Product Description

Continuing Titan's bestselling Transformers collections, this never-before-collected reprint of the extremely hard-to-find Transformers UK comic material collects the Target: 2006 storyline, which relates directly to the events of the DVD smash-hit Transformers: The Movie! Ultra Magnus, Autobot leader in 2006, is torn between two missions - to help his fellow autobots in a last-ditch strike, or to help rescue a vanished Optimus Prime - and to confront Galvatron, who has returned in time to 1986, with deadly plans for the future! Add Megatron, Starscream, and a cast of thousands into the mix - and you've got a recipe for all-out Transformers action!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239955 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

About the Author
Simon Furman has written extensively for both comics and TV animation, including Alpha Flight, Death's Head, Beast Wars, X-Men: Evolution and The Roswell Conspiracies. He is currently producing the online comic The Engine. Geoff Senior has worked on Transformers, Death's Head and What If?

Customer Reviews

The Greatest Transformers Tale of Them All
There is a school of thought that Target: 2006 did for the Transformers comic series what Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns did for the comics industry as a whole. Writer Simon Furman had already made a name for himself as a more thoughtful, mature writer than his US counterparts, mixing action and characterisation in equal measure. Target: 2006 is where this method of story-telling reached new heights. Set in 1986, the story begins with Autobot commander Optimus Prime, stranded on Earth, inexplicably vanishing. The Autobots on Cybertron learn of Prime's disappearance and despatch their greatest warrior, Ultra Magnus, to investigate, although this means that their own planned mass-uprising against the Decepticon High Command will be endangered. Meanwhile, Megatron and the Earth-based Decepticons are taken by surprise when three Decepticons turn up claiming to come from the year 2006! Soon the evil and borderline insane Galvatron has taken control of the Decepticons and set about building a giant weapon to destroy his enemies, including the Autobots and the planet-devouring Unicron (yes, this story takes place during Transformers: The Movie). Furman does a good job of moving the three storylines ahead simultaneously: the Autobot commandos known as the Wreckers preparing for the uprising on Cybertron, Ultra Magnus' attempts to find Prime on Earth and Galvatron's barmy schemes for universal domination. The art is of excellent quality, with the different artists all being given the same colouring and inking style to preserve consistency. Also, for the first time, several Transformers die permanantly and Furman rams home the hopeless struggle that the Autobots particularly on Cybertron are facing. The UK Transformers comic was always superior to the US one mainly because Furman never really cared that he was writing about giant battling robots for kids, simply taking the characters he was given and telling the best story possible with them. This story still stands up well, even for adult readers, 16 years after it was published. Roll on the next collection!

Simon Furman's finest hour...
...At least, until he jumped ship for the US. The most famous of the UK stories and it's not hard to see why as it's a fabulous, fast paced, action packed epic, the 'Godfather' of Transformers stories. Before this, the greatest UK story was Dinobot Hunt but that only ran for four (well, six really) issues - this comes in at nine, and that's without counting the prologue and epilogue. But it's not just the length which makes the story stand out - it's the characterisations (particularly those of Galvatron and Ultra Magnus), the scope, the dialogue, the artwork... if anybody wonders why Transformers are still looked back on fondly today, here's the best place to start, and the US didn't even get to read it! (at least, not before now) And while poor, poor Scrounge's death in Bob Budianski's 'The Smelting Pool' ('Cybertron Redux') is the most moving moment in any Transformers comic series, Simon Furman comes up with a death here which nearly matches it, and he would again in 'On The Edge of Extinction' ('End of the Road').

It all starts here...
Here it is, what many people consider to be the epitome of Transformers comic writing. I wouldn't quite call it that, but the seeds of much greater things are sown here.

I'll get the bad points out of the way first: the colouring is a little gaudy at times, and there are a few holes in the plot (who let Starscream out in the first place? What was to stop the Autobots dismantling the cannon once Galvatron left?). Yeah, that's all the bad points.

On the plus side, we get our first look at Galvatron - when originally published, this was before the movie had even come out. Anybody who has seen the movie may be a little disappointed at Galvatron's performance in it - after all, all he does is kill Starscream (hardly taxing), backing out of his much heralded duel with Ultra Magnus.

Here, we see Galvatron in proper action, seeing just why he is considered to be the ultimate Decepticon. He takes on practically every other transformer and wins, plus he actually has a confrontation with Magnus. That's right - no cop outs, no letting his lieutenants do all the work, in this Galvatron gets his own hands dirty.

As well as the main story, this book also contains a brief history of the British comic from issues 1 to 88, as well as a synopsis of the movie. perhaps greater than ALL of this, though, is something that will surely interest all TF fans - 'Cybertron, the middle years' is a page long descriptionj of what happened on Cybertron after the Ark left 4 million years ago, and to my knowledge hasn't appeared anywhere before.

Oh, and it's on proper sized paper, not like all that American nonsense!

Roll on Fallen Angel, and Death's Head!