Yesterday we looked at the UK/European Zoids toy invasion of the mid-1980s. Today, it’s the turn of the tragically obscure UK-only comics.
While Marvel UK were handed down a Good Ones vs Bad Ones structure in keeping with every other action figure line of the time, clearly Zoids-makers Tomy kept a far looser hand on the till than did Hasbro with Transformers, or LJN with Thundercats. Stretching his writing muscles after a long stint as editor on the sterling UK Transformers comic, Ian Rimmer began by divorcing Zoids from even that simple, childish clarity of Good vs Bad.
In his hands, both the ‘Blue Guardians’ and ‘Red Mutants’ were battle-crazed mechanical tyrants, fixated on the absolute destruction of the opposing faction, with no concern as to how many ‘lives’ were lost in the process. An idea Transformers comics have often riffed on is that other, lesser lifeforms are tragically caught in the crossfire of a ceaseless robot war - but the difference here is that not even the ‘good’ Zoids cared in the slightest.
In a sense, the Zoids comic was a purer, less Saturday-morning-cartoon take on the Transformers concept, stripping away simplistic, binary morality to explore what an inhuman machine-race locked in perpetual conflict would really look like.
In the Marvel UK comic - beginning first as a backup strip in weekly reprints of Secret Wars and then improbably sharing a spotlight with ol’ webhead in Spider-Man & Zoids - the Zoids themselves were not even depicted as alive, per se.
What sentience they had was purely within the electronic minds of their tiny gold (for the Blues) or silver (for the Reds) pilots - who themselves were endlessly churned from a production line. Save for two trickster survivors, the Zoids’ original, organic creators had long ago wiped themselves out in the machine-war they brought forth.
As such, there was a rich vein of nihilism, even futility in the Zoids comic’s worldbuilding - no-one was really alive, no-one wanted anything more than to kill, the factories endlessly produced more meat for the grinder… It couldn’t be more true to the toys: every time their clockwork motors run down, they just get wound up once more and it all carries on like before.
But of course real stakes were required, and a human perspective necessary through which young readers could behold so alien and doomy a world. Once more, Zoids aped Transformers, by dragging a father and son human duo helplessly into the machine wars.
But no Zoid ever sought to help grim Captain Drew Heller or his plucky teenage son, Griff. The only monster-machine aid they and the fast-dwindling crew of the crashed Earth ship the Celeste ever received was by killing a series of luckless android pilots to hijack their abandoned Zoids.
Thus, the closest we ever got to a ‘hero’ Zoid was the small, unnamed, wordless Spider Zoid young Griff piloted for the first half of the comic’s run - Bumblebee or Optimus Prime this was not. Any other Zoid they encountered shot at them on sight - and so the Celeste crew thus seemed truly helpless and constantly endangered, with most of their number summarily and brutally killed off in the early issues.
And that was before one of their own turned out to be an evil robot in disguise - a long-running and vicious plotline which owes a hilariously heavy debt to both Alien and The Terminator. (Both overused touchstones for too many a sci-fi story in the decades since, but Ian Rimmer’s remarkably blatant 1986 borrowing from them may be one of the earliest - and likely only got away with because his young readership wouldn’t be aware of the swipes).
The setting of the comic was also remarkably static and narrow - a post-apocalyptic planet of sand and rock, almost devoid of organic life, later with brief jaunts to its frozen, deathly moon. Claustrophobic 70s, rather than maximalist 80s, sci-fi. While this admittedly result in some wheel-spinning on occasion, it was also precisely this rigidity which enabled the most invention.
In occasional, highly-memorable breakaways from the main plot, a Zoid pilot might plunge into existential despair while reflecting upon the futility and amorality of its existence, or the first and only human rescue mission decides this is a dead world and departs moments before the desperate Celeste crew reach them.
In other words, 2000 AD Future Shocks by any other name, wolves in a Woolworths toyline’s sheep-clothes. Perhaps this was why Zoids occasionally attracted Transformers luminaries - TF UK’s main writer Simon Furman penning a few characteristically dynamic tales, the wonderful Mike Collins lending some pencils, and the tragically overlooked generational talent that is Geoff Senior being the best there is at what he does. Which is to say highly expressive characters and widescreen robotic fight scenes that feel alive and bone-shakingly physical on the page.
But the lion’s share of the art went to Kev Hopgood (later best known as the co-creator of War Machine during a spell on Iron Man), whose studied scenes of apocalyptic machine-death on the arid world of Zoidstar were as essential to the bleak, desperate mood as were Rimmer’s scripts.
In his hands, the look of the strip fell somewhere between 70s sci-fi and Dante’s Inferno. And unlike Transformers, the comic’s Zoid depictions were toy-like to a fault - and thus home recreations of the hellish mech-slaughter were eminently plausible. Zoids was, however, never a smash-hit comic in the way many of its Marvel UK stablemates, including Transformers, were.
Partly because of this, and partly because of a dense tangle of licensing rights, the strips have never been reprinted (outside of four contemporaneous Collected Editions which covered only a fraction of the saga). But it does have one lasting claim to fame - one Grant Morrison became the primary writer towards the end of its run.
While the young Morrison also pilfered freely from sci-fi staples such as Terminator and The Thing, the hallmarks of the experimental, psychological and mythic storytelling that would define their later work for Marvel and DC are very much in evidence. They took the brief very seriously, and the strip became more 2000AD-esque - weird, vicious, even nightmarish - than ever in their hands.
Despite reaching these new creative heights, in February 1987 Spider-Man and Zoids was sadly cancelled after 51 weekly issues, one gorgeous, fully-stacked annual, untold numbers of violent deaths and a handful of surprise resurrections. Although major story threads were left in the balance, a promised US-style monthly penned by Morrison never came to pass. (Which perhaps freed him up to explore greater creative heights).
Meanwhile, the European toyline quietly fizzled out in 1988. Perhaps it had simply run its course after four years and 48 toys - or perhaps Terry Pratchett’s Christmas 1987 hit-job on Krark, Prince of Darkness was to blame.
The Zoids comics are not currently available to buy, but you can read scans of the complete run (plus the unreleased first issue of the cancelled monthly continuation) here.
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