Posting a bit early this month since today's my day off, but moving day is fast approaching, and I may not have time to do this on the 15th of the month!

THE TRANSFORMERS issue #21 was first available on July 15, 1986, with a pull date of October 1986.  The front cover features "AERIALBOTS OVER AMERICA!" in their comic book debut, and we see the five Autobot jets in question squaring off against robot-mode Ramjet, Thrust, and Dirge, defending an installation on the ground, with plenty of humans running for cover.  This is one of the less eye-grabbing covers, with a background that's uncolored and Herb Trimpe artwork that is perfunctory, but not especially dynamic.  The coloring is also strange—Fireflight is entirely white, Dirge has mismatched arms, and perhaps most strangely, Ramjet's face is flesh colored!  

Bob Budiansky scripted this story, with Don Perlin penciling the artwork and the team of Akin & Garvey doing the finished inks.  Janice Chaing continues her long stint as letterer, and Nel Yomtov is our long-suffering colorist.

The story opens with a focus on the Vasquez residence, boasting a typical nuclear family in Boulder City, Nevada.  They're talking about an Independence Day fireworks performance, totally oblivious to the tiny Insecticon named Bombshell, high up in the trees, observing and waiting for his moment to strike.

Yes, the Insecticons in the comics actually shrink down to the size of real Earth insects.  This is consistent with the Hasbro toy biography depictions of the characters (Kickback can put a hole in a quarter-inch thick plate of steel, which isn't very impressive for a gigantic robot, but certainly a mean feat for a tiny bug).  Production notes for the Sunbow cartoon indicate that they were at one time uncertain whether or not the Insecticons would shrink in the cartoon, but ultimately they decided the Insecticons would remain gigantic even when they're transformed.  This effectively means that the G1 Insecticon toys are just about 1:1 scaled, at least when they're in insect form.  

Richard Vasquez, father and husband, is bitten by a bug but thinks nothing more of it.  He's entirely unaware that Bombshell has, in fact, implanted a cerebro-shell into his system, effectively taking control of his nervous system.  He promises his daughter that "nothing can make me forget" about the fireworks show.  Dramatic irony, or an outright lie?  You decide!

The Decepticons have targeted Vasquez, specifically, due to his role as the assistant chief engineer over the hydroelectric power plant near Hoover Dam.  Megatron's plan is to destroy the dam, allowing the water to travel over the space bridge and flow through turbines to generate energy on Cybertron.  At least he's finally leting Earth technology work as it's intended, instead of trying to dismantle it! He is stationed several miles away from the dam with the other two Insecticons, who have recently come to Earth and have been modified to take on the forms of native insect life.  Megatron and the three Insecticons shrink down as they transform, boarding Vasquez's vehicle as he drives to work.

Somehow, Vasquez walks right past the guard with a rifle in hand.  He heads for the Hoover Dam control room, where the tiny Kickback knocks down the door and Vasquez, weilding Megatron, takes control.

Elsewhere at the Autobot base, Optimus Prime is having a wound in his armor plating welded together by Ratchet, while Donny Finkleberg and Skids are reporting on the Decepticon space bridge.  Prime offers a token "hey, glad you're not dead after all" to Skids, but that's as close to an apology as Skids will ever get.  When they explain that a team of Autobots arrived from Cybertron over the space bridge, Prime orders Jetfire to take Finkleberg to verify the veracity of his story.  

When Bumblebee alerts Prime to a news report about the Hoover Dam being taken over by a gunman with an incredibly powerful weapon, Prime determines it must be Megatron.  Ratchet makes a big deal over the fact that Prime's wounds are not welded shut yet, so you just know it's going to be a plot point later on.  (In a somewhat humorous moment, get a load of the kid making faces at the news camera.)

Wheeljack has just completed building the Aerialbot team, using the information the Autobots stole about Devastator's ability to combine in issue #19.  It's implied that the Aerialbots have already been given life by the Creation Matrix at some point off-panel.

Despite the fact that they're not fully programmed, the Aerialbots are sent to the Hoover Dam to deal with the problem, as they're the only ones fast enough to get there on time.  Silverbolt alone is the only one whose programming has been completed.  It's interesting how, in some ways, this mirrors the Aerialbots from the Sunbow cartoon.  In the show, the four smaller jets seemed to not care much about the Autobot mission to fight the Decepticons and preserve the Earth, with the level-headed Silverbolt the only one among them who seemed to uphold the Autobot ideals.  It would be interesting to know if this parallel is just a coincidence, or whether perhaps Budiansky took some inspiration from the Aerialbot portrayal in "The Key to Vector Sigma" parts 1 and 2. The pair of episodes would have first aired in November 1985, many months before this issue was written.

Outside the dam, the news media is trying to establish the identity of the gunman. Vasquez's wife and kid show up just in time for the reporters to produce a photo of Richard Vasquez, creating some pathos when the young child realizes it's her own father.  The Insecticons manage to electronically take control of the dam.  As this happens, the Decepticons send a signal to Cybertron, activating the space bridge.  Ramjet, Thrust, and Dirge are summoned, also having been recently modified into Earth-style forms.  (I'm not sure where the Decepticons are getting their information from.  While all three characters have an F-15 fuselage, none of them have a wing configuration that matches an actual Earth vehicle.  Ramjet's original toy, for example, was likely based on the single-engine F-16XL prototype that was never manufactured.  Dirge is similar, but not identical, to the single-engine Saab 37 Viggen.  No idea about Thrust.  No real-life jet plane could really have VTOL engines in the wings; the wings would create so much lift that they would, in all probability, rip right off the fuselage.  But, he looks cool, anyway.)

There's a coloring oddity where the yellow Diaclone cockpits on the Insecticons, as well as the cockpits on all three coneheads (as well as the wings on Dirge), are colored magenta instead of orange.  Now, my understanding of the four-color printing process is that it could only print black, cyan, yellow, or magenta.  If for some reason one of those colors didn't print, then that resulted in an incorrectly printed comic.  Usually, the publisher would recall incorrectly-printed comics to have them destroyed.  However, I've never seen a copy of issue #21 that didn't look this way.  So, I guess either Marvel didn't notice, or didn't consider it a significant enough error to worry about.  (There's also the possibility that Nel Yomtov simply grabbed the wrong marker when he was coloring these pages. He pulled some long hours.)  Following the trio of Decepticons is a huge drilling machine, which begins burrowing into the surface of the dam.  

Elsewhere, Jetfire and Finkleberg are still hunting for Blaster's group of Autobots.  Jetfire is alarmingly jokey, dropping Donny in mid-air before catching him, then making a quip about how humans probably don't bounce very well.  That's positively psychopathic.  He doubles down and continues to talk about how ballobots on Cybertron love to bounce when they play basketrek.  Finkleberg is not amused.  I swear, Jetfire is evil.  Once a Decepticon, always a Decepticon, I guess.  When they spot some Transformer fuel on the ground (Finkleberg slips on it, actually), they arrive at the conclusion that the missing Autobots were definitely there.  But, where have they gone?  It's a mystery!

The Aerialbots arrive at Hoover Dam, but as soon as Ramjet and Dirge and Thrust notice them, they take to the air to engage them.  A dogfight between the Aerialbots and some Decepticon jets seems like a perfectly natural match-up, but it feels strange that the first major appearance of these 1985 characters is when they take on a group of 1986 characters who are also appearing for the first time.  In the cartoon, the coneheads popped up halfway through season two, with the Aerialbots showing up near the end of the season.  The comic book continues to lag behind the cartoon when it comes to character debuts.  (This is also right before The Transformers: the Movie will hit theaters, which of course introduces many new characters as well.  That's gonna create a nightmare for Marvel Comics.)

You may recall that the introduction for Dirge and the others very nearly took a different turn, and probably could have all showed up as early as issue #10 if it weren't for Hasbro's insistence on showcasing the Constructicons instead.  Better late than never, I suppose.  (Meanwhile, whatever plans Budiansky might have had to introduce Inferno and Red Alert must have completely fallen by the wayside in favor of skipping ahead to the 1986 toys.  There are so many new products to advertise that twelve issues a year just doesn't seem like enough!)

The Aerialbots and Decepticons take turns showing off their special features, with Fireflight espousing such remarks as, "Who cares about the humans, Silverbolt?  They just get in the way!"  Yes, clearly his programming is not up to snuff.  By accident or design, this is very in synch with the Aerialbots from the television series.  We also get an interesting pairing when Dirge squares off against Silverbolt, using his ability to generate fear to magnify Silverbolt's acrophobia.  It's a logical character pairing.

On Saturday, March 12, 2022 at 8:46:53 AM UTC-8, Zobovor wrote:
> ...we see the five Autobot jets in question squaring off against robot-mode Ramjet, Thrust, and Dirge, defending an installation on the ground, with plenty of humans running for cover.

It is kind of tricky to read who the good and bad guys are on the cover. It looks like the Aerialbots are swooping down and firing on the dam along with the Decepticons and the humans. Just from the poses it looks like the Decepticons are protecting the people and the Aerialbots are trying to blow everything up.

> Elsewhere at the Autobot base, Optimus Prime is having a wound in his armor plating welded together by Ratchet,

If welding is used as a medical procedure and also a repair procedure for Autobot spacecraft (as we see them doing on Junkion when the shuttle crashed) then Transformers build their ships out of a material akin to their own skin. I wonder if it's weird for them in a body horror sort of way to walk around in spaceships made of their own skin. They may just be used to it. I guess riding around in Astrotrain is kind of like how humans make leather furniture and wear fur coats. Metal occurs a lot more naturally in the universe anyways so they may feel a closer kinship with all of creation since they are made of some of the most basic stuff.

> Wheeljack has just completed building the Aerialbot team,

Which is odd because he's a mechanical engineer, not a doctor. But if Ratchet did it he would seem like a Frankenstein and the robots his monsters. I guess it's easier for human readers to digest the engineer doing the body building. Budiansky could hand wave off the specifics of living robot biology with the excuse that they're alien robots and we as humans could never understand their life form. But it seems cheap to just build more troops when needed out of whatever they had lying around. Why even have a medic on the team if the mechanic guy could build bodies? Maybe he had to balance it out and give Wheeljack something to do after featuring Ratchet so prominently in the early stories.

> Despite the fact that they're not fully programmed, the Aerialbots are sent to the Hoover Dam to deal with the problem, as they're the only ones fast enough to get there on time.

Wheeljack was responsible for personality programming and he made the Aerialbot leader afraid of heights so that constitutes either gross incompetence, medical malpractice or deliberate sabotage. Again I feel the writer fumbled the ball when it came to believably explaining how the mechanics of sentient living robots worked. Maybe if it was explained that the personality programming had some aspect that was a random roll of the dice it could excuse the oftentimes psychotic personalities they ended up with.

> No idea about Thrust. No real-life jet plane could really have VTOL engines in the wings; the wings would create so much lift that they would, in all probability, rip right off the fuselage. But, he looks cool, anyway.)

He should have been named Windblade instead! Windblade is such a compound word, Budiansky-style, obvious name for a jet like that.

> If for some reason one of those colors didn't print, then that resulted in an incorrectly printed comic. Usually, the publisher would recall incorrectly-printed comics to have them destroyed. However, I've never seen a copy of issue #21 that didn't look this way.

If one of the four base colors was missing then any resultant color that requires either of them would be off on the entire page as well. Orange for the jet cockpits and yellow for the Insecticon ones would require some use of yellow and/or magenta, and both of those colors show up independently on the same pages elsewhere in the art, sometimes even in the same panel. I think the red cockpit covers were coloring errors.

> Kickback and Shrapnel scoop up Megatron and fly away with him.

It kinda looks like Megatron flies away, or at least that's how I interpreted it. But if Megatron could fly at will then why didn't he just point himself at Superion.

> (Blaster's head is still being colored as if he were Optimus Prime, and I have no idea why.)

Blaster was truly dead and his metal turned grey like Optimus' did in the movie. All subsequent Blaster appearances are fake head Blaster. Like Bigger Luke, it's a conspiracy and the clues are all there!

> So, I think that, a lot of the time, the question in the writer's room is raised, "If x character is so powerful, why don't the Autobots/Decepticons use him/them all the time?" The answer seems to be that each new character or group introduced has a major liability.

This is before Budiansky realized he could start killing new toys in the same issue he introduced them.

On Sunday, March 27, 2022 at 12:48:50 PM UTC-6, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:

> It is kind of tricky to read who the good and bad guys are on the cover. It looks like the Aerialbots are swooping down and firing on the dam along with the Decepticons and the humans. Just from the poses it looks like the Decepticons are protecting the people and the Aerialbots are trying to blow everything up.

I wonder if that was the art direction given to Trimpe. Maybe they were trying to sell it as a bait-and-switch. "ATTACK OF... THE AERIALBOTS?!"

> Maybe he had to balance it out and give Wheeljack something to do after featuring Ratchet so prominently in the early stories.

It seems like, even after most of the 1984 cast was sidelined by this point in the comic book, Budiansky deliberately kept Wheeljack around. He could have easily relegated him to the many characters who were inactive aboard the Ark, but he didn't. In the cartoon, Wheeljack and Ratchet (and later Hoist) were all lumped together as the characters who fix stuff and/or make stuff. The comics seems to create a real distinction between them. Ratchet is the doctor, so he does the battlefield repairs. Hoist is the mechanic, so he performs routine maintenance. Wheeljack is the engineer, so he designs and builds. Except, I guess, when Grapple is off building Omega Supreme, but he's easily as much a building as he is a robot, so I guess that's forgivable.

> Wheeljack was responsible for personality programming and he made the Aerialbot leader afraid of heights so that constitutes either gross incompetence, medical malpractice or deliberate sabotage. Again I feel the writer fumbled the ball when it came to believably explaining how the mechanics of sentient living robots worked. Maybe if it was explained that the personality programming had some aspect that was a random roll of the dice it could excuse the oftentimes psychotic personalities they ended up with.

The cartoon episode "The Key to Vector Sigma" seems to justify the Aerialbots being good-for-nothing punks by pointing out how young and inexperienced they all are. I also think Optimus Prime asking Vector Sigma to "value freedom wherever it may be found" had a strong effect on their personalities. They wanted freedom from leadership, freedom from the rules, freedom from the Autobots. Hey, it's what Prime asked for.

The cartoon also explained away Silverbolt being afraid of heights in saying that he was constructed out of a low-level cargo ship that never got very high off the ground. It opens up a whole weird can of worms because it sort of implies all the Aerialbots can remember what they used to be, before they were reconstructed as Transformers. Was Fireflight a crash test vehicle, and that's why he's so bad at flying? Was Slignshot an air show jet, and that's why he's such a show-off? And does this mean the Stunticons remember being regular Earth cars? Does Dead End have dreams about robbing banks?

Considering Budiansky created these characters, it's odd that he had far less to say about Silverbolt's fear of heights or why he was created this way.. A strict reading of the comics shows that Silverbolt really doesn't suffer from this problem until the rattle of Dirge's fear-inducing engines draws it out. But, we know from his Marvel TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE profile that it's a regular thing for him.

We'll learn much, much later in the comics that the Creation Matrix is a repository for some of Primus' power, so maybe Primus is just a twisted, whimsical god who likes to fuck with his creations. He generates these brain-damaged personalities for new Transformers because it amuses him to do so.

> Windblade is such a compound word, Budiansky-style, obvious name for a jet like that.

We know a lot of characters went through different names sometimes (Blastbox, Sprint, etc.) The fans on Thrust's wings wouldn't help generate thrust; they would generate lift. So it may very well not have been Budiansky's first name choice for the character. I can't help but think Budiansky would have named him after the fans in his wings, because it's such a distinctive element of the toy.

> I think the red cockpit covers were coloring errors.

Could be. We've had decades to learn these color schemes, but poor Nel Yomtov had to juggle an ever-increasing number of robots, and I think I read somewhere he was coloring them from memory (!). It's honestly a miracle he got it right as often as he did.

> This is before Budiansky realized he could start killing new toys in the same issue he introduced them.

Heh heh. Those poor Seacons sure didn't last too long, did they?

Zob ("You're about to have technical difficulties, courtesy of my... wait, never mind, I'm dead.")