Power Core Combiners are Hasbro's new push for combiner team toys.  The problem with combiners in the past is that they cost a lot to collect all the guys, and so kids rarely manage to get a whole team.  So Hasbro's trying a smaller kind of combiner where you get the whole set for $20.  This means the limbs are just drones instead of separate robot guys, but it at least gives kids what they want for an affordable price.  Toy interchangeability is also the rule of the day, so there's smaller Power Core Combiners two-packs with just a torso and a Mini-Con partner.  The idea is that the more guys you buy, the more ways you can swap an increasing number of limbs around an increasing number of torsos.

Smolder is one of those sold-separately torsos.  What initially hooked me was his basic character conceit.  He's a Decepticon fire engine.  A villainous rescue vehicle.  That's pretty fun, and has been done exactly once before in Transformers as far as my memory allows.  (Barricade.)  His name, Smolder, sweetened the deal.  That's new, great name, not recycled from anybody previous.

And his Mini-Con partner is an axe.

An axe named Chopster.

See how the layers of awesome are being set before us, one by one?  This veritable house of awesome?  Yeah, I see it too.  Part of my brain is demanding of me that Smolder, the emergency officer with an axe, be characterized as Axe Cop.  It kinda works!  Except for the whole "he's a bad guy" thing.  And the "he's the wrong colors" thing.  Well, maybe Shattered Glass Smolder would be Axe Cop...

Anyway, the toys themselves... they're okay!  It should come as no surprise, looking at him, that none of Chopster's modes are particularly fully-realized.  He has four of them, after all!  He transforms into an axe, a robot, a flame cannon, and chest armor for Smolder.  All of them look like a dude folded up, save the dude mode.  Chopster is saved by the awesome name and the whole being-an-axe thing.

Smolder's much better, but not fantastic.  He has a pretty conventional transformation from vehicle to robot, and it leaves him with super-long and massive arms.  Either you position his hands down by his knees or you put his elbows up at his collarbone.  Those are your choices.  They're really, really long arms.

Since he's a Power Core Combiner torso, Smolder combines with the limbs that come with the $20 full-combiner toys.  This means he has a third torso mode with a second, bigger head that flips out.  He's not terribly stable in this mode, but it's fun to put together.  When you plug in the vehicles for his limbs, they automatically convert into arms or legs.  It's pretty neat to see.

In a weird convergence of reality, the "Cyber Missions" episode with Smolder and Chopster went online today.  Chopster screams like a little girl and runs away.

I wasn't a big fan of G.I. Joe Resolute.  Mind, I didn't hate it or anything, and I did enjoy it as a curiosity.  It was sort of like a trial exercise to see what would happen if you took all of the soul and fun out of G.I. Joe and replace it with as much blood as possible.

But at least it got us more Destro toys!  This guy was supposed to come out in a single pack, but when plans folded, he got pushed into this Internet-exclusive seven-pack of Resolute designs.  (I don't need the rest of them, so they'll be eBayed soon.)

The most notable thing about this Destro, obviously, is the swappable arm.  He comes packaged with the untorn sleeve arm, but sitting next to him in the plastic tray is a torn-sleeve arm revealing he is actually a robot!  Or something.  I recall some of the Resolute design art pegged him as a big metal dude under his clothes.  Perhaps he's a Cyborg?  Regardless, there's two arms.  I think I'll keep him wearing the torn-sleeved arm, since it's more visually interesting.  Maybe keep the other arm hanging limply out of the suitcase.

I'm not sure exactly which of the guns he's supposed to come with.  There's two tiny ones beside him in the tray that obviously fit in his hip holsters.  There's a MARS briefcase that's obviously his.  He comes holding another gun.  But then there's a few guns between him and the Viper that I'm not too sure about.  Oh well.  My Destro doesn't need more than one accessory per (attached) arm, anyhow.

Be sure to catch me this weekend at the Canadian GIJOE Convention!

Hi there, everyone! I'm Matt, sometimes known as Monzo. I don't have a comic strip or anything to link to, but I thought I'd take the time to write to everyone reading this.

Who is Firestorm, the Nuclear Man? He hit the American comic book scene in 1978, co-created by industry stalwarts Gerry Conway and Al Milgrom. They introduced him as a super-powered being born out of a nuclear accident that fused a high school jock (Ronnie Raymond) and an atomic physicist (Martin Stein) at the molecular level; the accident furthermore granted them matter transmuting powers and the ability to split into their original forms. Being negative four at the time, it didn't really catch my interest, but as it happens the series only lasted five issues anyway.

But that was not the end of Firestorm! He scored himself a gig on the Justice League of America (Conway was writing that too), which, over the course of a few years, both landed him a new ongoing series and raised his profile enough to get him a boot-clad foot into the door of Hanna-Barbera's Super Friends/Super Powers program. This is where I came in.

I can't pin down what made me like Firestorm on Super Powers - heck, I'm not even sure how much of the show I originally saw. I'm pretty sure I didn't see the first season that featured him at all, which cuts out half of his appearances! But he somehow wedged himself in my preschool-age brain, aided I'm sure by my owning his Kenner Super Powers Collection figure.

Years later, when my fondness for the character caused me to pick up back issues of Firestorm from comic store quarter bins... I dunno. I just couldn’t make a connection; what I read didn't grab me, and so I never tried collecting the rest of his series when I got more “seriously” into comics. I don’t want to say “the comics didn’t live up to my memories of Super Friends”, because that feels, uh, much harsher than I intend... but it basically sizes up what happened for me. I still dig Firestorm in general, but the love only holds up in plastic (DC Universe Classics Firestorm, hurray!) or animation (Batman: Brave and the Bold Firestorm, double hurray!). Such is the way of life and media tie-ins.

Oh, and just to get this out of the way – I’m aware that the Canada-tastic MightyGodKing blog did an article on Firestorm’s incredibly overmatched villains a few years back). Nobody’s going to believe this, but I didn’t find out about the article – or, to be honest, the blog itself – until after I wrote up this strip and was looking for artistic reference for Dave. Logically, this parallel development can only mean one thing: the mediocrity of Firestorm’s villains simply transcends all rational human thought.

Of course, that still puts them one up on ‘60s Daredevil villains...

Here's a Toy News International strip for you!

Next weekend I'm going to be at the Canadian GIJOE Convention in Toronto!  Hooray!  I went last year and it was a blast.  And now that it's in Toronto instead of a Toronto suburb, it'll be a bigger blast!  If you're Canadian or something, come see me.

I'm also in the middle of attempting to get my ass to Anime Fest in Dallas, Texas, which is Labor Day weekend, aka the first weekend of September.   Just a few days before I'm scheduled to be at Intervention in D.C.!  (Which is the same weekend that Roomies! turns 13.)  I am all over this continent, dudes.

Here's this week's Joyce & Walky!.  I left it in an unfinished state (with unusual hand-written dialog) because Maggie and I made a sudden trip to Indiana today.   My sister's going into the Air Force in ten days, and we wanted to hang out before she left.  We've also got a Shortpacked! guest strip on Monday, since I'm sort of losing my buffer in the wake of all these trips.  It's about Firestorm!  You will enjoy it because I told you to.

So of course, with the incredible backlog of toys I've been building up, I should talk about the guy I picked up like three hours ago.

Ah well.  It'll probably be brief.

This is Hubcap!  He's a Scout Class dude, which means he's about $8.  He transforms into a super-retro automobile.  This is awesome.

You can transform him from car mode to robot mode and back in about 15 seconds, no joke.  This is also awesome.

If I had to mentally place him, aesthetically, with a previous toy line, I'd be leaning towards Beast Wars, with his balljointy limbs and roundish robot parts.  This is additionally awesome.

His open-palm hands are exceedingly awesome.  He looks natural standing, instead of looking like he's chronically tense.

And he's Hubcap.  Super awesome.

I recommend him.

Hey, dudes!  Those of you who are members of the Transformers Collectors' Club, I've got some nifty news for you.  Starting with the very next issue of the magazine, which should start arriving in mailboxes soon, there is a new ongoing comic strip feature by me!  It's titled "Recordicons" and features Shattered Glass Ravage and his cassette tape brethren.

It is absolutely adorable.

I'm serious.

In 1994, Transformers was dead.  Again!  It died once in the United States (while it lingered overseas), and they tried bringing it back in 1993 with the original toys and characters.  It didn't work.  It was antiquated and it didn't speak to the new generation.  Hasbro, who had recently acquired their former competitor Kenner, tossed them the rotting corpse of their once-golden property and told Kenner to have their way with it.

And for the first time in 10  years, Transformers was suddenly a top-selling toyline and a top-rated (Emmy award-winning) cartoon.  The Beast Wars toys were the third-most popular boys toyline of its time, behind Power Rangers and Star Wars.  The syndicated cartoon consistently ranked first in its local timeslot among the target demographic.  It resurrected the Transformers franchise and saved it from the abyss.  Why?

Because it was allowed to be different.

Some things that made Beast Wars popular were ganked from the Transformers franchise's recent history.  Its incredible articulation, for one.  Its willingness to resurrect older characters if needed.  Its insistence on integrating weapons into the toys in both modes, so no accessories got left behind.  But what it did innovate allowed Transformers to become a living, breathing, organic property.  So to speak.  Yes, everyone transformed into "real" animals.  It was weird to the long-time fans, but it drew in children like crazy.   For the longest time, Transformers had to be designed within a certain visual perimeter.  Sort of Gundamy, sort of Robotechy... everyone had to have a normal face with a crest and maybe a visor, with blocky legs and arms.  Beast Wars opened that up to toothy grins, bug eyes, and frightening mandibles.  Sometimes arms ended in legs or claws.  Sometimes feet didn't end in giant blocky boots, but in talons.   Transformations were more complex and more creative.  Shapes were new.  Faces were new.

Transformers had become stale, and its near-death allowed the powers that be to unchain it, let it go, and let it find its own way, free of the conventional wisdom.

The cartoon benefited from a similar Renaissance.  Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio, the co-story editors of Beast Wars, didn't know Transformers from a hole in the ground.  But they knew how to write.  And it turned out that was way more important.  Financial and technological constrictions turned out to not be minuses, but pluses.   Since Beast Wars was computer rendered, and this was 1995, the cast was tiny by necessity, starting with just five characters on each side, marooned on barren Earthlike planet.  Instead of being agoraphobic, this allowed the writers to focus and explore the characters they had.  Generation 1 started with 20 characters in its first season.  By its second, there were more than 50.  Some were lucky enough to get a line of dialog.  A sparse few got spotlight episodes.  But in Beast Wars, every character had time to shine.  We knew these characters inside and out.  They became real to us in ways that Transformers characters had rarely accomplished previously.

And it helped that Optimus Primal was not Optimus Prime. By the time we met Prime, he was already a fixture, a living legend.  Inspirational to a child looking for a faultless father figure, but not very conducive to storytelling.  When we met Primal, he was a nobody.  He was new to his crew, and they to him.  He made mistakes, but he was obviously learning on the job.  And the rest of the cast knew it.  Rattrap gave him so much grief.  This was something rarely seen before, a hint of dissent within the good guy robots!  The things Beast Wars introduced that we take for granted today...

Better yet, this was not the status quo.  Rattrap organically learned to begrudgingly respect Primal.  Dinobot learned over several seasons what his place in the universe was, and what he truly believed in, and what that meant for him.  (It meant he would die.) Blackarachnia evolved from a by-the-numbers femme fatale into a compelling three-dimensional character.  The show would always find a way to take away something from the characters that would show us who they are, allowing them to grow.  In Blackarachnia's case, it was her autonomy.  In Tigatron's case, it was his lover.  In Dinobot's case, it was his certainty.

These things were made possible by the incredible caliber of writers assembled by Forward and DiTillio.  Their ranks included Len Wein (creator of Wolverine, Storm, and Colossus), Christy Marx (Babylon 5), Jules Dennis (Real Ghostbusters and Batman: The Animated Series), D.C. Fontana (so much Star Trek), and, yes, Simon Furman (everything Transformers ever).  For the first time, a Transformers show was allowed to have an over-arching plot from season to season, still with room for individual adventures.  Transformers for the first time in animation was sophisticated, intelligent, and three-dimensional.

Some critics at the time of Beast Wars scoffed at its existence, claiming that once it was over it would return to obscurity, never to be seen or heard from again.  They've been proven wrong repeatedly.  The influence of Beast Wars persists to this very day.  Transformers Animated gave us an Optimus Prime that was very much like the untested Optimus Primal, and included characters such as Rattletrap, Blackarachnia, and Waspinator.  Beast Wars showed us that Transformers exists outside of the exclusive realm of the original cartoon, and incorporated elements taken from the Marvel Comics, like Primus, a concept that still informs Transformers fiction.  The very idea of the spark, the tangible "soul" of a Transformer,  has existed in every single incarnation of Transformers since, including the live-action movie, as has the concept of the Matrix/AllSpark as the Transformers afterlife.  The cartoon set the golden standard for what Transformers television fiction should be and aspire to, according to both the fans and the creators of current Transformers content.

Beast Wars is why Transformers still exists.  It pulled me back into Transformers after having left it, and is the biggest reason this very webcomic about toy collecting exists.  It's informed my own storytelling in the past and will continue to inform it in the future.  And there will always be a shelf in my house dedicated to its toys, as they portray a series of characters that will never, ever leave me.  Characters that have taught me valuable things.

Beast Wars is awesome.

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Thanks to everyone who came to see me at San Diego Comic-Con and didn't stab me in the eye!  You are the true heroes.

See those sketch cards?  Those were a huge hit.  I'll probably keep doing them.  Every time a character's card was bought, I'd redraw them on another one, and so I musta gone through like 15 Ambers.  She, Mike, Robin, and Ethan were the most-bought, for the record.  I also sold a lot of Batmen and SG Ravages!

Next up: The Canadian GIJoe Convention in Toronto!  That's the weekend after next.  See you there!

Tomorrow night: Why Beast Wars is awesome.

I'm home!  Let me drone on about one of my convention purchases, a reissued Blaster and some of his cassettes deployers.  Why the hell would I buy a toy I already have in still-great condition?

I guess it might be the three little dudes he comes with who I don't have.  I have no Steeljaw, no Ramhorn, no Eject.  That might be an incentive.

I guess it might also be his awesome-as-hell packaging, with the metallic slip-cover over the book-box deal.  And the lengthy bio on the back is less icing on the cake than it is a cake made entirely of icing, perhaps as a side dish.  It doesn't only flesh out Blaster's character, but it provides all sorts of nerdy little things about Cybertron's history and pre-war culture.  Oh, and Blaster's still a boom-box because cassette tapes are great for bootlegging music.

But no, the real dealbreaker is that Blaster's legs are a slightly different color.  Instead of silver, they're a metal-flaked beige.  That really got my attention, for reasons I should probably be ashamed.  Is that all it takes?  Is that really it?  One slightly different color?  Sure, his legs are sometimes brownish in the original comics, but...

Yeah, it was the warmer leg color.

I think I need an intervention.