motorcycles and go karts.  But then the UN or whoever the old British guy from Knight Rider represents gets cold feet and abandons Megaforce.  So then like Dunkirk their great victory is escaping with their lives, though not with their equipment, so the bad guy not only survives, he also has a bunch of neat new motorcycles and go karts.  Yet the head of Megaforce still thinks this was a big win.  As you can guess the plot is pretty stupid, the vehicles lame, and costumes lamer still.  The bald lady from Star Trek the Motion Picture is in this but contributes nothing to the final battle so I have no idea why she was even in the story other than the story isn't very good. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  I watched the Rifftrax version on Amazon but I think there was also an MST3K version back in the day, though it's not on Netflix.)

Alien Outlaws:  This incoherent, utterly inept production has aliens travel across the galaxy to land on Earth and steal some antique revolvers to randomly shoot people and vandalize stuff until a lady in a Pocahontas getup stops them.  Because all of that makes sense, right?  But then again no. (1/5)

To Catch a Yeti:  An utterly obnoxious early 90s kids movie where a guy inadvertently smuggles a "yeti" from Nepal to his home in upstate New York.  The weird little Furby-looking thing pals around with the guy's daughter while being chased by Meat Loaf in a terrible fur coat.  Bad effects, annoying characters, and a barely coherent plot make this pretty unwatchable except for mockery. (1/5)

Attack From Space:  This crappy 60s Japanese sci-fi movie features "Starman" trying to stop "Sapphirians" and their "Death Star."  Two of those terms would later be used in other, better properties. (1/5)

Buffalo Rider:  This is like a bad nature documentary only fiction.  It spends the first 10 minutes lecturing on the history of the buffalo hunting industry.  Then we finally get to a guy who finds a wounded buffalo, nurses it to health, and decides that he's going to ride it around for...reasons.  Riding a buffalo is pretty ridiculous as the animal doesn't steer all that well.  Another 10 minutes of the movie are spent on the adventures of a raccoon named Bandit as she escapes from a cougar and keeps her two sons out of trouble.  What did this have to do with anything?  Absolutely nothing!  Eventually the buffalo rider finds a murdered couple and takes their baby to its aunt and then kills the killers.  Most of it is narrated by some Waylon Jennings wanna-be while the shots are so ineptly set up and the acting poorer than health class videos. (1/5)

Death Promise:  This lame mid-70s karate movie is about a guy whose father is killed by the henchmen of a slum lord.  So he goes to train with some guy and then comes back for vengeance, though his friend (who didn't train with any master) probably does as much if not more.  The dumbest thing is OK he kills all these slumlords, but in the end he's still going to lose his home most likely.  I mean he didn't force the bad guys to sign the building's deed over to him so either some relative of the slum lords will own it or the government and either way they probably aren't going to keep a mostly-vacant tenement around when they could bulldoze it for something more profitable.  What a useless quest for vengeance!  That's probably more thought than the "writer" and "director" put into it. (1/5)

Reefer Madness:  I think this might have been a remake not the original.  It was in color at least.  Anyway, smoking dope leads a kid to murder and otherwise ruining his life.  It's really, really not subtle at all.  Much of it is a lame court setting and some humorless jerk lecturing people at a town council meeting.  This is after the movie opens with a crawl that goes on for like 5 minutes.  (1/5)

Invasion USA:  One of Golan-Globus's early attempts to enter American cinema, Soviet-backed terrorists invade Miami and go around blowing up houses with a rocket launcher that has an inexhaustible supply of rockets, shoot people at random, and attempt to blow up a mall.  But they never counted on alligator-wrestling Chuck Norris.  Maybe Trump should just name Chuck Norris head of Homeland Security?  It was pretty dumb even for an action movie.  (1/5)

The Stoned Age:  This low-budget 1994 movie features two teenage boys into heavy metal, booze, pot, and chicks.  They're like a more real and unpleasant Beavis and Butthead.  Though this movie is about as funny as the earliest episodes of that show, which mostly focused on the boys terrorizing their neighbors and wildlife, which is to say it wasn't very funny at all. (1/5)

A Trip Down Memory Lane--Cybertronian Style

After talking about Transformers in April, there was another Comixology sale on Transformers comics and I decided to buy some of the 80s-90s ones that were in various collections.  Back in the 80s and early 90s there were actually 2 Transformers comics:  the US ones that I read and the ones published in the UK.  The UK version usually had half of a US issue and then an original segment and sometimes written material.

The Transformers Classics UK volumes 1-5 only contained the original British material, not the US stories.  It also didn't include the GI JOE (or Action Force as the Brits called it) stories that were included after the separate Action Force comic was cancelled.

The very first story was I think collected and published in the US as issue 22 or so.  It was a bit of culture shock as the art was completely different.  Whereas the US comic artists drew the characters like their animated TV versions, the artist in the UK drew the characters like their toy versions.  For some (especially Ironhide and Ratchet) this was pretty unfortunate as truth be told some of the toys looked pretty stupid.  It made it really a chore to plow through these early stories.

Really the first two volumes felt interminable.  It was just a struggle to get through them.  I think it started to pick up once the stories turned to the characters from the movie and afterwards.  When the writers write about Optimus Prime, Megatron, and the rest of the original characters it just never really felt RIGHT for some reason.  Maybe because I was thinking of the old US comics and cartoon show so once it got past that it was more of a fresh slate.

Unlike the US comic the movie characters like Hot Rod, Ultra Magnus, Springer, and Galvatron show up a lot more often in the "present day."  There are a number of issues that involve Galvatron traveling back in time and battling the 80s Autobots.  He and Ultra Magnus fight a number of times, usually with Galvatron coming out on top at first.  One of the big featured stories was "Target 2006" where Galvatron first comes to the "present" of 1988 after being defeated in the movie.  The arc for this story was like 10 parts and featured the "present" Autobots and the "future" Autobots all trying to stop Galvatron.

The UK comic also had a plot where Megatron and Optimus Prime are catapulted to Cybertron when they both supposedly "died" on Earth in the US comics.  Optimus Prime is nearly killed by his fellow Autobots before convincing them he isn't a Decepticon agent and then leads a comeback for the resistance.  Megatron is driven mad when the evil Lord Straxus, killed in issue 18 of the US series, tries to transfer his mind into Megatron's body.

An interesting character in the UK comics is Death's Head, a robotic bounty hunter who is first tasked by Rodimus Prime to track Galvatron down.  But then Rodimus has a change of heart, not wanting his enemy killed, and so tries to stop Death's Head from collecting.  It's one of the better plots from the UK comics.

Volume 5 ends with my favorite story of the lot.  It wasn't very long and is what you'd consider an Elseworlds tale.  It's 2025 and the Autobots have finally destroyed the last Decepticon--so they think.  Rodimus Prime decides it's time to step down and selects Springer as the new leader.  But a hidden Decepticon agent suggests Ultra Magnus should lead and that starts a whole new civil war--this time Autobot against Autobot.  It's a good story about the cyclical nature of war.  It ends with a great panel where Rodimus Prime is just kneeling between the warring sides, devastated by this new war that he inadvertently brought on.

There is a volume 6 but it's not available to buy yet.  I don't know if there's a volume 7 or not.  The UK comic actually lasted a few years longer than the US one and had more like 300 issues while the US comic only had 80.

Having read the UK ones, I decided to pick up some of the US ones too.  I bought volumes 4-7, which covered issues 39-80 and the Headmasters series.  I didn't really care for the earliest issues.  There was a "4 issue limited series" at the end of which all of the Autobots are seemingly killed by Shockwave.  Issues 5-12 then don't feature most of the characters.  Some lame human characters like Circuit Breaker and Robot Master were introduced along the way.  Probably the stand outs of those early ones were 17-18 that take place on Cybertron to deal with the Autobot resistance there.

Anyway, issue 39 is just before the resurrection of Optimus Prime, who "died" in issue 24.  It was the introduction of the "Powermasters" which made slightly more sense than the Headmasters and especially the Targetmasters who had little dudes turn into their heads or guns respectively.  The idea for the Headmasters was the Autobots decide to rip off their heads and give them to the human-like Nebulons to earn their trust.  Because that makes sense, right?  With the Powermasters they used the idea that the fuel on Nebulos was poisoned and thus the little dudes turned into power plants for the robots to help power them.  Still kind of dumb, but at least not quite as lame.

Then comes the "Underbase Saga" where an ancient Cybertronian database is floating through space.  Whoever taps its power will gain unimaginable power.  Unfortunately for everyone, that's the evil Starscream, who goes on a rampage in issue #50 that "kills" every Transformer who doesn't have Nebulonian technology or organic material, which of course left only the newest characters.

These purges became fairly commonplace in the last 30 issues of the US run.  First came Underbase and then the Matrix Quest, where the Autobots try to find the Creation Matrix only to discover it's turned evil, and then Unicron attacks in issue #75.  Finally a great many Autobots are killed in the final issue #80 before Optimus Prime returns (again) to save the day.

All these purges got to be kind of annoying.  Unless you liked one of the few characters to survive them all like Grimlock, at some point your favorite character was probably going to "die" or be decommissioned or whatever.  Still, in a toy comic it does become necessary to winnow out the old characters to focus on the ones on the store shelves.  The final issue was a little disappointing in that it's not even a double issue or anything.  In the span of like 20 pages, Optimus Prime comes back, beats up Decepticon leader Bludgeon, and the Decepticons just decide to go away.  The End?

The first 55 issues or so were written by Bob Budiansky who fans can thank for a lot of the Transformers canon.  Budiansky, according to notes in one of the volumes, created the file cards for most of the early toys.  The file cards provided a backstory for each character.  They were what made me like Jetfire and Grapple more than other toys and it's what gave us Optimus Prime's famous motto:  Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.  And Megatron's motto that could be Donald Trump's slogan:  Peace Through Tyranny.  While there were plenty of lame stories during Budiansky's run, he was certainly a vital part of the Transformers mythos.

The last 25 issues or so were written by Simon Furman, who also wrote most of the UK issues.  To a lesser extent than his compatriots like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, or Grant Morrison, Furman brought the more literate British style to the US comics.  In a way that was probably better as fans (like me) who had followed since the beginning were getting into their teens and thus hungrier for something a little more complex.  Only a little.  I mean it was never exactly Shakespeare.  Furman also took advantage of the opportunity to fold in some elements from the UK comics, like the mythology behind the creation of the Transformers and some characters like Autobot resistance leader Emirate Xaaron.  Like in the UK comics, he brought Galvatron to the present, only this one was from an alternate 2009 where only a handful of Autobots remained and their leader Rodimus Prime's corpse was chained between the remains of the World Trade Center, which reading that issue (#67) in 2017 is a little spooky.

The last 15 issues or so were drawn mostly by Andrew Wildman, who was not my favorite to put it mildly.  Wildman had this tendency to make Transformer faces too human, even incorporating spit or drool sometimes.  Naturally you want characters to have some expression but these are robots so they don't have facial muscles like we do.  But since this was the 90s I guess we're lucky he didn't draw the Autobots with huge muscles, ponytails, and soul patches like a lot of superheroes in the 90s.  (See anything drawn by Rob Liefeld.)

There was a continuation of sorts with the Generation 2 comic that lasted only 12 issues and took the purging of characters to new levels.  I'd reread that but they don't seem to have that on Comixology.

It was the end of that continuity for 20 years or so.  Then IDW, which publishes the current Transformers comics, decided to publish a continuation of the old US comic like they did with GI JOE.  And like GI JOE they brought back the same creative team, in this case Furman and Wildman.  At least Wildman's art wasn't quite as bad and with modern technology the colors and such were sharper than the old Marvel issues.  Wildman quit after about 10 issues and was replaced by better artist Guido Guidi for most of the issues though in the #0 issue especially they brought in some guest artists too.

The story of "Regeneration One" picks up 21 years later when the Autobots are living peacefully on Cybertron.  Though soon chaos is unleashed as the "Last Autobot" is killed, Megatron has raised a zombie army on a ravaged Earth, Scorponok is reborn, Bludgeon arrives with a Warworld, the more-evolved Jhiraxus and his empire pay a visit, and the dark Matrix is unleashed.  It's probably not the story that would have been had the US series continued but it did tie up some loose ends.  And it's one of the few times where Rodimus Prime isn't a whiny little bitch.  I did find it hard to believe Optimus Prime completely abandoned Earth, letting Megatron turn the place we know and love into a total hellscape.  The last few issues got a little metaphysical, but it was mostly a good wrap-up.

It was fun to revisit the old comics and read what was happening across the Pond.