Very early Transformers stuff is plagued with obscure oddities. Well, I should say oddities to *us* - to the people actually producing those same things at the time they may have been (or seemed) completely correct. There are countless examples but just for instance take Megatron's unfinished character model is some early Marvel stuff. To be fair, that was the artist's reference available at the time and they were doing what they thought was correct. It's not like the artist looked at a final model as well and just picked the outdated one.

So given the enormous rush of early Transformers material, lack of now-a-days easy communication, and simply timeline of when certain things were either done or available, we give a lot of leeway to oddities and mistakes. Some are completely understandable, some take some extended understanding and backstory, and some are just outright weird. Even among the weird, the Marvel coloring book "Decepticon Patrol" stands out.

The cover is innocuous enough, seemingly a typical mix of almost finished character models and toy inspired designs prevalent in this medium, but a few pages in you come across extremely unrecognizable depictions of Bumblebee, Mirage, Ratchet, and Huffer. A few more pages in and Thundercracker and Skywarp have all new heads and modified jet modes. Interestingly, all of these are consistent through the whole book.

The Seekers oddities can be explained pretty easily be observing that since this is a coloring book, these differences in designs would help the the colorist to distinguish between otherwise identical designs. It's actually pretty clever and thoughtful - which is where it's interesting to me - because it's at a lever of thoughfulness and cleverness that is FAR above most other Transformers media of the time.

The bigger curiosity is more the Autobots. These designs are just straight bizarre. Besides maybe Bumblebee, they don't show any elements of the characters at all - not toy, not toon, not art, nothing. Stranger still, the alt modes are toy correct (if not simplified toon correct) - so what went wrong with the robot modes?

The easiest explanation is probably that the artists simply didn't have any material to work from. Maybe Marvel forgot to send it, maybe the fax came through so messed up it was worthless, maybe art didn't exist for those characters at the time. It's worthwhile to note that these four Autobots did not have the previously done Takara artwork done for some of the Diaclones like Prowl or Trailbreaker. So it's easy to dismiss these designs as the artist being instructed to "draw something, anything" and get it out the door. Random generic robots show up all the time so this isn't quite that far of a stretch.

Until I came across this,
https://2warpstoneptune.com/2014/01/13/the-transformers-stamp-fun-featuring-the-brave-autobots-1984/

Some interesting stuff there but nothing super mind-blowing, until you look at Mirage and realize that it's the same model as from Decepticon Patrol, which would be weird if that model was just done independently on the fly. Bumblebee, Ratchet, and Huffer now use either toy or box art, so those should have been available for Mirage as well. Looking closer, even his alt mode is faithfully copied from Decepticon partrol - which weirdly included a Cybertronish rocket and modified midsection.

In another coloring book, "Forest Rescue Mission", some of those weird seeker hats show up again. It also has Optimus Prime's "combat deck" which also shows up as Prime's Cybertronic mode in US Marvel #1 comic. So there's at least a little bit of connective tissue going on here, which makes me wonder just how truly random these might not be.

I have no delusions that anyone producing this material at the time was quite an OCD fanatic as I am. In fact, I see stuff like this going like:

"Hey can I get a job...*any* job?"
"Sure draw this Transfoomers thing, here's a manilla folder with scraps and unreadable and outdated reference material. Oh and have it done in 45 minutes or you don't get paid."

The optimistic side of me wonders how it all stitches together. I've always unofficially thought of that tank thing as Prime's Cybertronic mode, even though it wasn't "confirmed" in the cartoon or anywhere else. But maybe it was. Maybe there are whole sets of character models out there (outdated, by a different artist, all-Cybertronic designs) that we haven't fully discovered yet. There's that weird Gears model in early Marvel. Recently we've seen extremely early Cliffjumper art and a totally different Mirage design. Floro Dery made sure to give Ratchet and Ironhide completly different faces so we could differentiate them while not providing the same courtesy to most of the Decepticons. So there's so precedence, I wonder what more we will learn as more things come to light.

BJN

On Wednesday, January 25, 2023 at 11:29:06 AM UTC-7, brianj...@gmail.com wrote:

> The optimistic side of me wonders how it all stitches together. I've always unofficially thought of that tank thing as Prime's Cybertronic mode, even though it wasn't "confirmed" in the cartoon or anywhere else. But maybe it was. Maybe there are whole sets of character models out there (outdated, by a different artist, all-Cybertronic designs) that we haven't fully discovered yet.

I don't have Decepticon Patrol in my collection, but I've seen the alternate designs you're referring to.

My theory is that maybe the plan was, at one stage, to draw every Transformers character differently even if they originated from the same toy. You mentioned recently this was pretty much the rule with the Autobots—Prowl and Bluestreak were not identical in robot mode, despite being the same Hasbro product in different colors. I wonder if this was the plan for the Decepticons as well, at least at one stage.

I posted some years ago about how Rumble and Frenzy have appeared with different designs from each other in some media. Frenzy appears in a 1984 coloring book called "Bumblebee to the Rescue," drawn by Steve Dikto, and his design doesn't come close to following the standard Rumble/Frenzy cartoon look. His helmet prongs jut out to the sides so his whole head is like an X-shape. But, Frenzy also appears in this design two years later in the 1986 "Car Show Blow Up" storybook. By this point, there should be zero "early installment" weirdness. Earl Norem was a talented illustrator who was very good at rendering the Transformers characters correctly and on-model. What's even stranger is that Rumble and Frenzy appear on the same page together at one point, and they're using two different designs. This strongly suggests to me that there was an official alternate Frenzy design that Earl Norem was referring to. (I guess another possibility is that Norem was cribbing from that weird Steve Dikto illustration, but that would be... odd.)

This might even be related to the reason Frenzy and Buzzsaw were largely left out of the show, with instructions in the story bible to only use them sparingly. Or, it may have nothing to do with that. It's so hard to say.

So, along these same lines, it's possible that Starscream and Thundercracker and Skywarp were all originally intended to have unique designs that would distinguish them from each other, until soembody put the kibosh on that idea and said to illustrate them all identically instead. There's a perception that bad-guy soldiers tend to wear identical costumes, making them sort of a nameless, faceless army of disposable troops. Star Wars did it with the stormtroopers, G.I. Joe did it with the Vipers, Ninja Turtles did it with the Foot Soldiers... the list goes on. And the notion from the cartoon pilot that there were many dozens of Decepticon jets in a wide range of colors, not just the three that existed as toys, helps to cement that idea.

I'm sure there are plenty of concept designs that we've never seen before. A cartoon model for Bolts from The Transformers: the Movie surfaced only just last year, and it was clearly a prototype for what eventually became Rewind/Eject. Makes you wonder what else is out there.

Zob