The Wrath of Guardian!
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"The Wrath of Guardian!" | |||||||||||||
Publisher | Marvel Comics | ||||||||||||
First published | 12th October, 1985 | ||||||||||||
Cover date | 19th October 1985 | ||||||||||||
Script | Simon Furman | ||||||||||||
Art | Barry Kitson | ||||||||||||
Colours | Gina Hart | ||||||||||||
Letters | Annie Halfacree | ||||||||||||
Editor | Ian Rimmer | ||||||||||||
Continuity | Marvel Comics continuity |
Ratchet and the Dinobots return to the Ark to discover that Shockwave has left a nasty surprise for them...
Contents |
Synopsis
Seeing Guardian holding the battered body of Swoop, the other Dinobots charge to avenge him, despite Ratchet's warning. Their frontal assault is effortlessly beaten back, but Ratchet is able to overload Guardian's cranial systems by firing his laser scalpel into the battle droid's cerebral access port. Guardian flees into the depths of the Ark. Grimlock demands that Ratchet repair Swoop immediately, but Ratchet replies that he has an entire Arkload of Autobots to repair, and that Swoop is not at the top of his list of priorities. Telling the Dinobots to keep Guardian occupied while he works, Ratchet storms off. Angry at having lost face and resentful of the dressing-down, Grimlock orders his amused troops into action.
On his way to find his deactivated comrades, Ratchet passes the headless body of Optimus Prime. Ratchet assumes that, as long as Prime is of use to Shockwave, he'll have to keep him alive. At the Blackrock Aerospace Plant, Shockwave tells Prime that he exists only to serve the Decepticons, and that despite his unwillingness, he has given life to six Decepticon brain modules. Prime is privately thankful that giving life to these six used up the last vestiges of Matrix power in his mind, and that the power now resides within Buster Witwicky. Meanwhile, Buster is trying to fix a broken tape deck, to be overwhelmed by another terrible headache. As he recovers, he sees that the tape deck is now fixed...
In the Ark, Ratchet has succeeded in reactivating first Prowl and then Wheeljack. Wheeljack is having difficulty concentrating on his task of tracking Guardian using the internal scanners, due to his recent reactivation, but shrugs off Prowl's offer of help. Prowl then returns to Ratchet for a status report. Ratchet observes that some Autobots are badly damaged, and that he had to give up on Sunstreaker completely, but that Jazz (his current patient) should soon be up and running. Wheeljack calls Prowl and Ratchet to see the unexpected readings he's picked up. They are suitably shocked...
Elsewhere in the Ark, Snarl and Grimlock are being followed by a decidedly unstealthy Guardian. A sudden and well-executed attack from all four Dinobots inflicts heavy damage, and the Dinobots prepare to finish the job. At the same time, Prowl confirms that there can be no mistake—"there's a high density thermo-nuclear bomb in one of the Ark's corridors. And it's mobile!" Wheeljack gets a visual of the corridor, to reveal the wounded Guardian prostrate at Optimus Prime's body, as the Dinobots advance. Grimlock aims his gun at the cranial access port, and Wheeljack confirms—Guardian IS the bomb, booby-trapped by Shockwave. If Grimlock pulls the trigger, the others conclude, he'll not only destroy Guardian, but them, the Ark, and the entire mountain!
Featured Characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
Autobots | Decepticons | Humans |
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Quotes
"Well, if that was the mighty Dinobots in action, don't put your trigger relays on pause waiting for praise!"
- — Ratchet gets sassy with Grimlock and the Dinobots over their defeat at the hands of Guardian
Notes
Continuity notes
- "The Wrath of Guardian!" follows on directly from the cliffhanger ending of last issue's "Decepticon Dam-Busters!".
- Ratchet uses his laser scalpel as an offensive weapon, with far more effect than when he last attempted to do so in US issue #8. The other mentioned weakness of Guardian, vulnerability to a strong magnetic field, was exploited by Windcharger to defeat him in "Raiders of the Last Ark".
- Just as "Dam-Busters" did, this story makes what will ultimately be recognised as a rare move for a UK-original strip by checking in on and advancing two sub-plots from the US material already in motion.
- Shockwave relocated Optimus Prime's head to the captured Blackrock Aerospace Assembly Plant Number One in US issue #8, whereupon he revealed his plans to use the Creation Matrix within Prime to create new Decepticons, and unveiled the "protective casks" containing these six new burgeoning lives. Following on from this, we see the brain modules of these new Decepticons for the first time, which have evidently been drawn by the artist with advance knowledge of how they look in their impending US debut in US issue #10 (right). Their green coloration doesn't match, though, but was evidently taken from how the (different-looking) modules were colored in US issue #9.
- We learn for the first time that the "electric shock" Optimus Prime subjected Buster to in US issue #6 was him transferring the Creation Matrix from his mind to the human's to keep it from Shockwave's clutches. Buster has been suffering "headaches" like the one he has in this story since US issue #7; his Matrix-born ability to manipulate metal was first implied in that issue, but it will not be until US issue #9 that the US material will show him to be capable of complex feats like the repairing of the tape deck he performs in this issue.
- However, see "continuity errors," below for a note on how the UK material misinterpreted the timeline at play here.
- Ratchet notes he has had to "give up altogether" on repairing Sunstreaker. The already-offline Sunstreaker was blasted point-blank by Shockwave as a graphic demonstration of his power to Megatron in US issue #5; this line of dialogue has obviously been written with foreknowledge of US issue #10, in which Sunstreaker will be singled out as the one Autobot Ratchet is unable to repair thanks to this excessive damage.
Transformers references
- Prowl swears "by Iacon's Great Dome!"—the first instance of what will become a relatively common oath used by the Transformers in the comic, which refers to the huge golden dome of the city-state of Iacon, the Autobot capital on Cybertron. The dome was designed for the Generation 1 cartoon and debut in its pilot episode, but had not actually appeared in the regular comic. However, the cartoon designs were reproduced in the Marvel UK story "And There Shall Come...a Leader!", ensuring that the swear makes sense "in-universe."
Real-life references
- The title continues Simon Furman's early predilection for movie titles, this one coming from The Wrath of Khan.
- The song that plays from Buster's tape deck is Bruce Spingsteen's "Glory Days."
Continuity and plotting errors
- Optimus Prime's right arm was blasted off at the elbow by a shot from Megatron's fusion cannon in US issue #4, but here appears intact. It seems unlikely that the Decepticons would have fixed it, and Ratchet hasn't had the chance yet.
- During its one-page digression to Optimus Prime and Shockwave, the story seemingly thinks it's correcting a continuity error in the US material, namely: if Prime already transferred the Matrix to Buster in US issue #6, how was Shockwave able to use it to create new Decepticon life in US issue #8? The answer this issue provides is that the new Decepticons were created with the "last vestiges" of the Matrix remaining in Prime's head, left behind after he transferred the "main creation power" to Buster. But in actuality, there's no error present, because Shockwave didn't create the new lives in US issue #8—he began the process some time between US issue 4 and #5, with Prime only transferring the Matrix to Buster afterward. We didn't realize what we were seeing at the time, but we even saw this in action on the final page of US issue #5, as energy was channelled from Prime's head into a glowing cube in the background.
Artwork and technical errors
- We're almost there! Virtually every Transformer in this story is drawn to the specifications of their finalized character model for the first time in a UK-original strip, but Prowl still has an off-model, squared-off head that seems based more on his toy or its package art.
- Several of the Dinobots, meanwhile, have early colour schemes that will persist through most of their appearances in the first 100 issues of the UK series:
- Snarl's dinosaur head is coloured gray instead of yellow.
- Slag's dino-head continues to be coloured golden-yellow, following the lead of his previous appearance in US material, but only in dino-mode itself; when in robot mode, it can be seen sitting behind his head in the greyish-purple of his finalized colour scheme. His dino-mode neck-frill is also coloured gold, but that's just flat-out wrong.
- Swoop has a blue Pteranodon head, boots, and arms, and white thighs; on his finalized colours, his boots and arms are grey, his thighs are red, and his dino-head is orange while he is in robot mode, and silver-white while in dino mode.
- Following the lead of the previous two US issues, Optimus Prime's disembodied head is drawn missing its ear-antennae.
- Page 3 is mis-printed, with the magenta and yellow inks swapped, resulting in Guardian and the Dinobots all appearing shocking pink instead of golden-yellow.
- Page 5, panel 4: Sludge's shoulder-wings are coloured golden instead of grey.
- Page 6, panel 3: Grimlock is missing his shoulder-wings.
- The original printing of Transformers #31 actually reads "...safely within the mind of someone else..."; the reprint in Collected Comics 6 changes it to "...safely within the mind of Buster Witwicky...*" and adds a footnote reading "*Transformers #24", which wasn't in the original.
- Wheeljack is missing the red on his torso and his shoulder-fins are coloured red instead of silver-white, both apparently artifacts of an earlier colour model which will be seen in a few other stories before his finalized colours settle in.
Back-up material
- Back-up strips: Machine Man ("If This be Sanctuary?!" Part 1), Robo-Capers and Matt and the Cat
- Fact File Interface: Bombshell
Cover
- Issue #31: The Dinobots charging down a corridor, by Will Simpson.
Reprints
With the exception of the 2011 Classics UK trade paperback and 2018 The Definitive G1 Collection hardback, all reprints omit the page featuring Buster.
Transformers Collected Comics #6 (Marvel UK, 1987)
Transformers Holiday Special 1994 (Marvel UK, 1994)
The Transformers: Best of Grimlock (IDW Publishing, 2010)
The Transformers Classics UK Volume 1 (IDW Publishing, 2011)
Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection, Vol. 2: New Order (Hachette Partworks Ltd, 2018)