It was a Ford's voice

You might have noticed that I've been on something of a childhood-nostalgia kick just lately. My brother's been spending the week at my place, in celebration of his 45th birthday - an age so alarmingly ancient that it would drive anybody back to their infancy, even if we hadn't been sent an enormous pile of childhood photos to look through as well!

And one thing I've been recollecting is what was probably the second-coolest epic dream I had as a child (I'll have to tell you about the very coolest one some other time), and how I can pin it down to an almost exact date, because it related to the plot of this issue of the Transformers comic!

I think all my blog-readers need to read through this comic before I tell you about the dream it inspired - and please do read it in the right historical context. The autumn of 1986 was a very exciting time. I turned ten years old on October 14th, I was in my last year at primary school, and most significantly of all, there was the most amazingly thrilling and exciting story in Transformers! My parents must have separated at around this time too, but that made little or no impression on my conscious or subconscious mind, quite possibly because the Transformers comic was just so cool, I didn't pay attention to anything else.

The cover date is October 4th, 1986. The internet seems fairly certain that Marvel UK's cover dates at this point were the off-sale date, and the comics were released the previous Saturday. We got our comics (Transformers and the Beano) every week on Sunday, along with a Sunday Times for our father, from the newsagent in Tattershall, about a four mile drive away. We really did live in the middle of nowhere.

But that means I must have first read this one on Sunday 28th September - which was actually my dad's fortieth birthday. I'm sure I would have given him a card, and possibly even a present too, although he was a hopeless person to buy things for. And not being someone who celebrated birthdays, I'm sure he wouldn't have minded at all that his adoring sons spent the whole day reading this comic about toy robots and the Secret Wars sticker album that came with it as a free gift!

We're in part 3 of the unprecedentedly epic story, "Target: 2006", which was the first that British Transformers fans had heard of the upcoming theatrical Transformers movie - a concept so amazing that it captured the imagination of everyone in the country (except maybe the ones a bit older than nearly-ten).

The British Transformers comic divided its time between reprinted American stories and (much superior) original British adventures, worked into the same continuity. We'd had a run of eight consecutive weekly British issues over the summer containing American reprints (the US Transformers comic #17-#20), which gave ample breathing space to run a long string of UK original material - the four-part "In the National Interest" in №74-№77, followed immediately by the amazing eleven-part "Target: 2006" before it returned to the American comic.

(Incidentally, #21 of the American series is meant to follow immediately from #20, with Skids returning from his solo adventure. The dialogue was changed when it was printed in the UK comic to say that he was going to wait around for a while to let his wounds heal before going back to rejoin the Autobots. The UK comic was good at that kind of thing.)

If you haven't already, please go out and buy the whole of Target: 2006 in its collected edition. You won't regret it! Obviously it's best appreciated when read one weekly installment at a time, over eleven weeks in 1986, but the collected edition is the second best option.

In the story so far (and despite this being 'part 3', the 'prologue' in №78 is really just part of the story, so there have actually been three previous episodes), as the characters remind us here, the three senior Autobots have disappeared, three mysterious new Decepticons have arrived from the future, senior Decepticons Megatron and Soundwave have been taken out of action, new Autobot Ultra Magnus has arrived from Cybertron, and all kinds of things have happened. There's no shortage of incident in these 11-page chapters!

But what's really innovative in this particular chapter is the storytelling structure. Ironhide narrates it in the first person, from a point some way in the future of where the story left off last week. And he's telling us in flashback what has happened since we last saw him. It's fascinating and was a completely new narrative style to me at the time - it's no wonder it stuck in my brain! The tantalising mystery of exactly what Ironhide is doing, digging and lifting rocks, runs all through the chapter, outside the scope of the main story.

I think everybody was looking forward to seeing Ultra Magnus fighting Galvatron (they were the new big toys, released in time for Christmas shopping that year, and heavily promoted as "The New Leaders" and stars of the still-mysterious upcoming movie), but I for one didn't mind the slow build-up to the inevitable conflict. It was nice to see all the other Transformers get something to do - the American comics very rarely did that, strangely enough, with the focus often being more on one or two individual Transformers, and a lot of human supporting characters. Target: 2006 ignores the humans completely and gives us an all-robot cast! I wholeheartedly approved of that kind of thing!

Of course, some Autobots are more prominent than others in this story. Hoist (the green and orange truck there in the third panel) is bizarrely neglected throughout Target: 2006. He's in about three panels of the whole epic! And the omission is even more strange when you consider he's supposed to be the maintenance guy, who gives the Autobots their regular tune-ups and services. With chief medical officer Ratchet having disappeared, surely Hoist should be the emergency medic? But he doesn't seem to do anything like that here.

Not that I particularly cared about this in 1986 - that kind of quibble is strictly the province of grown-up me. As is wondering why neither Hoist nor Mirage appear in the rest of this issue, when Mirage doesn't look damaged so much as just upside-down. I guess it was more severe than it looks. Incidentally, the American comic had several of these Autobots already on the long-term-injury list at this point, but the British reality has them just fine and dandy. Gears seems to be back on his feet here too, having been badly damaged back in the Dinobot Hunt storyline, but that's not unreasonable, since he's meant to be something of a tough guy. The American comic was downright weird about Ratchet's inability to fix his friends for months and years on end.

This whole comic is really, really great at making you want the toys of these characters! It's October, and even if you haven't got a birthday coming up, everybody is making a Christmas list by now! The British comic actually only rarely had that kind of effect, even though it was the original reason for the Transformers comic existing - the priority for Simon Furman was always to tell a great story rather than to spotlight the newest and most expensive toys on the shelves (well, except those rare occasions when he was directly ordered to do just that), but this issue happens to do both, really well! The next chapter moves to the other plot thread, on the planet Cybertron, where some of the foremost characters are non-toy-based ones who were made up for the British comic, and a couple of characters whose toys were only available in the USA.

Eight against one? I only count seven Autobots there. Hoist is apparently still putting Mirage back on his wheels, Jetfire is up in the air, Hound and Ultra Magnus are back at the base (along with the injured Autobots and Omega Supreme), Smokescreen and Tracks are... somewhere else (Ironhide 'gets' them in a couple of pages), and that seems to account for all the active Autobots. Maybe Ironhide just can't count.

The classified ads were a part of every Transformers comic. These shops and special events seemed very exciting, but at this point in time I never got to go to the big cities where they existed. Well, Nottingham on very rare special occasions, maybe. But although Nostalgia & Comics in the Broadmarsh Centre no longer exists, and nor even does the Broadmarsh Centre, the original one in Birmingham (now called Worlds Apart) is still where it always was, and just as cool as ever!

I really liked Jeff Anderson's art in this issue (the storyline had multiple different artists, each doing a chapter or two) - Geoff Senior was the particularly sensational artist, but Anderson successfully makes all the characters look like robots, while also giving them a great range of facial expressions. The colouring is great too, making Galvatron look so shiny and metallic; the British comic had access to much better-looking artistic techniques than the American stories did, so it was always a bit disappointing to go back to the ugly-looking US material.

The Constructicons never got much in the way of personality, poor guys. And since their toys were among those who weren't sold in this country, they always had a slight unattainable mystique that made us want to read about them, but it's fitting that they only get a cameo in this particular comic, since it's otherwise full of the toys you could find in Woolworth's, Argos or wherever your parents did their Christmas shopping! And who could resist asking for Galvatron, after a display like this?

The complete and utter humiliating defeat of the heroes was quite shocking, if not all that unusual for the British Transformers comic - 'Dinobot Hunt' ended with an unequivocal Decepticon victory. But this issue ends back with Ironhide in the present day, and what is he doing?

He's digging up the ultimate evil (until Galvatron came along) enemy, Megatron! And also Soundwave! I really didn't get what was going on at the time I read this, and was anxious to see what would happen next issue. And of course what happened next issue was the other plot strand of Target: 2006 - we didn't get any follow-up on this story, or that cliffhanger scene it ends with, until the following week, in №83! I had a whole two weeks to stew on the implications of this story, and it's no wonder my dreams got to work on producing a continuation!

Of course, there was still a bit more of the comic to read, after the main story had finished. That was another difference from the American comics - in Britain we always had a back-up strip, and a couple of other little features...

Lew Stringer's Robo-Capers were a regular weekly fixture. It was now the only comedy mini-feature in Transformers, with Mychailo Kazybrid's Matt and the Cat having ended with №73 - in the early days, there were no end of other bits and pieces of filler in Transformers, but it was gradually developing into a comic that focused primarily on the main title feature. No British comic could possibly be without a Lew Stringer strip, though! The very idea is unthinkable!

And everyone wanted a BMX in 1986. I don't think many people particularly cared about buying special oil for it, but maybe this advert generated a couple of sales. I (probably) got a BMX for my birthday on October 14th, although as usual I've had to rely on my brother's superior autobiographical memory to tell me about it. It sounds right, though, and even with my own dull memory I can confirm that I never once oiled the thing.

The collected edition of Target: 2006 doesn't include the fact files. This one about Ultra Magnus gives us information about his origins that aren't mentioned in the comic stories themselves, and really should be read as an integral part of the whole storyline. Fact files in the Transformers comic were generally just lifted from the American material, but these ones were different.

And then of course there's the letters page. Grimlock had only just taken over from original letters-page host Soundwave, and the letters printed here are just catching up with the reaction to the new regime. I preferred Soundwave - he was an evil Decepticon, after all, and could be very nasty to letter-writers and Autobot-lovers. Grimlock, for all his rough and tough attitude, was still a goodie, and everyone secretly rooted for the baddies in comics (generations of British comic readers were taught by Dennis the Menace that this was the correct moral stance to adopt, especially in the eighties, when Dennis and similar characters were quite remorseless in their bullying of softies!)

And then there was Hercules. Transformers back-up strips were whatever American series Marvel UK had access to, with the sole criterion for suitability for the Transformers comic being that there was at least one robot, or something that looked like a robot, in it. So the Hercules limited series, in which he's accompanied by a robot Recorder, was an obvious choice. The previous back-up strip was Rocket Raccoon, and when Hercules finished it was Spitfire and the Troubleshooters. Hacked up into five or six-page chapters, the stories were never very readable, and certainly not something I'd do more than cast an uninterested eye over for the sake of completeness.

Ooh, it's Galactus. If I hadn't been so excited by the Transformers story, that might have provoked a bit of a reaction from me. Galactus, after all, features in the Secret Wars sticker album that came free with this comic! Which was, in fact, my first introduction to a lot of Marvel superheroes - I hadn't read the Secret Wars comic from Marvel UK, or more than a handful of other superhero comics here and there. My obsession with superheroes didn't start until my teenage years - at the age of nearly-ten, I didn't know much about the whole concept of superheroes except the few random fragments I'd happened to see in passing. Although those did include a couple of really really great Spider-Man stories, which gave me a basic grounding in just how good they could be!

We did indeed reserve Transformers with our newsagent, although there was really no need to fill in this form. It did mean that all our Transformers comics came with PRIDMORE written in capital letters on the cover - this copy I've scanned here isn't the original (which was read to pieces decades ago) but a more recent acquisition. I like that this form makes it clear you have to get your parent or guardian's signature before you can reserve the comic with your newsagent - perhaps there had been cases of parents being taken by surprise for demands of 30p for a comic their child had ordered!

And the back cover is an advert for The New Leaders! Which turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. Ultra Magnus is fleetingly the Autobot leader during the movie, but never in the comic stories. Still, at this point we all assumed he was going to take over Autobot leadership imminently, and were surprised when it never happened. Since the American comic (somehow) didn't have to use Ultra Magnus and Galvatron, they were reserved for the British stories, which had to fit into the American continuity in between issues. Poor Magnus never had a chance of ascending to the position of New Leader.

Now, as for this dream I promised to tell you about. It must have happened during the fortnight between reading this issue and reading the one where the Earth-based side of the storyline resumed, and have been spawned by my impatience to find out what was going to happen next! I can get even closer to fixing an exact date when I dreamed it, in fact, because I'm almost certain it was at our mother's house in Boston. At this point in time, we were spending every Tuesday and Wednesday night, and Fridays and Saturdays of alternate weeks, at Willoughby Road - an equitable arrangement presumably intended to keep everyone sort of happy, though I'm not sure it succeeded. I could certainly have done without the mid-week journeying all the way to Boston, ten miles away from our father's house, with school being nearly five miles more out the other side, but does anyone ask my opinion? I tell you, childhood is rough, and the only mitigating factor is that I didn't actually care in the slightest, and was really only interested in things like the Transformers comic.

(International readers of this blog might like to know, incidentally, that the 'Boston' I'm complaining about here is the real, original, genuine Boston, in Lincolnshire, England, and not that fake one in Massachusetts that some people think of when they hear 'Boston')

This wasn't the only time my dreams have provided an ending for a story I was half-way through. To this day I can't hear about the Doctor Who story The Keys of Marinus without struggling to remember which bits of it actually happened and which were part of the dream I had when I fell asleep half way through reading the novelisation. But in this case, I was actively involved in the next installment of Target: 2006! In fact, I was hanging out with the Autobots in our bedroom at Willoughby Road - I forget which ones, but Trailbreaker was definitely standing in the corner and supervising proceedings - and trying to make contact with the future. There was a small hole in the space-time continuum on the wall of the room (the bump in the wall made by the disused chimney), represented by a sort of pattern of blue and purple dots of the type you'd see in comics where this kind of thing happened, and by means of flying a kite through this hole, we were trying to establish a link to the Autobots of the year 2006.

There was a lot of static, but something definitely got through, and we heard a voice saying something. One of the Autobots told me excitedly that it must be a voice from the future, because it was a Ford's voice, and the only Ford among the Autobots is Ironhide, who's currently absent "digging his own grave", as seen in the comic.

I do love that Transformers who turn into distinct makes of car would have distinct voices. This is a wonderful innovation of my subconscious mind, and really needs to be worked into the next Transformers movie. Ironhide, of course, being originally a Japanese toy, turns into a Nissan rather than a Ford, but I didn't know that at the time, and he had a distinctly American accent on the cartoon, so naturally I'd think Ford.

But establishing contact with the future was a pivotal moment that meant the Autobots would be able to defeat Galvatron after all, despite their crushing defeat! All thanks to me! And so, having saved the day and brought Target: 2006 to a satisfactory conclusion, I woke up and told my brother all about the dream. He said I was making it up.