Manga Thoughts: Transformers the Manga 1
Apr. 9th, 2020 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRationing out the things I post about here, I’ve turned to another one of the manga volumes I bought on my last trip to the area bookstore before the national chain closed its stores for public health reasons, leaving me after getting on close to a month still not quite able to decide whether to see how far an independant comics store further away from me can deliver, to impose on the people stuck in the warehouses of one larger online store or another, or just to make the compromise some find more significant than others and start buying more “e-manga.” It had been something anyway to find a volume of a new “official release of vintage Transformers manga” after having looked and waited for it to show up in the store, but in the time I’d been waiting and looking I’d happened to see a review with some rather strong suggestions its appeal was focused on the nostalgic and the young (however many of those kids might be stuck with being presented things that appealed most of all to their nostalgic parents).
The artwork was decent, although its “giant transforming robots” did look better to me than “the human pals of the good-guy robots”; I can’t quite articulate why these particular manga character designs didn’t appeal to me compared to others from the 1980s even as I had a different source of comparison in the old Marvel comics. The episodic plots seemed very simplistic, though, something not helped by the dialogue being translated as short exclamatory sentences. Aware the manga seemed to be building off broadcasts of the dubbed-into-Japanese Transformers cartoon, I supposed it had been intended and published as “kids’ stuff.” There, though, I could start thinking a bit further into things.
With some interest in “things I didn’t know about at the time,” I’ve imbibed impressions (without quite being able to justify them by pointing back to where I saw them) of 1980s North American anime fans holding the drawn material they were interested in above at least the animation scripted and designed near them. That manga might “start its fans young” could be an explanation for lasting interest from its audiences, but I was at least ready to consider the Transformers manga a counterweight to however-inflated claims.
Transformers was a sort of “widely available default” for me, on even a local channel for stretches of time and bought off the magazine and spinner racks of the day, but that ubiquity might have wound up contrasted to working my way into Robotech. There have been times I’ve succumbed to the temptation of thinking that if only I’d resolved to buy (or just ask for) the more expensive Robotech comics starting where I saw them deep into their runs (where I’d moved beyond my spotty collection of the Marvel Star Wars comic by looking hard enough to find every issue of the Transformers comic starting with the second issue), I’d have penetrated to the secret of “this show is really three shows, and there’s a lot more like them in another country” along with other early anime fans. On the other hand, I didn’t know the Transformers had started as two separate Japanese toy lines (and a selection of other robots) with less of a story than something starting as animation, presumably making it more permissable to be given a story on this side of the Pacific. Remembering the enigma of “Robotech” and “Battletech” using the same piloted giant robots, I could wonder what someone in Japan who remembered the “Diaclone” and “Micro Change” toys would make of the new series, although from the first chapters of manga “1986” Transformers were being shown off. By the end of the volume things were getting to introducing the concepts of the only-in-Japan Transformers series; however, I’m not nearly as compelled now to decide on one way or another of following this series.
The artwork was decent, although its “giant transforming robots” did look better to me than “the human pals of the good-guy robots”; I can’t quite articulate why these particular manga character designs didn’t appeal to me compared to others from the 1980s even as I had a different source of comparison in the old Marvel comics. The episodic plots seemed very simplistic, though, something not helped by the dialogue being translated as short exclamatory sentences. Aware the manga seemed to be building off broadcasts of the dubbed-into-Japanese Transformers cartoon, I supposed it had been intended and published as “kids’ stuff.” There, though, I could start thinking a bit further into things.
With some interest in “things I didn’t know about at the time,” I’ve imbibed impressions (without quite being able to justify them by pointing back to where I saw them) of 1980s North American anime fans holding the drawn material they were interested in above at least the animation scripted and designed near them. That manga might “start its fans young” could be an explanation for lasting interest from its audiences, but I was at least ready to consider the Transformers manga a counterweight to however-inflated claims.
Transformers was a sort of “widely available default” for me, on even a local channel for stretches of time and bought off the magazine and spinner racks of the day, but that ubiquity might have wound up contrasted to working my way into Robotech. There have been times I’ve succumbed to the temptation of thinking that if only I’d resolved to buy (or just ask for) the more expensive Robotech comics starting where I saw them deep into their runs (where I’d moved beyond my spotty collection of the Marvel Star Wars comic by looking hard enough to find every issue of the Transformers comic starting with the second issue), I’d have penetrated to the secret of “this show is really three shows, and there’s a lot more like them in another country” along with other early anime fans. On the other hand, I didn’t know the Transformers had started as two separate Japanese toy lines (and a selection of other robots) with less of a story than something starting as animation, presumably making it more permissable to be given a story on this side of the Pacific. Remembering the enigma of “Robotech” and “Battletech” using the same piloted giant robots, I could wonder what someone in Japan who remembered the “Diaclone” and “Micro Change” toys would make of the new series, although from the first chapters of manga “1986” Transformers were being shown off. By the end of the volume things were getting to introducing the concepts of the only-in-Japan Transformers series; however, I’m not nearly as compelled now to decide on one way or another of following this series.