The Autobot-Decepticon War is now raging on two planets, their homeworld of Cybertron and the organic world of Earth, which the half-stranded Decepticons plan to loot for its energy resources. Both sides are battered the loss of their leaders. Decepticon fuel auditor Ratbat arrives to oversee operations, to the despair of the overly-logical Shockwave. Meanwhile, the Autobots elect Dinobot leader Grimlock as their new commander, praising his single-minded devotion to getting them off the planet and fighting the Decepticons. But Grimlock's ruthless leadership style and disdain for human casualties soon has multiple Autobots considering their loyalties. Elsewhere in space, the conflict has spread to the peaceful planet Nebulos, and even through time, with future Decepticon commander Galvatron running riot on modern-day Earth, and Ultra Magnus vowing to stop him.
I covered the first compendium volume (of four) of Transformers: Til All Are One previously, noting both that it's great that Skybound and Image Comics have brought the Marvel Transformers run back into print in four, easy-to-collect volumes, but it's also annoying that these volumes were only available in a Kickstarter campaign. The mass-market paperback editions split the UK and US stories apart from one another, an act of editorial madness that will long live in infamy. This should be the definitive way the comics are collected from now on.
For the stats, Compendium 2 collects issues #24-44 of the monthly Transformers US comic, the four-part Transformers: Headmasters mini-series and issues #96-187 of the weekly Marvel UK comic, noting that half of those reprint the US comic anyway, so it's not quite as impressive as it sounds. However, this is still almost 1,250 pages of Transformers action, published from approximately October 1986 to October 1988.
The collection kicks off with the "kill the leaders!" story arc that both the UK and US comics followed for a while. Everyone knows that Transformers: The Movie killed off Optimus Prime and replaced Megatron with the even more powerful Galvatron in a storyline set twenty years in the future, but for the comic book, American writer Bob Budiansky was tasked with likewise getting rid of them in a completely different story. Prime's death - getting blown up after losing a video game duel with Megatron (!) - is infamously stupid, so British writer Simon Furman tried to make it resonate a bit more with a UK-original story beforehand showing Optimus Prime wanting the Autobots to carry on and thrive in his absence. As usual, the British story arc, which also incorporates Megatron's battle of wits with the disembodied head of Lord Straxus and both Prime and Megatron returning to Cybertron, is well-written, better-characterised and milks the situation for pathos, action and even a little bit of comedy. The American storyline is borderline nonsensical in comparison. It's clear Furman didn't quite have the full outline for what Budiansky was planning, resulting in some awkward plotting (the Predacons showing up in both storylines requires some cheesy rewriting of American speech panels to give Megatron amnesia).
After Prime and Megatron return to Earth and promptly die (it will not shock you to learn they will return, eventually), Budiansky develops one of his better notions, namely making Grimlock commander of the Autobots. This is one of those ideas that initially seems insane, but Budiansky makes it work: none of the other Autobots is really a viable candidate, and Grimlock is both the most powerful Autobot at large after Prime's dispatch, and shows a determined level-headedness in stopping an attack on the Ark by Trypticon, the largest single Decepticon warrior ever created. Grimlock secures his election when he turns down the job after realising his own selfish motives, in a very rare moment of self-reflection. The Autobots, moved by his wholly uncharacteristic selflessness, make him leader anyway and about three weeks later realise they've made a horrendous mistake when he makes himself a crown and starts referring to himself in the third person. Grimlock sends Goldbug and Blaster on a mission to apprehend a rogue human villain who has stolen Autobot equipment and order them to kill the squishy human with prejudice. After having him arrested by the police instead, Blaster and Goldbug realise their new leader is too barmy and go AWOL, which Grimlock predictably does not take well.
You may be asking, "who the hell is Goldbug?" At this point we have to rewind a little bit and follow what will the dominant strand of the UK comics in this collection: the return of Galvatron from the future. Having previously visited contemporary Earth in the classic Target: 2006 arc, Galvatron secretly kept hold of his time travel device and, after being booted into space by Rodimus Prime at the end of the movie, triggered it. His arrival on present-day Earth is not well-received by anyone, as he beats the hell out of Perceptor's newly-arrived resistance cell from Cybertron and even bests the Dinobots in combat. When Shockwave joins the fight, fearful that Galvatron will usurp him, Galvatron is forced to retreat, since there are so many Transformers present that he knows will survive until his time, he can't just kill them without disrupting the timestream (that ship has already sailed, but nobody knows that yet).
With Galvatron MIA and the war on Cybertron resuming in the year 2007, Rodimus Prime puts a bounty on Galvatron's head. The incredibly resourceful mechanoid bounty-hunter freelance peacekeeping agent Death's Head conducts a subtle investigation (by finding Cyclonus and Scourge and beating them up) that concludes Galvatron probably returned to the past, so Death's Head goes after him. He immediately meets Bumblebee and immediately blows him into a thousand pieces, to show he's not messing around. Rodimus Prime, aware of the threats he has unleashed on Earth's past, time travels back to solve the problem, and Wreck-Gar takes it upon himself to rebuild Bumblebee as Goldbug. After some more shenanigans, the Autobots and Death's Head engage Galvatron in combat and fail to stop him before being forcibly returned to their own time. It falls to Goldbug and present-day Ultra Magnus to, at least temporarily, halt Galvatron by burying him in lava (as you do). Unfortunately, Magnus suffers the same fate.
American readers may vaguely recall Bumblebee being instead killed by the human counter-terrorist organisation G.I. Joe and rebuilt as Goldbug. However, Simon Furman and the UK editors took one look at the G.I. Joe and the Transformers mini-series, realised it was possibly the worst-ever comic about either franchise that could possibly be published (the passage of forty years has only solidified this impression) and ejected it from their continuity. The replacement story is much better and Wreck-Gar being able to rebuild a basically-dead Transformer is something that was already established in the movie with future Ultra Magnus, so it makes more sense than G.I. Joe somehow being able to rebuild a Transformer from scratch. There will be many more crossovers between the two franchises and absolutely all of them will be much better than the initial one (although, for the sake of completionists, Compendium 4 does include that story).
The volume continues to flip between stories on contemporary and future Earth and Cybertron. The present-day US stories focus on Goldbug and Blaster in exile, during which time they find new allies like the Throttlebots and new enemies like the Scraplets, who threaten to destroy all mechanical life on Earth until it turns out they have a very dumb weakness. Grimlock's relentless pursuit of the exiles, to the point of ignoring the Decepticons moving to a new base of operations in the Florida Keys, continues to gnaw away at the loyalty of his Autobots, eventually resulting in Wheeljack calling in his friend Sky Lynx from Cybertron to help resolve the situation which, predictably, goes sideways. Meanwhile, the ignored Decepticons, now jointly commanded by Shockwave and Ratbat, whose pedantic budget calculations for Decepticon fuel expenditures threaten to drive the usually coldly logical Shockwave completely insane in one of Budiansky's more amusing double-acts, are allowed to run riot on Earth, leading to the Autobots' human allies having to fight them instead (with mixed results).
The UK stories divide into two groups. One continues to entwine around the American stories, providing better rationales for what the hell is going on in the American strip. For example, Furman has a story about the Throttlebots fighting the Combaticons and even defeating them (albeit with help), which better explains why the Combaticons are so incessant in chasing the Throttlebots down in the American stories. The other is largely set in the future, with the big-ticket story being The Legacy of Unicron.
This story is a genuinely impressive epic, in which we learn that, after the events of Transformers: The Movie, Unicron's head didn't go into orbit around Cybertron but instead flew through space and crashed on the planet of Junk. Unicron has mind-controlled the Junkions into rebuilding his body. Using his mental powers to reassert control of his creations Cyclonus and Scourge, Unicron has them usurp command from future Shockwave and unleash a massive assault on the Autobots which, with both sides so evenly-matched, threatens to wipe out both sides, leaving Cybertron ripe for Unicron's return. Obviously this plan does not work out. The story is impressively epic and give Furman the chance to his give own origin story for the entire Transformers franchise, here casting the Transformers as the creations of the light god Primus, designed to stand as the last line of defence against Unicron, the Chaos-Bringer. Furman had apparently seen the "the Transformers are the creations of the Quintessons, despite the Quintessons having no idea who they are in the movie," idea and roundly rejected it.
However, the story is also a nice piece of continuity-straightening. At its conclusion, Death's Head is ejected from the Transformers universe altogether and into his own comic, whilst Cyclonus and Scourage end up in Cybertron's distant past, where they come under the command of Scorponok.
The story then switches to a completely new - and enormous - cast of Transformers in the four-part Headmasters mini-series. An Autobot resistance cell led by Fortress Maximus and including the contemporary versions of Hot Rod, Kup and Blurr (so far all their appearances in the comic have been of their future selves from the movie timeline) tire of the war and flees to the planet Nebulos, hoping to live in peace alongside its inhabitants. The power-hungry Nebulan Lord Zarak constantly disrupts their attempts to make peaceful contact, forcing Fortress Maximus, Highbrow, Hardhead, Chromedome and Brainstorm to remove their heads as a sign of goodwill, which the Nebulan leader Galen accepts. Frustrated, Zarak contacts Maximus's nemesis Scorponok, whose Decepticon army quickly reaches Nebulous and starts laying waste to the planet. Galen and several friends "binary-bond" to the Autobots, replacing their heads and becoming the titular Headmasters. The Decepticons rapidly copy the trick and capture the Autobot Headmasters, reducing Nebulous to a dystopia under Zarak's rule. The remaining Autobots come up with the Targetmaster concept, turning Nebulan companions into powerful weapons, and are able to rescue the Headmasters. Aware they are laying waste to the planet, the Autobots flee on their starship, the Steelhaven, and the Decepticons follow.
This isn't the best mini-series ever (though it wipes the floor with the G.I. Joe crossover) and Budiansky struggles with the mind-boggling weight of the size of the cast. As well as the Autobot and Decepticon Headmasters and Targetmasters, we also meet the Monsterbots, Terrorcons, Horrorcons, Technobots and, er, Sixshot (who makes his only Marvel G1 appearance in one panel, has one line of dialogue, and is never seen or head from again). Nebulos and its people, who are basically just human (not even green, as the cartoon suggests), are also fairly undeveloped. What does make the story work is its better-than-normal musings on the price of peace, how pacifism can be sustained in the face of mindless hate, and wouldn't it be awesome to turn into a giant robot's head or gun? Thoughtful stuff indeed.
Having fled from Nebulous, it's not a surprise that the two groups find their way to Earth, responding to a distress call sent by Goldbug. There's some creaky continuity-twitching as we meet Buster's somehow-never-before-mentioned (remember the comic was over four years old by this point) older brother Spike, who promptly replaces Galen as Fortress Maximus's companion. The cast somehow immediately gets bigger as both sides invent the Pretenders, Transformers clad inside bio-genetic shells for...reasons that are never entirely made clear. You can see Budiansky struggling here as even he can't introduce twelve new Transformers in one issue and give any of them more than the most cursory characterisation (in his defence, he does try again later on, and manages to give at least Cloudburst, Landmine and Skullgrin a bit more to do).
He does rally to the occasion, however, as he brings together the arrival of the Headmasters, their first stormy meeting with Grimlock (who has really lost the plot by this point, despite his success in getting the Ark back into space again) and a full-scale battle with the Decepticons as the catalyst for the return of Optimus Prime. There is some very nice plotting here as Goldbug travels to Nebulos to rebuild Prime only to find the planet's fuel sources poisoned to defeat any future Transformer incursion. However, the villainous Hi-Test has created the Powermaster process to negate the poison, empowering two Decepticon warriors in causing havoc on the planet. Hi-Test's angry former mento, Hi-Q, agrees to undergo the Powermaster process to save Optimus Prime. I think Budiansky put more thought into this storyline than he did the Headmaster mini. Anyway, Prime's back and the first thing he does is...visit the circus? It's to rescue Sky Lynx, but still, some odd decisions there.
The volume is rounded off by another future Furman epic. Set wholly in 2008 (future time is advancing at the same rate as in the present), the comic sees the Quintesson homeworld on the verge of total annihilation, sparking their decision to invade Cybertron to use it as a replacement. They also attack Autobot City on Earth to split the Transformers' attention between the two planets. This is a pretty good story, even finding a way of incorporating the otherwise inexplicable American adaptation of the (awful) TV episode The Big Broadcast of 2006 into the main continuity. The characterisation given to the various Quintesson characters like Lord Kledji and General Ghyrik is surprisingly good, and it feels like this is Furman redeeming both the Quintessons and Rodimus Prime as characters (Rodimus gets demoted to Hot Rod for a bit here, allowing him to reflect on what elements the Matrix draws out of him to make him a better leader). We get some of the best battles seen to date, and the sole appearance of Metroplex in the entire G1 Marvel continuity. The main mike-drop is left for the end, however, when we discover that Quintesson was destroyed by a growing rift in the fabric of space and time, one that may threaten the entire universe. What I really like about this is that the astute reader probably already knows what is causing this, and what may be able to fix it, but that's for Compendium 3.
This volume does cover a lot of ground and there's a lot going on outside of these main arcs. There's a solid stand-alone Christmas story about Starscream being brought back online and joining forces with a human to "do good," though in reality it's just a way of pettily annoying Streetwise, who keeps expecting him to do something evil instead. A team-up of various female human characters encountered during the saga so far feels like it could be complete cringe, but surprisingly it works reasonably well (though Swindle's repair bill may disagree). There's even a whole mini-Furman epic arc set on Cybertron with the Wreckers discovering that Megatron got a lot further in his plan to turn Cybertron into a mobile battle station than anyone thought possible, and a mad Autobot scientist now wants to complete his work. And also raise an army of Transformer zombies because...why not? Some very nice characterisation for Ultra Magnus, Xaaron and Springer here. We also have Furman's own G.I. Joe crossover as the Joes' UK branch, Action Force, comes face-to-face with Megatron in London. This is a bit of a throwaway action story, but it's fine, with some nice Geoff Senior artwork.
This compendium is mostly very good stuff. The absolute insanity of putting Grimlock in charge of the Autobots is one of those great ideas that almost writes itself, and Budiansky does some of his best-ever work see the consequences play out. Furman remains the stronger writer, though his Galvatron arc feels a little unfocused here. Target: 2006 was phenomenal because of how it was really epic and quite tightly-written at the same time, but the arc here drags out too long (bearing in mind Galvatron returns to Earth in the opening issues of this compendium and is still skulking around, not doing that much, at the end). Galvatron is such a powerful character, it's hard to use him and have him not just win instantly, and I'm not sure Furman does his best work here in having Galvatron in stealth mode instead. However, The Legacy of Unicron and Space Pirates, both future epics without much interaction with Galvatron, are both all-timer classic stories. Also, this compendium handily collects all of Death's Head's appearances in Transformers, making it clear what a great character he is.
Where the compendium suffers is the sheer, unrelenting avalanche of new characters it constantly introduces. You can see Budiansky railing against the dying of the light, having a strong arc focused on Blaster and Goldbug (formerly Bumblebee) and even throwing some bones to old favourites like Ratchet and Wheeljack, whilst trying to fob off the entire Headmasters and related cast to a mini-series, but eventually it gets a bit much for him. Modern Transformers fans may be completely bemused to see big-hitters like Trypticon appear in all of two issues, Metroplex in one, and Sixshot in one panel, whilst characters like the Throttlebots, Sparkabots, Flywheels and Sandstorm get much more substantial appearances.
Transformers: Til All Are One - Compendium 2 (****) is still pretty decent stuff. The growing pains of the first compendium are gone, and the consistency is much better. The constant appearances of new characters may get wearying after a while, even if both the primary writers are adept at using them in interesting ways. But there is some fun action here, and the totally unhinged deliciousness of Grimlock as Autobot leader cannot be overstated. If you can find a copy without pawning a kidney (or waiting an indeterminate amount of time for the near-inevitable Kickstarter reprint), this is reasonably recommended to any Transformers fan.
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