This Is Why Other Grown-Ups Don’t Take Me Seriously
Didn’t realise until today, but this week marks six months of consistant blogging. So I’m celebrating. Thinking about it, as the comics industry thinks 25 issues are noteworthy I might start partying every three months.
Transformers fandom is the source of a lot of bewilderment among even the nerdiest adherents of comic shop culture. Part of it is a generational thing (in that if you didn’t grow up with the toys your stunted emotional development is likely focused elsewhere and I’m looking at you, sports fans), part of it is that robots don’t float everybody’s boat. Which is fair enough. I mean, I don’t have the first clue why superhero comics folk go nuts over monkeys, and I’m finding the announcement of Congorilla as a member of a new Justice League team somewhat underwhelming.
Speaking of which, at the Wizard World LA DCU panel writer James Robinson announced that “People are going to love this character by the time I’m done with him”. LXG aside, I rate Robinson highly as a writer, but he’ll have to pull off something pretty fucking special to make an Imperial era Kiplingesque white supremacist appealing to me.
Enough apes. I’m certain that the continuing popularity of the Transformers is due to Simon Furman’s writing. He’s an under-rated creator, and it’s difficult to impart how mind-blowing it was to read his stuff at a fairly early age. Because no one gave a crap about a toy licence, he was given huge scope to write whatever the hell he wanted. Sure, the toys were popular without him, but it was the epic, grand-scale vision he brought to the title that were used as the foundation of all subsequent iterations. A hell of a lot of his concepts have been used in not only the cartoons of the 90s and 00s, but the film itself. The hugely popular film, which wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for the unanticipated success of the Dreamwave revival, greatly influenced and bought in droves by fans of Furman (FoFs? Someone should make a badge. And a fanclub newsletter).
I think the reason for their popularity outside of Furman’s influence is their nature as not only both a toy vehicle and action figure (a two for one deal), but also a kind of puzzle. A way of rearranging and altering elements from one pattern into another that appeals to a mindset of construction and applied reasoning that I’d argue is related to the popularity of jigsaws, Lego and Nintendo Brain Training. Just look at the movie designs; graphic aesthetics were not the first box that needed to be ticked.
Michael Bay’s robots weren’t designed to be simplified or even elegant (compare to the more organic and trimmed down look of Transformers Animated, or even The Spectacular Spider-Man). They were designed from an engineer’s perspective, the emphasis being put on figuring out how one element can be splintered then moved and rotated into a different configuration. The robots are all huge puzzle boxes, and although the busy designs have been rightfully criticised as over-complex and confusing the intricacy of their creation nevertheless impresses.
And that concludes today’s earnest analysis of extra-long product advertisements.
