Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki

Welcome to Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki. You may wish to create or login to an account in order to have full editing access to this wiki.

READ MORE

Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki
Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki

Issue Numbers, Issue Titles[]

This is a very useful page, what with having all the issues linked by number. Unfortunately, it's also a somewhat difficult page to find. Few if any of the individual issues link back to it. Instead, they link back to http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Marvel_US_issues , which lo and behold doesn't list the issue numbers.

So if you're browsing along, and suddenly find yourself on, say, Trial by Fire!, good luck finding the page about the next issue. Shouldn't the issue titles in the category also mention a number, and shouldn't there be a sequential listing that all the issues link back to?

OR OR OR, as Sipher just mentioned, there's a "Next issue/Previous issue" box floating around on a few issues' pages. That'd at least provide continuity if it got worked onto all the pages. -- Repowers 07:14, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

[]

(snipping a lot of stuff that's probably not of any further interest. People can get them back out with "history" if they disagree....)


I wonder if, especially for UK comics, we should change the links so that each UK issue links to a separate "issue" page, with the separate stories being linked as they currently are (all current comic pages are organized by story title). Besides the "back-up" features you mention, later UK TF comics often have TWO TF stories running concurrently, and the current system does not account for this well. But I'm not the best person to suggest an alternative. My expertise is in the US comic, which tended to have just one story per issue, and little else. The US comic even tended to break up story arcs into individual titles for each issue more often than not....


Shouldn't we have talked about merging the UK and US comics into one entry before actually doing it?....--G.B. Blackrock 23:35, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Should we have? It's easily fixed if that's deemed not acceptable. The real big change here was making Generation 1 (comic) be a disambiguation rather than blurb on the Marvel US comic, because that is most certainly not the only Generation 1 comic, and it's probably not even the one that most people would be interested in.
I decided to just fold the content in that article into Marvel UK, because do we really need two seperate pages on the two Marvel comics? If we actually do get enough content to warrant two articles, it's easy enough to split the two. But like I said, the major change her isn't the merge, it's putting a proper disambiguation page at the G1 comic link.
Apologies for the alleged "UK bias" in the little blurb. I've never actually read any significant part of either Marvel comic, and know next to nothing about either, so I can say that definitely was not intended. --Suki Brits 00:24, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

It's not a big deal to have them merged, and the way it was done (leaving the US and UK sections separate within the same page) I can live with. I'm absolutely opposed to folding all the US stuff into the UK page, though, as I've said elsewhere. I do not see these two as the same entity, but rather as two distinct, yet often similar and occasionally overlapping, entities. I just would have liked to be aware of the change beforehand, is all.--G.B. Blackrock 00:46, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I've written a bit more on the UK comic, trying to explain its format and its relationship with the US comic. I think I'm right in identifying the 'Perchance to Dream' storyline as the point where US and UK separate, but I can't remember when the original UK material dried up. Was it around #290? --Tribimat 02:08, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I see it differently. I don't see the US and the UK as "separating," because I see them as already separate. They may look the same in many cases, but they're separate. This is borne out by the few, but significant, differences between them, such as how Bumblebee is turned into Goldbug. Clearly, there is room for differences of opinion on how individuals look at the canon, but the fact that there ARE these distinctions are part of why I oppose any attempt to force US stories into the UK continuity on this Wiki, which should essentially present the facts as they appear. (Incidentally, the way you describe the UK version in the actual article is fine with me)--G.B. Blackrock 03:34, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Seperating the UK and US comics would give legitimate space to discuss the various special features the UK comic had which had no counterpart in the US comic. Things like the letters pages answered by Transformer characters, fact files (which, in the early days weren't straight reprints of Transformers: The Universe), back up strips, competitions, humourous strips (Robo Capers, Matt and the Cat, Combat Colin - some of which had directly Transformer-related content). Sorry, can't sign this comment as I'm just a visitor.

How to deal with UK issues with multiple stories[]

I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with the issues in the UK (especially around the late-200s) that have more than one story contained therein. The current set-up probably won't continue to work for these issues. How's this for an option?

Marvel UK issues (lead stories):
#284 | #285 | #286 | #287 | #288 | #289


Marvel UK issues (back-up stories):
#284 | #285 | #286 | #287 | #288 | #289

Note that the back-up to UK #289 is a different "End of the Road" than US #80 (Which is actually entitled "The End of the Road," which may or may not seem significant.)--G.B. Blackrock 18:48, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Looks good to me. --Suki Brits 22:18, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to get all information on a particular issue onto an entry for that issue? For instance, issue 213 will have a "US Story" link that refers to the relevant US strip (which will be identical for 214-216), a "UK Story" section that gives a full account of the UK strip (in this instance, I think it's Megatron's return to Cybertron with Ravage), and a "Back-up Story" section that gives a brief account of the back-up strip. I realise that the back-up stories in most cases aren't TF-related, but they were an integral part of the UK comic experience. I'll try to put an example entry together this week and you can see what you think.
Incidentally, I take the point about the UK and US continuities not being the same. I'm not at all hung up on "canon" and am much more interested in detailing the things as stories. I just wanted to say that #255-60 is where the two parallel continuities go in completely and irreconcilably different directions. At some point I'd also like to write something about how Furman used his knowledge of what was happening in the US stories to foreshadow later events - the story 'Prey' and the return to Cybertron (UK #97-104) is a classic example, featuring both Optimus Prime's "death" and Megatron's madness.
Now that I think about it, the letters page was often used as a vehicle for explaining how the US and UK stories fitted together. They should be an excellent resource for this sort of thing. When I've got access to the original issues again, I'll see what comes up.--Tribimat 00:22, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
Actually, my preference (other things being equal) would be to have the comics entries organized by issue number, but it was decided early on that it would be redundant to have separate pages for issues of the UK comic that were largely already duplicated on the US page for the similar story. (US stories tend to be 1-per-issue. This not often the case in the UK comic.) A compromise position was to make the pages story-specific, rather than issue-specific. This is working for now, but as I've already noted, appears as though it may be unwieldy as we look at UK issues in the future. I could do this issue-by-issue for the entire US series with no trouble at all, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that the US is the only, or even the "most correct," way of looking at it. I've argued fairly strongly for US comic integrity, but have tried to stop short of giving it "supremacy." It's just that the US comic is what I know. I know it fairly well. But I don't have the background to say much about the UK comic beyond what I know from the Internet.--G.B. Blackrock 02:51, 19 April 2006 (UTC)


I've come across some issues of the UK comic that have two TF-related stories, but the "lead" story is just a reprint, while the "back-up" black-and-white story is new. (So far, I've only put links for #221-228 that fit this description) Under the rubric I proposed above, I've felt compelled to make the link in the main (i.e. "lead story") UK chart go to the reprinted story, while the new story is relegated to the "back-up" chart. This technically seems to work, but seems rather unsatisfying. Thoughts?--G.B. Blackrock 20:41, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

I've decided that it would be simpler to only put 2nd stories in the bottom grid in the cases where one of the two TF stories contained has not already been printed in the UK previously. This means that some "back up" black and whites are actually in the top grid, but since these tend to be the stories featured on the front cover (since the "main" color story is a reprint), that makes more sense, I think.--G.B. Blackrock 02:49, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

The UK Annuals[]

Hi. I was just wondering if there should be a space on this page for the UK Annuals and if so what format it should take? There were a couple of annual stories that linked heavily into the main UK strip so it seems like something that is needed for the sake of completion.

As each annual contains several stories and there are only a few of them I was going to suggest a seperate table for each annual with links to individual stories. Does anyone have any opinions/guidance on this?--Omnisvalidus 18:46, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

As nobody has comented on this I have added the annuals in. Omnisvalidus 18:33, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Annual years and releases[]

(I'm raising this here as there isn't a generic article for the annuals and it could affect all of them.)

It's my recollection that the annuals released 1985-1987 were always referenced as being the annual for the year of publication (e.g. issue #65, printed in 1986, has a caption referring to "this year's annual"), but from 1988 onwards the annuals are referred to as the next's years, even though the books themselves don't give specific dates (whereas other Marvel UK annuals for Action Force, Thundercats and Visionaries released in 1988 all explicitly say they're the 1989 annual). This has led to quite a bit of confusion over the years as to which annual is which. Transformers Annual 1986#Items of Note currently states:

This was the first annual, published for Christmas 1985. Due to the 1985 print date in the cover it is frequently mistakenly referred to as the 1985 annual, however annuals are always printed at the end of the year before.

Whilst this is the main practice, is there any evidence it specifically applied to Marvel UK in 1985-1987?

Also most of the annuals state they were released in December, but I recall the announcements and adverts for them tended to be in the summer. Further to this the annual released in 1987 is explicitly followed up in stories printed that autumn (issues 135-138) which would have been awkward if the annual wasn't yet on sale. Timrollpickering 21:48, 20 April 2008 (UTC)