Product Description

Celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Transformers! This is the fifth title in a new series of black & white digest-sized books from Titan; featuring stories that have never been collected, "Transformers" is packed with action and adventure for all ages! What do robots dream of? This question and more is answered in "Perchance To Dream" with Galvatron's return and also a tribute to crime novelist Raymond Chandler as the Autobot Nightbeat takes on the role of private eye! Featuring work from a stellar cast of UK creators including Staz Johnson ("Batman/Aliens 2"), Geoff Senior, Simon Coleby and the current "Transformers" creative team of Simon Furman and Andy Wildman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #344325 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

About the Author
Simon Furman's writing credits include Alpha Flight, Death's Head, IDW's new Transformers series and Necrowar. He is also enjoying some success with his online comic The Engine. Andrew Wildman's artwork has featured in X-Men Adventures, Gl Joe and Spider-Man 2099. He is currently designing working on Dreamwave's Transformers and also drawing online comic The Engine.

Customer Reviews

A Grab-bag of (mostly) excellent stories
Titan's final Transformers book collects all the UK black-and-white strips which haven't been seen in previous volumes. Whereas the other books had a plot line or a theme running through them, 'Perchance to Dream' is little more than a round-up of the missing stories, with little sense of cohesion - the book features three major storylines, none of which are remotely connected to one another. Fortunately, a good three quarters of the volume ranks amongst the absolute best of the black and white tales.

The story 'Perchance to Dream' itself is a compendium piece in the style of the earlier 'Aspects of Evil', and may even surpass that series. Here, we witness the dreams of five deactivated Autobots as their subconsious minds run over events from their pasts. The series was presumably created at the request of Hasbro UK who at the time were pushing a rerelease of some of the older toys, and the advantage is that some characters who hadn't been seen for years were finally given a starring role once again. Sunstreaker, in particular, hadn't been seen anywhere since the early issues of the US comic. It was great to have the characters back again, and was a good precursor to the already collected 'Earthforce' stories - why that particular volume came out before this one is beyond me.

'The Big Shutdown', a two-parter, is probably the greatest of all the black and white strips, and the only one to be rerun in colour during the remainder of the comic's lifetime - although not necessarily to the strip's advantage. Evident from its title onward, it's very much a 'film noir' style tale, as Nightbeat takes on the Humphrey Bogart role to investigate the dead body of a Transformer, lying on a beach, and in this case the black-and-white style is highly appropriate. In any case, the story's an absolute classic. Following that is (the chronologically earlier) 'A Small War', also a two-parter, which recounts the origin of the Micromasters and is superior to the parallel US tales (and shows just how small Emirate Xaaron is). Together with 'Rage' and 'Assault on the Ark', these stories are loosely connected in showing Thunderwing stake his claim as Decepticon leader, as Simon Furman readies the character for his starring role in the US 'Matrix Quest' saga.

Rounding off this collection are the final three black-and-white strips to be produced, 'Inside Story, 'Front Line' and 'End of the Road' (also the title of Simon Furman's final US G1 story, and the tag-line on the cover of the final G2 issue - the author's little in-joke). Together they follow a journalist becoming caught up in the Transformers war. This trilogy always did seem anticlimatic after so many years of great UK storytelling, and even here that sense remains. There's nothing wrong with it in itself, but you yearn for something a bit more substantial to climax the UK Transformers comic, and Titan's reprints.

Fortunately, at the time, the UK comic was only just starting the reprints of Simon Furman's US Unicron saga. Any sour note was easily conteracted by more than a year of great storytelling still to come.