Cover Recreation – Target: 2006

Published by Kevin Gorman

A bit of a mega-post this time.

DECEPTICONS, TO EARTH!

And so during the time that it took Galvatron to get to Autobot City Earth, this Epic adventure took place.

Target:2006 is probably the story that most people would hold up as the defining story of the Marvel UK Transformers run. And for good reason they’d be right. It was around this time that Simon Furman and the ever impressive art team were really hitting their stride. To a kid it was starting to become apparent that there were two distinct threads running through the comic, with the US stories being a damn sight more lighthearted than the more gritty UK ones. And the art, wow, the UK stuff just blew the US stuff away with guys like Geoff Senior at the absolute top of their game.

Target:2006 was the first real EPIC story-line we had with it’s content casting a huge Galvatron shaped shadow over the adventures of the Autobots and Decepticons for the next 100 or so issues, with everything finally coming to a head with the apocalyptic Time Wars Epic. Other multi-issue story-lines such as Dinobot Hunt came earlier but nothing had the scale and scope of Target:2006.

Issues 78/79/80 Original Covers:

Issue 78 Recreation (or how i finally started understanding layer masks!):
This is an interesting cover and shows the control that Marvel UK had over their content. Ratchet being front and center while Optimus Prime is hiding in the back as a starry shadow is something that i don’t think we’d have seen in the US comics.

Issue 78 Recreation – No Cover Elements:

Issue 79 Recreation:

Issue 79 Recreation – No Cover Elements:

Issue 80 Recreation:

This was a fun one to do. It’s a collaborative image with OptimusTimeLord from the TFW2005 boards. You may know him from his fantastic animated gifs of the G1 Cartoon using real figures. He recently did some amazing work animating panels from Target:2006 using figures. We chatted a bit and decided to work on an cover together. Very happy with this one 🙂

Issue 80 Recreation – No Cover Elements:

Issues 81/82/83 Original Covers:

Issue 81 Recreations:

Issue 81 Recreation – No Cover Elements:

Issue 82 Recreation:
Poor Iron Factory Blitzwing got horribly dismembered for this one. 😀

Issue 82 Recreation – No Cover Elements:

Issue 83 Recreation:

Issue 83 Recreation – No Cover Elements:

Issues 84/85/86 Original Covers:

Issue 84 Recreation:

Issue 84 Recreation – No Cover Elements:

Issue 84 Recreation – Expanded Version:

Issue 85 Recreation:
One of the main standouts in my realisation that there was two very distinct story-lines being printed in the UK comic was the torture and zombification of Jazz. The image of him strapped to Galvatron’s torture device still sends a shiver down my spine. It was getting really easy to tell that the UK stories were more in the vein of 2000AD than the more traditional Marvel story-lines that the US comic printed.