Transformers (Titan Magazine)
Transformers (rebranded Transformers Universe from issue #22-25, then Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with Vol.2 #1) is an ongoing monthly magazine published in the United Kingdom by Titan Magazines. It ties in to the 2007 film and features a mix of original comic strips, reprinted strips by IDW Publishing, and regular features and competitions. It is over 50 pages long each month.
Titan picked up the rights to a Transformers comic in 2005 after Panini, publishers of the short-lived UK Armada comic, allowed it to lapse. Titan sat on it, reasoning "bugger Cybertron, let's wait for the upcoming film and make £££££s!". Work began on it in October 2006, though all information on the film was top secret even for Titan until IDW's movie comics began.
According to Steve White, Transformers was seen as "the big one", the title that would get Titan Magazines the attention and kudos of the UK comic industry. [1] It seemed to succeed, selling enough to get original cover art after #6, quite a height in the UK licensed comic market. It's already the longest running UK Transformers comic since Marvel's!
The April edition of Previews UK revealed that the comic will be rebooting from #1 in June 2009, just in time for the second film, and #25 of the first run confirmed this with a breathless "TF:UK gets an EXTREME makeover!!!" blurb. Unfortunately, it's also going back to stock-photo covers (sob!). Titan have previously rebooted their Star Wars comic every so often to bump sales, most recently at the start of the Clone Wars cartoon.
Titan started running a Transformers Animated sister title from 23rd October 2008, though unfortunately it didn't make £££££s and died after issue 3.
Titan produces digest-sized collections of the UK strips under the title Transformers Adventures; two have come out with a third upcoming. IDW reprinted the first eight issues' worth of strips in the United States in late 2008 as a four-issue miniseries, under the title Saga of the Allspark, as a tie-in to Reign of Starscream [2]
| Titan Transformers issues Volume 1: |
|---|
| #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10 | #11 | #12 | #13 | #14 | #15 | #16 | #17 | #18 | #19 | #20 | #21 | #22 | #23 | #24 | #25 | |
| Titan Transformers issues Volume 2: |
|---|
| #1 | #2 | #3 | |
Comic strip
Opening each issue is a 11-page original comic strip (10-page before #13). These are written by Simon Furman and illustrated by a mix of artists, many of whom have been seen on other Transformers comics — Geoff Senior, Nick Roche, Staz and Guido Guidi.
Prequels and sequels
Issues #1–6 were set before the film and were based on specific characters, filling in details of the war and characters (like Devastator) who were not given much development in the film. The first two strips, starring Optimus and Megatron, tied in to the IDW prequel comic in the same way Marvel UK's stories tied in to the Marvel U.S. series. At the end of #2, four of the characters had been scattered across the galaxy and #3–6 focused on their solo adventures on alien worlds. They also featured characters from the toyline, such as Clocker, in secondary-character roles.
Issues #7–8 were set immediately after the Mission City battle in the film, dealing with leftover plot elements like the whereabouts of Scorponok.
Alternate universe
For issues #9–13, the strip featured an alternate reality story, Twilight's Last Gleaming, where the Decepticons won in the film. This has a sizeable cast, covering both characters from the film, as well as ones who only had toy bios like Elita-One. It opened with Sam Witwicky already dead, Optimus Prime missing in action (later found to be offline) and the Decepticons cyberforming the Earth. The resolution had Megatron dead (with Starscream usurping command) and the All Spark destroyed.
Rather than just being a 5-part divergence, this alternate reality rolled on into the second year of the title and lasted until #25, the end of the first series. This was intended to allow Titan to do pretty much whatever they wanted with the cast and universe without having to worry about the plot of the second film. [3]
In this second year, the Autobots had to handle the aftermath of an Earth-shattering story, something that had not been done before. Storylines included the Decepticons deliberately preventing America from rebuilding, Jazz being reborn as an amoral villain, a second group of Decepticons under Stockade, and then a very big twist. The central plotline involved Earth's slow, destructive demise from the aborted cyberforming of Twilight's Last Gleaming, before being replaced with the Decepticon Heartland and Starscream's manipulation of the American government.
The alternate universe ended with a three-parter called Revolution, beginning in #23, that pitted the Autobots and Stockade's Decepticons against an all-out conquest attempt by Starscream and tied up most of the loose ends. The last shot of the alternate universe was Mikaela Banes and Bumblebee driving off into the sunset, awwww!
Transformers Animated
Issue 17 featured a 6 page Animated story written by Furman, written to promote the spin-off. Unsurprisingly, it featured Grimlock.
When the spin-off buggered off into cancellation, Transformers began printing the leftover strips from #23 to #25[4]. The first and third were done as "pull-out" comics. By the second, it had began to diverge from the Season 2 continuity... which will never be followed up. Doh!
Artist "consistency"
Titan has, by this point, become infamous for inconsistency in the movie strip art. For reasons unknown, instead of using one or two artists it uses hordes of them (plus a few inkers and colourists), none ever doing more than one issue in a row. Different artists have different styles and, not to put too fine a point on it, have different ideas of how many of the Movie design's fiddly bits they want to draw.
But then there's other issues like:
- Elita-One started out looking just like her toy, but by her second strip her head was being altered to resemble the G1 Elita (either to differentiate her from Arcee or as deliberate homage). How much her head resembles Elita One differs depending on artist... and in #14 and #16, she has the toy's head again!
- Arcee constantly alternates between being drawn like her movie design or like her Scout-class toy (only not blue).
- Andrew Wildman drew Ratchet looking like the white, face-plated Cybertronian Ratchet in Prime Directive issue 1, which was reprinted in Wildman's issue. Unfortunately, in the issue immediately before, Nick Roche had drawn Ratchet looking exactly like his movie self!
- Colouring is fluid for many characters and sometimes entirely wrong: Armorhide has been green and white-and-blue, Starscream has been both grey and bronze, Thundercracker has been blue and black...
- Poor Theodore Allen changes hair, age, and build in seemingly every appearance.
It appears model sheets aren't being used...
Regular features
- Autobot vs Decepticon Smackdown — last seen in #5 (as "Human VS Decepticon Smackdown"), this pitted two characters against each other and gave a list of their strengths and weaknesses. The outcome of the fight was left up to the reader to decide. This feature saw a return in #20 as Beast Wars Battlefield, pitting Grimlock against a real Tyrannosaurus.
- Top Gear — this section provided competitions to win Transformers merchandise, as well as telling readers about awesome new stuff it'd be cool to have.
- Character Profiles — an in-depth description of an individual character's personality, history, abilities and weaknesses. Originally these were taken from Transformers: The Movie Guide, but from #8 (Bonecrusher) the movie-based ones have been new creations. As of issue 14, the profiles have included Beast Wars characters, adapted from Beast Wars Sourcebook.
- Star Screams letters page — Letters and fan-art from readers, with a prize for the Star Letter. Originally called Mech Mail, readers were invited to write in and say which Transformer they'd like to answer the mail (a traditional gimmick) - Starscream got the nod. The tone is very over-the-top, with "Starscream" threatening death to readers who like the Autobots, slagging off the other characters, and so forth.
- Artobots — a special section for readers' fan-art.
- Posters — a pull-out poster in the centre pages, sometimes double-sided. Generally it's a poster version of the front cover, though #7, #18 and #19 featured the art of what would have been a cover but were scrapped/altered at the last minute.
- How To Draw... — This feature instructs small children how to draw the incredibly fiddly and complicated movie-verse Transformers. "If you found this one a bit difficult to draw... well, it's all part of Megatron's evil plans!" It's also shown how to draw sequential art and cover images. It's noted to not actually work as a how-to-draw and is generally unworkable.
- Bumblebee's Way-Past-Cool Reviews - Video game reviews. Which aren't written in Bumblebee's "voice". And aren't way past cool. Or even cool.
- Arcee's Soulmates - Starting in #20; a small personal's column in Star Screams, with Transformers (all of which are specific characters but go unnamed) putting a lonely-hearts ad out. I am not joking about this.
Fantastic Free Gift!
It's a battle-scarred and ancient tactic, known well to British and Irish comic fans: a cheap item stuck to the cover, that is hopefully desirable enough to convince a child to buy the comic. It's been around for decades, but traditionally was placed on the early issues and then on the occasional later ones to cause a short-term sales boost. These days, the UK comics industry is in such a piss-poor state that every damn issue has to have them - and they're often bulky, which leads to badly-shelved and bent comics in the newsagents - and Transformers is no exception.
Free gifts have included a target-shooting game, Autobot/Decepticon dog tags, a notebook and pen, stickers, a pinball game, sweatbands, and many toy guns.
They are always large enough to take up a significant amount of space on the cover they are stuck to, necessitating some pretty ugly graphic layouts that cover the illustrations with text in order to leave a large blank space for the gift to be attached to so it won't obscure anything important. This can often make the covers look really freaking bad when you take the gift off; a quick perusal of the cover images on their relevant articles will make immediately apparent the frequent emptiness of the bottom left-hand corner in particular.
- 23 and #24 had a splashy two free gifts, both of the extras being Animated themed. You might think that this was Titan getting rid of gifts they'd had made for the cancelled Animated comic... and you'd be right, since the promised gift for #25 is the sacred Pencil Pod promised to us in Animated #4 but that never arrived!
According to editor Steve White, coming up with free gifts is "a nightmare for our marketing department, who have no real experience on a more male-orientated older title and have to come up with ideas that don't just rely on some piece of cheap plastic... However, they're constrained as much by money — yes, we'd love to have a Minicon on the first issue, but we have to get real." [5]
Reprints
To fill out the pages while keeping costs down, the magazine reprints comics published by IDW. The reprints are cut into 5–8 pages segments (though one was once 10 pages), deliberately shorter than the UK strip so it's clear which is the primary story.
The reprints so far have included:
- The Movie Prequel: #1–13
- Beast Wars: The Gathering: #1–13
- Megatron Origin: #14–25
- Beast Wars: The Ascending: #14–25
Audience
The primary audience of Transformers is, of course, young children — as well as the features and editorial sections being written in juvenile tones (and the presence of free gifts), the letters page is full of kids sending in their praises, photos of their collections, suggestions for stories, and drawings of their own characters. Steve White has openly admitted it's a "junior" title, though they attempt not to talk down to the audience, citing this as a flaw in the short-lived Panini Armada title.
There is, however, a sizeable minority of older fans and this is openly recognized in both interviews and in the comic itself. This generally does not affect the content, with the exception of a competition in #7 for the Best of Simon Furman trade, with the question being: what robot bounty hunter Furman had made.
Letters and photos have also shown a sizeable number of female readers of varying ages, which Starscream openly approves of.
Multi-continuity
While the current focus of the comic is, obviously, the film, the title has been multi-continuity from the start; in #22, the logo was even altered to say "Transformers Universe" rather than "Transformers Robots in Disguise".
Substantial references are made to the Generation 1 franchise. #1 had a feature on the animated movie and its DVD, trades of IDW's comics are promoted and offered as competition prizes, and the odd reference is made to G1 and older fans who may remember it. A poster on The Many Faces of Optimus Prime, running in both #17 and #1 of the Animated title, listed all the versions of Optimus Prime as well as Marvel, Sunbow, IDW and Dreamwave G1 continuity. A follow-up, The Many Faces of Megatron, was run in #2 of Animated and #19 of this title.
As of #14, it began reprinting the G1 prequel story Megatron Origin, while informing the young'uns that G1 is a wildly different variation of the mythos they know and love.
IDW's Beast Wars comics are one of the main reprints, being chosen by Steve White for marketing reasons as the Beast Machines DVD boxsets were being released at the same time as the film [6]. The Beast Wars cartoon itself had been repeated in full on a loop on Channel five in recent years, making it familiar to the target audience. Young readers in the letter's page have written in mentioning it (and #7 had a fan-art of Cheetor), Beast Wars character profiles began in #14, and Starscream has alluded that Simon Furman as a Maximal in the form of "a strategically-shaved ape", especially his head! There have also been two competitions to win the UK Beast Machines DVD boxsets.
The new Transformers Animated cartoon received a minor feature in #10, with further information in subsequent issues to coincide with the show airing on UK satellite TV. In #13 it got a 12-page "Pull Out Special" that contained information, plugged merchandise, and hyped the then-upcoming Animated comic. Since the cancellation of the Animated comic, the leftover strips have begun running in this comic.
Sales
Thanks to circulation figures printed in the comic's indicia and online sources, we know the comic's sales in the UK and Eire, as reported to the UK industry group ABC.
The comic's average net circulation in 2007 was over 45,000 (reported from #10). This basically means it was selling more than the average IDW issue ever had.
The January to June 2008 sales showed Transformers' average sales had dropped to 38,733.
The June to December 2008 average sales, by comparison, are reported by ABC to have dropped to 24,617. (Arrrrg!) Issue 14 was above the average, #18 and #19 below it. A global recession and being tied into last year's big film make for wobbly sales.
Sales are expected to bounce up again when the second film comes out.
The sales for #1 of the Saga of the Allspark reprint series sold 11,417 in the North American direct market [7]; this had dropped to 8,939 by #4. [8]
