The First Ever Transformers Annual!

MTMTE Annual #1
cover by Tim Seeley.

Well I recently picked up IDW's  The Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Annual 2012 and it struck me -- this is the first time Transformers has ever gotten an American-style annual! Sure, there's been a tonne of hardcover UK annuals over the years, but never an American-style 'big comic' annual.

So I was kinda excited for it.

The Annual is an oversized (40 page) book, which takes the bold move of actually having a significant plot revelation happen in it -- a part of the ongoing story from More Than Meets the Eye  is resolved here, which is really neat. It harkens back to the old 1960s Marvel comics annuals, which were just over-sized 13th issues for each year.

The unfortunate thing about it, though, is that it's really not very good.

Sal's Sunday Punch #20

And now it's time again for your favourite pal Sal to demonstrate why no one could draw a punch like him. 

This time how about we raid the pages of Rom Spaceknight again, huh?

Pow!!

This beauty comes from the pages of Rom Spaceknight #31, written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by our Pal, Sal Buscema. The basics? In this issue Rom fights (and defeats pretty handilly, I might add) the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. It's the lineup with Rogue, Mystique, Blob, etc. My favourite part in the entire issue is this fight with Blob.

As you know, Blob is immoveable, can't even be harmed when he plants himself in one spot. Unfortunately for him Avalache (another one of the evil mutants) caused an earthquake that sent Blob flying through the air. Well... you've already seen how that ended.

This issue leads into Rom's second fight against his nemesis Hybrid. Remind me to tell you about him some time.

--Andrew S.

Richie Rich: It's funny because he's RICH.

See? It's funny because he's  rich.

So we're back to Harvey comics, and maybe I should explain why we even came here in the first place. I used to read Harvey comics when I was a kid. I loved them. I especially loved Casper and Hot Stuff -- and in fact part of my early learning to draw was copying and tracing images from old Harvey comics. I adored this material. I even liked their most popular character of all -- Richie Rich.

But then, fairly recently, after about 25 years of not bothering with Harvey comics I had another encounter with them. It was actually really neat -- I bought a Casper  trade paperback. It was a neat nostalgic trip, reading Casper stories, seeing them evolve... but... I didn't just leave it there, did I?

I had to read some Richie Rich too, didn't I?

Shouldn't this have been an issue of Marvel Two-In-One?

(Spider-Man #33, art by Bob McLeod)