On May 8th, we celebrate the birth of the Transformers! It was on this day in 1984 that the very first piece of Transformers media, the first issue of the Marvel comic, was released! But if you’d asked a Mr. Ted Nolan, who posted about the issue a few weeks later on Usenet (yes, kids, the internet was around in 1984!), you’d never have guessed a household name and a thirty-year franchise had just been born!
Cross-contributed to Disciples of Boltax…
Fresh from 1984 - and imported over the Atlantic, besides - have a trio of promotional mini-posters featuring Soundwave, the Decepticon jets, and Megatron, made using stills from the earliest Transformers comic and toy commercials. These ridiculously high-resolution scans were made, respectively, from Marvel UK’s Transformers #4, #5 and #6.
I actually scanned these some time ago, but at the time wrote them off as being useless because, due to the terrible color reproduction involved, they were incredibly red-tinged. However, I recently learned about Photoshop’s “Variations” tool (which is kind of embarrassing, given how long I’ve had the program), and my new stab at fixing them up produced much better results. Megatron is still terribly yellowish, though.
Fun fact: in these scans, Starscream is the one with the grey chest and white/red wings! These early ads seem to have been the source of his first Marvel Comics color scheme, which appears to have switched the grey to blue because of comics’ limited color palette at the time.
There were also mini-posters featuring Optimus Prime and the Autobot cars, but their animation designs didn’t change as drastically, so I didn’t scan them at the time. Might go back and do them anyway now…
unpretty
