The enduring impression the 1980s UK Transformers comics left upon me is a theme to which I keep returning. The US stories (which the weekly UK comic reprinted in between its own original material) had their moments, but tended towards safe whimsy and off-beat episodic adventures. By contrast, the UK comic - whose writers were steadily ingesting Alan Moore and Judge Dredd at the time - aimed far higher.
It gleefully exposed its young (i.e. sub-10) audience to longer-running and denser storylines, with interwoven and parallel narratives, a requirement to remember plot beats from months past, and a wildly, deliciously inappropriate degree of violence. Because its characters were theoretically machines rather than ‘people’, it was able to fly its brutality under the radar. To a would-be censor, the shocking murderer of an Autobot was no different than throwing a toy car at the wall. Of course, we knew better. These robots were people. Our people.
Never did the comic run with this ball more than it did with 1986’s Target 2006, an eleven-part epic running uninterrupted from September to November, exclusively in the UK. This was a massively ambitious undertaking for the comic, which acted as both prequel to and expansion of that same year’s Transformers: The Movie.
The movie was set in a hyper-futuristic 2005 (the ‘2006’ thing is a confusion stemming from the comic’s team having access only to an earlier script), and notoriously cleared out most of the existing Transformers cast in order to make way for a new set of must-have toys.
Target 2006 forks in another direction: what if those all-powerful new characters arrived in the midst of the altogether more Earthly 1986 Autobot/Decepticon war? Of all Transformers stories, in any medium, Target 2006 is the one that has most stayed with me, and the one I most recommend anyone revisit today. Here’s why.
It begins as it means to go on, as we hop over to Cybertron to witness the Insecticon Shrapnel electro-torturing a begging, pleading Autobot to death. He’s clearly getting off on it, while another watching Autobot (Roadbuster) decides to just let it happen.
The abrupt disappearance and implied death of Optimus, our long-term hero/father-figure. It’s depicted as being extremely painful, with no explanation or reassurance that he was alive for around 8 issues - 8 weeks in real-time, which was an eternity to a seven-year-old..
Introducing the concept of characters time-travelling from twenty years in the future to young minds that can barely remember what they had for breakfast yesterday. Evil chrono-jumping robots was, of course, a direct lift from The Terminator - but it’s fair to say the comic’s readership at the time didn’t know that.
Cyclonus and Scourge, right-hand thugs to future Decepticon leader Galvatron, marking their arrival in 1986 by casually blowing up trains and petrol stations for kicks, and all the mass casualties that implies.
These still-mysterious new baddies are shown to be so powerful that they take out Megatron, the comic’s long-term, nigh-on unkillable arch-villain, within moments of arrival. Not to mention Soundwave, the until-recently beloved face and voice of the UK comic (he’d answered reader letters with pithy aplomb, his villainous contempt allowing the comic’s editorial team to treat idiot questions with deserved disdain).
The introduction of a whole new set of unknown Autobots on Cybertron while still reeling from the above – and the statement that they’re all about to be imminently wiped out. Plus they all seem to hate each other? The purple-and-yellow tough-nut named Impactor is made our new focal point, but we’ve never met him before today and his surly, antagonistic behaviour flew in the face of everything we hitherto knew about goodies.
The sudden apparent death of Jazz, the most front-and-centre good guy after Optimus, at Cyclonus’ hands…
…and an extended, brutal beatdown of Hound by those same hands…
…then the revelation that Jazz is actually still alive, but being continuously tortured by Galvatron, in absolute agony. For some of us, this may even have been our introduction to the very concept of torture. Knowledge we probably shouldn’t have had while still learning ten times tables.
Galvatron demonstrating that he is functionally invulnerable, then single-handedly taking out every single Autobot. A clear riff on Megatron’s decimation of the established goodies in Transformers: The Movie, this was compounding the brutal and cynical 1986 argument that all our favourite toys to date were shit and useless. (And therefore we should buy the new ones instead).
Prime’s right-hand guy Ironhide apparently betraying the Autobot cause by rescuing their mortal enemy, Megatron.
Suddenly breaking away again from all this high drama and trauma for what appears to be a completely unrelated story about yet another tranche of new, and very angry, characters. Parallel narratives, especially for whole issues at a time, was a huge jump in complexity for any kid’s comic.
The apparent graphic murders of the Insecticons (including a spear through the brain for Shrapnel) and the ‘new’ Decepticon jets Thrust, Ramjet and Dirge - characters who only joined the comic five minutes ago, and a toy of which half of us probably just got as a birthday present.
The Wreckers – the Cyberton-based Autobots, our supposed heroes – gleefully talking up their thirst to kill, and generally behaving like the most murderous of Decepticons. Are we supposed to root for these guys? The comic’s pulling from war movies and Eastwood-era Westerns here, which is a giant leap into amorality and brutality, and away from the Saturday morning cartoon, black and white harmlessness of yore.
As if we weren’t already clear that no-one plays nice any more, we get a new Decepticon so impossibly cruel that he beats up a piano.
Continuing the bending - even shattering - of established good/bad morality, we get a shock alliance between the surviving Autobots and a reactivated Megatron. Autobots and Decepticons working together! Lions laying with lambs! Oh my!
Gigantic Ultra Magnus being completely bloody terrifying to Hound, and declining to help the Autobots in their darkest hour. The new big-ticket Transformer toy, the Optimus replacement everyone wanted for Christmas, turns out to be a massive arsehole? Time to redefine our simple sense of heroism.
Transformers UK’s most landmark artist, the incomparable Geoff Senior, steps up to the plate with perhaps the comic’s most traumatic and dynamic fight scene to date. Most memorably: extended pain and suffering enacted upon Grapple (sheet metal through the chest) and Trailbreaker (horrific acid burn).
Galavtron…. is a future version of Megatron? What how huh Christ alive. But Megatron is here too! How can that possibly work? N.b. this is also massively spoiling a major twist in Transformers: The Movie - a film not quite yet released in the UK.
Impactor, a character we’ve just been taught is a) Cybertron’s last hope b) tough as nails, getting his arse completely handed to him by yet another new set of impossibly strong Decepticons – who turn out to actually be Autobots. Why would they beat the living snot out of someone from their own side? Why is everyone on Cybertron such a complete bastard?
The entirely Cronenbergy concept of Inhibitor claws – frightening spidery-devices which gouge their way into someone’s back and can stop Transformers from transforming. This is existentially horrific.
By the by, the Transformers’ universe contains sentient, malevolent planets with godlike powers, who might just be pulling the strings of everything that’s happened so far. Worth remembering that, just a few short weeks ago in the comic, the highest drama was a concern that a silly man named Jake might smash poor Skids’ windscreen.
The apparent and agonising deaths of major Decepticons Shockwave, Frenzy and Thundercracker, mere panels after they return to the comic after a months-long absence. In fact, they have been displaced in time and space to allow for the arrival of more time-travelling Transformers - but, as with Optimus’ fate, this is something we don’t learn for some time.
Galvatron casually builds himself a Death Star laser, destroys an entire spaceship and intends to do the same to an actual planet. As Decepticon masterplans go, this is a long way from their prior hi-jinks - e.g. kidnapping costumed comicbook-writers or eye-roasting oil rig workers’ pizzas.
The future Autobots Hot Rod, Kup and Blurr arrive, and immediately break our brains by encountering the present-day Ultra Magnus. They know him, from 2006, but he does not yet know them. Asking a seven-year-old to get their fool head around the idea that there are two different versions of Ultra Magnus in this continuity (present and future) is no small thing.
After years of only lightly teasing his treachery, Starscream finally goes mask-off and effortlessly taking out his bosses Megatron and Soundwave – who we were only just told were the Autobots’ last hope. New depths of evil!
After several issues of sustained torture at Galavatron’s hands, poor old Jazz is remade as a zombie death-bot - who immediately and brutally takes out all his his friends. There was no way to know if his deeply disturbing new state could ever be reversed.
The single best and most dramatic page in the comic to date – followed by effectively a whole issue as one extended, incredible, brutal fight scene. The penciller Geoff Senior at his very best, and the whole book suddenly levelling up before our very eyes. How could we possibly go back to business as usual after this?
After all the build-up around Ultra Magnus as Autobot super-warrior, their only hope and the heir to Optimus Prime… Galvatron defeats him handily. There’s yer new leader, kiddos. Useless. (A characterisation also deployed in the 1986 animated movie, thus dooming Magnus to years of Professional Underachiever status).
The extremely graphic – including decapitation – death of ‘Starscream’. Death has never before looked so permanent. Had this been a human character as opposed to a ‘robot’, this issue would have been pulled from shelves and there would have been a months-long Daily Mail campaign against the comic.
Hey, six-year-olds - it’s time to learn about alternate realities and parallel timelines. Pay attention at the back.
Even when the Autobots win – they lose, with the shocking and graphic murder of the by-now beloved Impactor in the line of duty. Despite Impactor not being an ‘official’ Transformer (he didn’t get a toy until a couple of years ago), he didn’t feel like some also-ran supporting character: he was the protagonist for several key issues of Target 2006, given more and more distinctive personality than the average Autobot. We loved his world-weary dedication to a hopeless cause, and full-throated embrace of annihilating his enemies (in stark contrast to Prime’s comics-typical tendency to let mass-murderers go). Hence, we fully expected him to remain a cast regular.
But no, Impactor was born to die, to give the comic lasting stakes even as everyone else was necessarily resurrected in order to line up with the US stories that followed. A tragedy I read with disbelief and despair in 1986, and which stays with me to this day. But this was not quite the last we’d see of our purple-and-yellow hard man… A story for another day, perhaps.
By the time all is said and done, the entirety of Target 2006 has steadily eroded our safe, binary notions of good and evil. Megatron has been deeply-wronged by his past self and his right-hand man, meaning we’re rooting for the comic’s long-time villains in the final issues. Embracing amorality is perhaps Target 2006’s foremost lesson.
The relief of Optimus returning (once Galvatron has fled back to his own time) is undercut by the creeping concern that he’s either thick as mince or has completely lost his mind. This is not a remotely sane response to the devastating and traumatic events of this story - or to the knowledge that the future is an unutterably bleak and scary one of invincible resurrected arch-villains and evil, omnipotent planets.
In short: Target 2006 was a lot. If I was the age today that I was when I first read this in 1986, I’d have been watching Bluey.
Bluey’s great! But it doesn’t feature torture, decapitation, parallel universes, malevolent cosmic gods and harpoons through the brain. Target 2006 is the highest watermark of the 1980s Transformers comics (whether UK or US), but to this day I’m stunned that it was allowed to happen.
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