Before Dreamwave published their first Transformers miniseries, Prime Directive, a 6-page preview was produced to be sent to retailers. If you've followed any monthly comics before, you'll probably know that ahead of an issue dropping, companies typically release 4-6 pages as a preview ahead of time; this, by contrast, is an entirely original piece, taking no content from the upcoming first issue. If nothing else, that gives a good indication as to how hard Dreamwave were banking on the Transformers license being their big break.

The thing this preview is most remembered for is probably that it features five pages of nothing but humans talking, with only one brief glimpse of any robots. We open on said humans in the arctic, a setting which is notable because a) it gives me immediate Bayverse vibes and b) it's very obviously been picked so Lee doesn't have to draw too many backgrounds. I mean, look at this.

And hey, let's be fair. It's a lot of extra work to draw six whole pages just for a preview. There'll be plenty of other reasons to call Lee a lazy hack as we go through this project, so I'll let him off easy here.

What I won't be as kind to is the dialogue.

Right off the bat we begin with a very clumsy attempt to get some themes in here. When you're working within such a small pagecount, that's a wee bit tricky. A deft writer might have a conversation pull double duty, telling you a couple of each characters' quirks so they immediately feel like more than cardboard cutouts while having it relate to a wider idea. Since Sarracini is not a deft writer, instead we get a sports metaphor that makes no sense whatsoever and which goes on for two whole pages.

Decompressed storytelling was a big thing in comics around this time, with western monthly releases experimenting a lot with the sort of slow moving, character-focused pacing found in other examples of the medium, like longer form graphic novels and manga. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who jumped on this wound up not understanding how to make it work on a structural level, and they really just made less things happen per panel and page to imitate the aesthetic elements. Dreamwave is an absolutely stupendous example of this approach. This is all foreshadowing.

What we actually learn in these two pages is that this Lazarus guy has taken the other guy to the arctic. He's some kind of potential investor in a project Lazarus is looking for partners on. Lazarus apparently hasn't explained why exactly wandering around the frozen tundra is important, and the other guy is understandably pissed. It's a little unclear why he came along to the arctic when he has no idea what Lazarus wants to invest in, but here they are, trudging through the snow.

So they argue, and then a very confusing set of panels happens.

I had to squint at this for a hot second to work out Lazarus is supposed to be grabbing him painfully. Lee is not a master of… much of anything, art wise. And clear, readable action is something he struggles with from the get go. Anything that needs a reader to understand implied motion and momentum has a good chance at winding up a dud.

No worries though. We get straight back to po-faced declarations of The Themes Of The Comic, Honest, which only requires that he draw people standing around.

I have a high tolerance for comic book-y expository nonense. But it's so entirely joyless here. Shoot me, I have to read the entire rest of this fucking series.

On the next page, we finally get to something Transformers related I can draw your attention to, though. There's a full page of them coming across a monitoring set up for something (oh my, I wonder what it could be) in the ice. It's more space filler of no real interest, but this particular text box might ring some klaxons in a modern day Transformers fan's head:

Now, this isn't an example of 'what do you MEAN, Dreamwave did that first?!', a refrain that will crop up quite a few times as we make our way through these comics. It's true that a shocking number of franchise staple concepts originate in Dreamwave, but the gladiatorial element isn't one of them. That goes back to Marvel, with the UK-only prose story "State Games" establishing it as part of the backstory for both Megatron and Optimus. But it is notable that Dreamwave is going to be where a lot of people encounter this concept for the first time, given that the prior story was not just a UK exclusive, but specifically a prose story tucked away in an annual rather than the regular monthly comic. (And yes, spoiler alert: it will crop up again in Dreamwave.) I would not be surprised to find out the revival of this concept in places like the Aligned continuity owe at least some debt to the idea resurfacing in this series.

Anyway, the comic then tries to persuade us that the thing most of interest when it comes to what can be gleaned from terrifying alien war machines with all the onboard tech and weaponry they have is that they turn into cars sometimes. No further explanation is forthcoming. Lazarus just sort of says this as though it's self evident and moves on.

Look, making the fact Transformers characters can transform central to the fiction is my whole thing. I want it. When Transformers media doesn't take advantage of that stuff, I am sad. But the degree to which this falls flat is a bit of a warning as to a problem this series is probably going to come up against a lot as we go on, and which plenty of recent Transformers media aimed at fans has struggled with. How do you do things like that in something that isn't made for eight year olds and running on "rule of cool"? Transformers turn into cars and planes and weird animals and such because that's cool to a child who wants to buy awesome toys. It's tricky to translate that into a story aimed at adults that takes itself remotely seriously. In no way impossible. But if you don't really consider how you plan to approach that part, and indeed a great many elements integral to Transformers, you're probably not going to nail it.

They talk for another goddamn page after this and oh my god, this preview should have been three pages tops. I'm not making you read all that. Just rearrange the words in one of the above panels, it's about the same experience.

Finally, FINALLY, we hit the jackpot with the last page: a full page spread of Soundwave, partially obscured in ice as they excavate him. (See? Bayverse vibes.)

Soundwave is pretty much the single most iconic non-Optimus Transformer in broader pop culture, so that tracks. (Honestly, he'd probably give OP a run for his money.)

And it is a very nice bit of imagery, though they really didn't need those damn speech bubbles down there. But you can see here where the concept for this preview originates. All the build up being so you can have the final full-page splash of an 80's-style iconic character to get the audience hyped up. In the hands of a better writer, that would probably have worked perfectly well. As it stands, the fact this apparently did get people hyped is really more just down to Soundwave being really cool, I reckon.

So that's the preview. It's on Earth, the robots came to Earth a long time before under circumstances we don't know about, and now some shady humans have found one of them. It's a decent enough setup. One so good it's been used in Transformers at least twice; seriously, that is just a description of Megatron in Bayverse, right?

After all this riveting comic content, the original version of the preview also featured some teaser art. This gives us a bit more of an idea what the upcoming series might look like, since we get all of one panel of Lee actually drawing a robot in this one.

Pat Lee's art is, of course, one of the more infamous elements of Dreamwave's comic. He called his style "anime inspired" a lot, which was a real exciting prospect in 2002 if you were a certain kind of nerd. You can sort of see some of it in his art. In that very 'western artist in 2002 working off an English language how to draw manga book' way that is a peculiarity of the time period. But it sure doesn't look like, say, the Transformers work of Studio OX.

More to the point, his artwork is frequently a mess, with terrible composition, incoherent proportions, very little understanding of perspective, and little to no emotion conveyed by its characters. He tends to draw his robots all very... puffy and inflated-looking, too. This style would form the basis of a 'house style' all other artists brought in were expected to follow. Even when much more competent artists than Lee are to be seen, they'll be somewhat shackled by the restrictions put in place there.

The second reason I wanted to do this is that since I got into Transformers all those years ago, the recognizability of Dreamwave as a part of Transformers fandom history has really decreased. When I got into the franchise it was around five years since Dreamwave had gone under as a comics publisher. I learned about it as a bit of very recent fandom drama pretty much immediately. Dreamwave's extremely ignoble end was a matter of absolute infamy in the fandom, and brought up pretty regularly. People made a lot of Pat Lee jokes and expected you to know what they meant without explanation.

Since the mid-2010s, however, I've noticed that's changed a lot; partly because it's much older news now than it used to be, of course, but also because the combined success of IDW, Bayverse, Transformers Animated and Transformers: Prime at bringing in completely new fans since then means a lot of people around these days just never heard those years-long injokes about That One Trashfire TM, and since these comics can't be re-printed these days, that means there's not really a lot of awareness of them. And since there are some places where Dreamwave has wound up being surprisingly influential, I think it's worth at least one re-visit.

There are a couple of things to answer before I get started on the actual project, so here's a quick list of them:

+ No, I'm not doing the Armada tie in comics that Dreamwave also did alongside their original take on G1. This is mostly just because I haven't done an Armada rewatch in a decade either and would need to do that first, I think. I actually own some of those though, like physical copies, so maybe one day. But for this, we're just doing their G1 comics, starting with the miniseries and then going into the short-lived ongoing.

+ I don't remember the actual content of these comics very well at all. I didn't much care about them when I first took a look back in the day. I just have vague recollections of the odd plot point and a general sense they were at times quite... strange. We can all (re)discover this together.

+ I am not going to give a schedule for this blog. I will post whenever I feel like it. Promising otherwise would end in hubris and disaster.

+ This blog is being run by me, @decepti-thots! If somehow you found this blog and not that one rather than the other way around... uhhh, now you know, I guess!

With that out of the way:

Before we get into the actual retrospectives, I'm going to write up a brief overview of pertinent stuff about Dreamwave as a publisher and their history with Transformers comics. It's not going to be a comprehensive overview, for the simple reason that there are already places you can go for that, and there's no point in me doing that instead of just linking you to TF Wiki's page on the topic. But we'll take a look at the basic context of where TF was at when these comics launched and what Dreamwave actually was before we get into the comic itself.