Ahhh! A happy ending!

I'm sure you all remember my post from a week and a half ago about the fascinating adaptation of Planet Terry for the British Transformers comic, and have been eagerly awaiting the sequel ever since.

Well, I've finally acquired a copy of Transformers no. 25, and it's intriguing in many ways!

It came with a free gift of a Kellogg's Corn Flakes model airliner. So every copy of this comic you find in the wild, like this one, has a big rip on the cover and a strip of decaying 36-year-old sellotape. All the airliners no doubt fell apart and were thrown away within a few days of getting them, but at least some of the comics still survive!

Apart from all the intrusive cornflakes, this cover uses the cover of the American Transformers #6, the second half of which is reprinted inside. The speech bubble is a UK original addition, though; there isn't one on the American original. Simon Furman, at a guess, enlivening the cover with his characteristic speech patterns and tying in to the cornflakes airliner theme with the call-sign CF-one. It's those little attentions to detail that made the British Transformers comic so special!

Inside the comic, as it winds down towards the big new weekly full-colour relaunch, we find the penultimate two-page Chromobots episode, the final eleven pages of the American Transformers #6, the final five pages of Machine Man #19, the letters page, Robo-Capers, Matt and the Cat, fact files for exciting new toys Warpath and Ramjet, a mega Kellogg's Corn Flakes competition, and of course the final three pages of Planet Terry! The first year of British Transformers comics were mega!

The British Transformers no. 26 printed the entire American Transformers #7, incidentally - a whole 23 pages of Transformers in the Transformers comic! British readers had never seen the like - and never really would again...

But to return to the final appearance of Planet Terry, he's squeezed into the final three inside pages of this issue, all of them in monochrome. Here's how it starts:

We get an extra title at the top, which weirdly calls this story "The Saga of Princess Ugly, part 6". That was the title of the American Planet Terry issue #2, which was spread over the British Transformers nos. 20-23. The way it was spread over them was also interesting, so if your eye has been drawn to the much more interesting part of the pages above, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs, but...

"The Saga of Princess Ugly" in the American comic was split into three chapters, as per the old American comic tradition, but those chapters were of very irregular length - the kind of thing that's a real inconvenience for British reprint comics. Part 1 was six pages, part 2 was a whole nine, and part 3 was seven. The way they dealt with it is a great indication of how the British Transformers comic worked - for no. 20, they didn't have any American Transformers material available to them, and were printing the British-original "Raiders of the Last Ark". There were six pages of that in the British comic, backed up by the usual filler material including the last part of Machine Man issue #18, and the first part of Planet Terry issue #2.

With no. 21, they had a mere five pages of Transformers content, concluding "Raiders of the Last Ark", and so ample room to print the full nine-page part 2 of Planet Terry, if they dropped Machine Man for one issue, allowing his next story to be spread over nos. 22-25. The other pages of Transformers no. 21 were filled with the usual kind of stuff, including a thrilling four-page historical comic about Erik the Red.

Then for Transformers no. 22, the long-awaited American Transformers #5 was finally available, and the Transformers content could go back up to 11 pages per issue of the British title! The third part of "The Saga of Princess Ugly" could be chopped in half and spread over two issues, with a "part 4" added to the top of the first page of no. 23.

As we saw in the last blog post, the American Planet Terry issue #3 was titled "Secret of the Space Warp", and that was the title shown in the British Transformers no. 24, which printed five pages' worth of material from the first 19 American pages. So why they reverted to "The Saga of Princess Ugly" for the title of these final three pages (in which Princess Ugly neither appears nor is mentioned) is hard to fathom.

But that's just a sideline to the most interesting part of this British printing. Not only is the dialogue rewritten to explain what the Devourer is, the second panel is entirely different! I didn't remember that at all, but it came back to me as soon as I looked at this comic. It's been lifted from the bottom of page 9 of the American comic - part of the large chunk that was chopped out for the British Transformers fans!

A scene that really happened in the American original has been repurposed as a flashback to Terry playing a video game! Now that's some clever editing! Although it does raise the unanswered question of why this Devourer knows who Planet Terry is, and specifically wants to eat him!

Slightly less clever is the way the page number has been very clumsily scribbled out at the bottom right of the British printing, but with that excitement out of the way, there's not much to note about the final two pages...

Ahhh. From the British comic-readers' perspective, Terry has found his long-lost parents at last, and everybody's happy!

From American comic-readers' perspective, next issue they turn out to be statues, and Terry's quest continues for nine more issues. And he never does find his parents; it ends with him still endlessly searching. I prefer the British one!