Simon Furman

Cover price is $1.

Story is by Simon Furman.

Penciler is Andrew Wildland.

Anchor is Stephen Baskerville.

Mm-hmm.

And my theory is that him and Optimus Prime, like you and Optimus Prime, soul bonded somehow.

Because the thought that Simon Furman seems to be bringing up is, yeah, this dude has been the power engine for Optimus Prime.

Are they actually separate beings now? Or were they combining into one?

And Ghastly McNasty graced the intro and letters page of the comic.

and was obviously in reality the actual editor, Ian Rimmer, and his assistant, Simon Furman.

Simon Furman would later go on to write most of the Transformers UK scripts, and I would say is a lovely bloke who was once stood next to me at a comic mart when I was selling a load of stuff, and he very kindly offered to sign something in order for me to get my money for it, which he did, and I did, and I now wish that I'd just kept it, of course.

Scream did only last 15 issues before it got cancelled, but that wasn't actually due to controversy over its horrific content, surprisingly, even though a lot of people seem to think it was.

I mean, the then Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown did apparently send a letter of complaint about the title, but seeing as this was about a year after it had already been cancelled, I don't think we can give him much credit on that one, to be honest.

So there is a discrepancy there.

And what I think happened was that Simon Furman and all the others at Marvel UK got a version of the script, which was changed a bit before things were finalized.

I don't know why they decided to change the year by one.

Who knows, but...

Earth, and everyone living on it, human or Autobot, will kneel before the might of Galvatron! Wow, this is so cool.

UK readers got a look at these three way before seeing the movie.

In a break from tradition, the credits are here on the last page, and split across two small boxes, one telling us that Simon Furman wrote the script, Jeff Anderson was the artist, letters were by Starkings, colours by T. Joswiak, and the editor was Ian Rimmer.

And that's all for our prologue! So here's Part 1's cover, which is a black background with what looks like a spray of orange lava emanating from the bottom, in front of which are Galvatron on the left and Ultra Magnus on the right.

There's a lot of IDW comics chat on there, which of course, there's going to be a little bit more tonight as well.

We've had episodes before with Mr. James Roberts, Mr. Nick Roach, with Mr. Simon Furman, with Mr.

Bob Budiansky.

So you know, it's all kicking off really comics wise, but a lot on our Patreon.

Welcome to The Rest is Giant Robots, a conversation through the careers of writer Simon Furman and artist Andrew Wildman.

Recollections and revelations about the highs and the lows as creatives in comics, books, games, film and TV.

Hello everyone, welcome to episode 56 of The Rest is Giant Robots.

I'm Simon Furman.

And I'm Andrew Wildman.

What are we talking about today then, Simon?

The entire grand Manichean epic of Autobots and Decepticons is merely a backstory cooked up by Marvel comic writers like Jim Shooter and Bob Budiansky, explicitly designed to explain to American children why a heroic semi-truck was locked in a million-year cosmic war against a sentient Walther P38 handgun and a microcassette recorder.

The entire Transformers mythos, from the original toy line via the Marvel UK writer Simon Furman, turning the whole thing into a theological epic, through to the Michael Bay blockbusters, was simply the cover story for a cross-media marketing psyop.

We don't love Transformers because we love Transformers.

We love Transformers because a room full of Hasbro executives decided we had to love Transformers for Hasbro to produce a shareholder return that year.

His designer, Fiore Deari, literally drew him as the devil, but the devil is just a costume, what Marx called a character mask.

The process of wearing it is entirely impersonal.

When UK comics legend Simon Furman gave Unicron his origin story, first in Marvel UK's The Legacy of Unicron in 1988, and then in Transformers number 61, he gave science fiction one of its greatest theological myths.

Primus and Unicron are the primal forces of order and chaos.

Last time, Matt, when you were on here, you told us all about how you joined up with Dreamwave Productions.

And wouldn't you know, uh, we have an opportunity to get more behind-the-scenes stories in a Wizard news piece titled Optimus Prime Time, which reports on the new book Transformers: The War Within, which is written by Simon Furman, a long time writer of the comic book, and illustrated by Don Figueroa, who you talked about quite a bit last time as well.

It acts as a prequel, basically, to all the adventures we know, explaining how one regular Cybertronian became Optimus Prime.

And isn't that what happened in the-

Just, [laughs] just have the robots fighting some more.

And it became like a concept thing, like how do we keep Armada sales up? So they kept doing things like, oh, cross over with another universe.

Oh, let's bring Simon Furman in to write it and see if that works.

I don't know.